Victor Carl is the main character in a series of novels by William Lashner. How could anyone resist a dubious hero who frequently resorts to "yowza" and "gad" to express his feelings? Not me. Carl's not a particularly successful attorney, always teetering on the edge of going broke, so he's frequently forced to take cases no one else will, and he's not above using deceit, dodgy ethics, and downright trickery to get his clients off. One of my favorites is A Killer's Kiss. As in all of the Victor Carl mysteries, the plot is satisfyingly complex, making it almost impossible for anyone (except Victor) to finally figure out whodunit.

Gillian Roberts has written many mysteries about schoolteacher Amanda Pepper. The first one is Caught Dead in Philadelphia, and they're all perfect for cozy mystery fans.

Bennie Rosato, the Philadelphia attorney who stars in Lisa Scottoline's series has a particularly tough time of it in Mistaken Ident.i.ty, because there's a woman out there who swears she's Bennie's long-lost twin sister.

And here are two books-one fiction and one nonfiction-that showcase Philadelphia's love for its football team, the Eagles: Matthew Quick's The Silver Linings Playbook is a heartwarming, humorous, and soul-satisfying first novel (but not at all soppy or overly sweet, I promise).The main character is thirty-year-old Pat Peoples, a former high school history teacher, who believes in happy endings and silver linings-despite the fact that his father won't even talk to him, there are huge gaps in his memory, and he's become addicted to working out.As Pat slowly begins to remember and come to terms with the painful realities of his past, he's aided by an eccentric (but effective) psychiatrist named Patel (who shares Pat's love for the Eagles) and Tiffany, the widowed sister-in-law of his old best friend, Ronnie.

It's probably enough to say that the content of Jere Longman's If Football's a Religion, Why Don't We Have a Prayer?: Philadelphia, Its Faithful, and the Eternal Quest for Sports Salvation is as entertaining as the t.i.tle.

But there are a few novels about Philadelphia that have nothing to do with either sports or crime: Lorene Cary's moving historical novel, The Price of a Child Richard Powell's The Philadelphian (which was made into one of my very favorite movies; it was called The Young Philadelphians and starred a very young Paul Newman and Gig Young) John Edgar Wideman's Philadelphia Fire (and all his others) And last, probably the most unusual novel about Philadelphia I expect we'll ever encounter is Kathryn Davis's h.e.l.l. You never know quite what to expect from Davis, but in this, her third exceptionally well-written work, she really outdoes herself.

POLISH UP YOUR POLISH.

Books about Poland-both fiction and nonfiction-don't often have the happiest of themes. It's a country that's been buffeted by history. Or maybe swamped is a better choice of verb. There are memoirs beyond number, oodles of histories (frequently offering contradictory interpretations of the past, especially as it relates to World War II and the treatment of Polish Jews), and fiction from eminent writers such as the Singer brothers (Isaac Bashevis and Israel Joshua), Jerzy Kosinski, the science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, as well as poetry from the likes of Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska. It's quite clear that if you want to read Polish writers and/or books set in Poland before you actually go there, you'd better start early and plan on reading late into many a night.

Here are some t.i.tles that I've been either entertained or moved by: Brigid Pasulka's A Long Long Time Ago and Essentially True is set in both the Krakow of the early 1990s, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Poland of World War II. It's a story of war, love, and the way the human spirit can triumph over unlikely odds. It was a pleasure to read. Fans of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows and Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson won't want to miss it.

For a sweeping overview of Poland's history-especially good if you aren't demanding fine writing and three-dimensional characters-try James Michener's Poland.

Czeslaw Milosz turned to prose in Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942-43, which offers readers an up-close and personal account of life in Warsaw under n.a.z.i rule.

The beautiful writing of The Zoo-Keeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman illuminates the true story of Warsaw zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski, who together contrived to save hundreds of lives during World War II. This is a must-read.

Other books about Poland, both its past and its present, include: Nonfiction: Michael Moran's A Country in the Moon: Travels in Search of the Heart of Poland;The Lost:A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn is revelatory; Eva Hoffman's Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (I read-with great admiration- everything that Hoffman writes); Adam Zagajewski's Another Beauty; and n.o.bel Prize-winning Isaac Bashevis Singer's memoir In My Father's Court.

Fiction: Madame:A Novel by Antoni Libera (Soviet-era Poland); Louis Begley's Wartime Lies; Charles T. Powers's In the Memory of the Forest; JaneYolen's Briar Rose (ostensibly a book for teens, but it's perfect for any age); Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces (at least the first half); Lilian Nattel's The River Midnight; Trans-Atlantyk by Witold Gombrowicz (or any other of his autobiographical novels); and Alan Furst's The Spies of Warsaw. Furst's novels are great for their splendid sense of place-World War II Eastern Europe.

POSTCARDS FROM MEXICO.

The t.i.tle of this section is the name of one of my favorite songs by the group Girlyman. (At one point I wanted to use song t.i.tles for all the sections, but gave it up as an impossible dream.) Any stray thoughts I might have entertained of going anyplace in Mexico besides Oaxaca, Cuernevaca, and Mazatlan immediately vanished upon reading G.o.d's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre by Richard Grant. Not that I regret reading it-to the contrary, it's a mesmerizing account of one of the most dangerous areas in North America, where drug growers, buyers, and sellers are prevalent, murders are many, and the folklore of the place is difficult to separate from the facts (think Humphrey Bogart, the Apaches, and Pancho Villa). But I have to say that sharing Grant's (often harebrained) adventures through the pages of this book is adventure enough for me.

Charles Bowden's Murder City: Ciudad Juarez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields also shook me to the core. It describes how this city-right across the Rio Grande from El Paso-continues to disintegrate into an anarchy of crime and violence.

But on to happier books: The Copper Canyons in the Sierra Madre provide much of the setting for Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Super Athletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall. It's a must-read for runners, of course, but even non-runners should find it interesting, as it includes other topics as well, especially an introduction to the little known and understood Tarahumara Indians, their beliefs, culture, and way of life. I especially enjoyed McDougall's chatty and yet informative writing style.

Bruce Chatwin (no slouch as a travel writer himself, of course) called Sybille Bedford's A Visit to Don Otavio: A Traveller's Tale from Mexico one of the best travel books of the twentieth century. Set right after World War II, it's a sublimely well-written portrait of the country.

Nonfiction fans will also want to take a look at these: Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude is a 1950s book that helps us get a handle on the country even today-half a century later; Alan Riding's Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans is also many years old now-it was published in 1989-but it still makes excellent reading for anyone interested in trying to understand how Mexico's past is informing its present; Earl Shorris's The Life and Times of Mexico is a well-written narrative history; Tony Cohan's eminently readable Mexican Days: Journeys into the Heart of Mexico; and Rebecca West's Survivors in Mexico, which explores-with her usual panache-the dark clash between the Aztecs and the Spaniards. Finally, Graham Greene's The Lawless Roads explores Mexican att.i.tudes in the tumultuous 1930s-the research and travel that went into writing this book provided Greene with the setting for one of his best novels, The Power and the Glory.

Who knew that the renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks (author of, among many other books, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat and Other Clinical Tales) was also a fern fanatic? I certainly didn't, until I picked up his Oaxaca Journal, a charming account of fern hunting in Southern Mexico. Another book set in Oaxaca is Peter Kuper's Diario de Oaxaca: A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Mexico. As a friend wrote me, "it gives an earthy and organic feel to what living in Oaxaca can be like. It combines a journalistic eye for political events with the close-up gaze of a people (and bug) watcher." All true.

Following hard on the heels of two well-reviewed t.i.tles (the novel The Hummingbird's Daughter and the nonfiction work The Devil's Highway), Luis Alberto Urrea once again scores high with Into the Beautiful North, in which nineteen-year-old Nayeli, who works at a taco stand in a small coastal Mexican village called Tres Camarones, decides to travel to the United States to find her father and bring him home. The characters are three-dimensional (especially Nayeli); the plot is fast paced and filled, somewhat unexpectedly, given the subject, with humor. Book clubs, especially those interested in reading multicultural novels, will want to add this to their list of books to be discussed.

And these: Sandra Benitez's A Place Where the Sea Remembers; Consider This, Senora, an unforgettable novel by Harriet Doerr; the first half, especially, of Barbara Kingsolver's The Lacuna, which includes wonderfully nuanced portraits of Diego Rivera, Frieda Kahlo, and Leon Trotsky; Amigoland, Oscar Casares's warm and funny story of two aged brothers who take a road trip to Mexico to try to find out-at long last-the true story of their grandfather's kidnapping; News from the Empire by one of Mexico's best writers, Fernando Del Paso; and last, but not at all least, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, which has always struck me as being the uber viscerally painful novel.

PROVENCE AND THE SOUTH OF FRANCE.

For anyone going to spend time in the south of France, Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence is a good place to start. But don't stop there: all of the following books-as different as they may seem-make superb armchair reading. And they're good to take with you, should you actually be traveling.

Ford Madox Ford's Provence is a lovingly written account of la vie boheme, as lived by Ford and his artist lover, Biala, in Provence during the 1920s. It seems to be written by a different man than the one who began The Good Soldier, his novel of pa.s.sion and betrayal, with the sentence "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Incidentally, when Ford's Provence was published both Graham Greene and Dorothy Parker found it to be splendid-and that's a most unlikely pairing of critics!

Two Towns in Provence by M. F. K. Fisher contains two of her most appealing memoirs: Map of Another Town (about Aix-en-Provence) and A Considerable Town (an appreciation of Ma.r.s.eille).

The selections in Travelers' Tales: Provence, edited by James O'Reilly and Tara Austen Weaver, remind me of the amuse-bouche that a chef will sometimes send out to diners: small tastes that indicate the quality of the rest of the meal.

Fiction fans should check out these: Jean Giono, born in Provence in 1895, gives readers a joyous sense of the Provencal countryside in many of his novels, including my favorite, Joy of Man's Desiring, although he's probably best known for his short story, "The Man Who Planted Trees."

I am a huge fan of award-winning Canadian writer Guy Gavriel Kay. I love the way he writes very realistic novels with just a bit of fantasy thrown in. I'd urge you to read The Lions of Al-Ra.s.san, The Last Light of the Sun, or Under Heaven. But since we're talking of Provence here, don't miss Ysabel. Although it's mostly set in twenty-first-century Aix-en-Provence, there's enough history and adventure to satisfy even non-fantasy fans.

Madam, Will You Talk was Mary Stewart's first work of romantic suspense, and if that's your fiction genre of choice, it's a cla.s.sic. Not only is there the requisite romance and suspense, but Stewart gives us a palpable sense of the city of Ma.r.s.eille.

I was quite taken with the tale of American poet W. S. Merwin's purchase of a ruined house in the rural province of Quercy, which he recounts in the more-or-less autobiographical grouping of three stories in The Lost Upland: Stories of Southwestern France.

History fans will want to take a look at these two books: Four Queens: The Provencal Sisters Who Ruled Europe by Nancy Goldstone is a captivating overview of the daughters of the King and Queen of Provence-Marguerite, Eleanor, Beatrice, and Sanchia-and their memorable marriages, which, together, shaped thirteenth-century Europe.

Lawrence Durrell's Caesar's Vast Ghost: Aspects of Provence is an a.s.sortment of history, literature, cultural commentary, and diary-like entries.

ROMAN HOLIDAY.

To really understand contemporary Rome, I think it's necessary to get a feel for its storied past. There are, of course, more histories written of Rome and its Empire than anyone could probably get to in one lifetime, but I'd actually give those a miss (unless you're really interested, and in that case I'd read anything that Michael Grant wrote about the city), and head instead for Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series. They are, in order, The First Man in Rome, The Gra.s.s Crown, Fortune's Favorites, Caesar's Women, Caesar, The October Horse, and Antony and Cleopatra.

There are several terrific series of mystery novels set in Ancient Rome-check out the novels of Steven Saylor and Lindsey Davis. I've always felt, in fact, that after reading all of the Saylor and Davis books I could easily get an advanced degree in Roman history.

Anthony Doerr's Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World is pure delight, and not only for new parents, those with a trip to Rome in their immediate future, or somebody trying to write a novel.

Paul Hofmann, onetime bureau chief for the NewYork Times, spent more than thirty years living in the Eternal City. His descriptions of people and places, and-what I found immensely interesting-the art of living in Rome make The Seasons of Rome: A Journal worth seeking out.

Other books for the traveler to Rome include Rome from the Ground Up by James H. S. McGregor (great for architecture and history buffs); Rome and a Villa by Eleanor Clark; Jonathan Boardman's Rome: A Cultural and Literary Companion; Margaret Visser's study of the Sant'Agnese fuori le Mura church, The Geometry of Love: s.p.a.ce, Time, Mystery, and Meaning in an Ordinary Church; and A Traveller in Rome by H. V. Morton.

Gritty-mystery aficionados should check out The Dogs of Rome: A Commissario Alec Blume Novel, the first in a projected series by Conor Fitzgerald.We're introduced to Blume as he works on a particularly inept murder that leads into an increasingly complex investigation.

ROW, ROW, ROW YOUR BOAT.

According to the New York Times, 1896 was a good year for rowers. It was the first time that anyone managed to cross the Atlantic in an open boat: George Harbo and Gabriel Samuelson rowed from New York to France.The next time that feat was accomplished was seven decades later.

Tori Murden McClure is an incredibly accomplished woman with many degrees and good jobs, and she definitely fits in this category because she was the first woman to row-solo-across the Atlantic Ocean.The story of how-and why-she chose to attempt the crossing (twice, actually, since her first trip was halted by a hurricane) is uplifting without being at all sappy. I loved the first line: "In the end, I know I rowed across the Atlantic to find my heart, but in the beginning, I wasn't aware that it was missing." And I was taken by the fact that it was Muhammad Ali who encouraged her to try the solo crossing a second time, by saying to her that she didn't want to be the first woman who "almost rowed across the Atlantic." She describes her journey(s) in A Pearl in the Storm: How I Found My Heart in the Middle of the Ocean.

Other courageous rowers have written about their trips in these enjoyable and sometimes heart-stopping accounts: Both Challenging the Pacific: The First Woman to Row the Kon-Tiki Route and Across the Savage Sea: The First Woman to Row Across the North Atlantic by Maud Fontenoy are well worth your reading time.

Jill Fredston's accounts of her and her husband's self-propelled journeys to some of the most remote places they could find are well told in Rowing to Lat.i.tude: Journeys Along the Arctic's Edge. (When they're not rowing, Jill and her husband, Doug Fesler, research avalanches and train rescuers. Their experiences doing that would make another great book.) Between them, Colin and Julie Angus have written several books about their rowing experiences, both together and apart, including these two: Rowed Trip: From Scotland to Syria by Oar, which describes their trips to countries far and near, including an effort to rediscover their ancestral homes; and an account of Julie's unaccompanied adventure, Rowboat in a Hurricane: My Amazing Journey Across a Changing Atlantic Ocean.

In Roz Savage's Rowing the Atlantic: Lessons Learned on the Open Ocean, she writes about her experience as the only solo female contestant in the 2005 Atlantic Rowing Race, which she entered despite having little previous rowing experience. Here's one of the best lines-or a least one that shows she maintained her sense of humor despite the pain and the dangers that beset her: "I loved the solitude, the wildness, the beauty. But the ocean and I would have got along better if she would stop trying to get in the boat with me."

I really enjoyed Rosemary Mahoney's Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman's Skiff both because of her writing style and the varied characters that she describes.

An older t.i.tle that is still great fun (partly because it's filled with references to children's books like Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows , and Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle books, especially The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle) is A. J. Mackinnon's The Unlikely Voyage of Jack de Crow: A Mirror Odyssey from North Wales to the Black Sea. (I learned, through reading this book, that a "mirror" is a small, unimpressive in appearance, but hard-working and dependable dinghy/sailboat.) THE SAHARA: SAND BETWEEN YOUR TOES.

Before you start any of these books, I'd suggest that you have a big gla.s.s of water close at hand-otherwise your thirst might quickly get unbearable. I included Marq de Villiers and Sheila Hirtle's Sahara: A Natural History in Book l.u.s.t, but it does such a fabulous job of bringing the place alive-making the desert bloom-that I felt I needed to include it here, too. You'll discover more than you ever probably imagined about the history, geography, legends, lore, and people of the great African desert, which was called "The Endless Emptiness" and "The Great Nothing" by early explorers.

In a way, Sahara Unveiled: A Journey Across the Desert by William Langewiesche updates the de Villiers book-there's more about contemporary travel (by roads and cars rather than by camels, for example) than the past. As always, Langewiesche's writing is clear, concise, and a pleasure to read.

The cla.s.sic novel exploring the lure of the desert is Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky, about three young ex-pats who slip past the veneer of civilization and are forced to see themselves in the light of a pitiless desert sun.

Who would have thought that Monty Python co-founder Michael Palin could write a book about traveling through the Sahara Desert that is not only funny but also insightful? It's true: take a look at his book Sahara.

My Mercedes Is Not for Sale: From Amsterdam to Ouagadougou . . . An Auto-Misadventure Across the Sahara by Jeroen van Bergeijk (and translated into English by John Antonides) surely wins the prize for best t.i.tle in this section. Plus, this story of a three-month journey along the Trans-Sahara Highway is a delightful read. (Though it would be so cool to live in a place named Ouagadougou, I'm pretty sure a move there is not in my future.) Three other t.i.tles about the Sahara that I've enjoyed are: Fergus Fleming's The Sword and the Cross is the story of Charles de Foucauld and Henri Laperrine, Frenchmen who helped their country advance its dreams of expanding its colonial holdings into North Africa.

And Jeffrey Tayler's Glory in a Camel's Eye: Trekking Through the Moroccan Sahara (the paperback edition has a different subt.i.tle: A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert) and Angry Wind: Through Muslim Black Africa by Truck, Bus, Boat, and Camel. The latter is a thoughtful description of his (sometimes torturous) travel through the Sahel-the countries that border the Sahara desert, including Chad, Nigeria, Niger, and Mali. His prose is fluent, his descriptions are powerful, and his accounts of the people he meets-both Muslim and not-are especially meaningful in our post-9/11 world.

SAINT PETERSBURG/ LENINGRAD/SAINT PETERSBURG.

Leningrad, which returned to its traditional, pre-communist name of Saint Petersburg in 1991, underwent a terrible siege during World War II. It was an ultimately unsuccessful attempt by the Germans and the Axis powers to bring Russia and its allies to their collective knees by starving out the residents of Leningrad in the fall and winter of 1941-42. Unsuccessful it might have been, but it was h.e.l.l on earth for the people living in the starving city. Here are four books-three novels and the authoritative history-on the event, plus a new translation of a cla.s.sic.

In Debra Dean's first novel The Madonnas of Leningrad, Marina works as a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum, where the staff, fearing the onslaught of German troops, begins to dismantle the museum by taking down the paintings but leaving their frames hanging.To hold onto her sanity while her life is almost quite literally deconstructing around her, Marina memorizes the holdings of the museum, room by remarkable room, to create her own personal "memory palace." It's to these memories that Marina returns as her grip on the present becomes ever more tenuous. After finishing the book I felt as though I'd had a long visit to the Hermitage, wandering through its unrivalled collection.

Leningrad during the siege may seem to be a strange setting for a novel that is best described as a lively, good-hearted buddy tale, but there it is, and if you enjoy the elan of movies like Butch Ca.s.sidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, here's the novelistic equivalent. (When I told a friend how much I enjoyed reading David Benioff's City of Thieves, he replied that he bet there was already a screen-play of it in the hands of the young actor Shia LaBoeuf. I can but hope that it's true, because it would make a most enjoyable film.) The novel begins with a visit between the author and his grandfather. David Benioff presses his elderly relative for information about what happened to him during the siege; what follows the first chapter is his grandfather's tale. But there's a catch. How reliable is the older man's story? When David tries to get answers to some of his specific questions, his grandfather tells him that since he's a writer, he should just make it up. So how much is truth and how much fiction? Maybe ultimately it doesn't matter.

The Siege, Helen Dunmore's sharply observed and painful story of a love affair set against the devastation wrought by the German advance on the city, is one of those unforgettable novels that knocks your socks off with its gorgeous writing.

Harrison Salisbury's comprehensive but very readable nonfiction account, The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, will tell you all you ever wanted to know-and perhaps more-about its subject. Despite its age (it was published in 1985) it remains a valuable read.

As for getting a sense of the city before World War II, try the glorious new translation of Anna Karenina by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, which is set in both nineteenth-century Saint Petersburg and Moscow.

SAN FRANCISCO.

I am so happy that Chicago Review Press has begun reissuing Gwen Bristow's historical romances. They're just as good as I remember them being, back when I first read them eons ago. Calico Palace takes place in San Francisco in 1848, just before gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill on the south fork of the American River. The portrait of the city in its infancy is three-dimensional; the lives of the characters animate the various social cla.s.ses and occupations in this city of only nine hundred (white) residents.

One of the major events in San Francisco history is, of course, the great earthquake of 1906, and one of the best-if not the best-books about it is Simon Winchester's A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906.

John Miller edited San Francisco Stories: Great Writers on the City, an anthology that includes essays, poetry, and excerpts from longer works. Contributors include a wide range of names, from Jack Kerouac to Amy Tan to Randy Shilts, and very many different aspects of the city are covered. It's a grand introduction.

Randy Shilts wrote The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, which incorporates local history and politics, the biography of Milk, and an overview of the gay community in the 1940s and '50s. (If you enjoyed the movie Milk, you'll like the book a lot.) This was Shilts's first book; it's probably not quite as well known as his And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. Shilts was a wonderful writer, and died much too young.

One of Laurie R. King's two mystery series takes place in San Francisco. Kate Martinelli is a San Francisco detective, and her cases range from investigating the death of a Sherlock Holmes fan to that of a homeless man. The first is A Grave Talent.

Gus Lee's China Boy is a great coming-of-age novel set in 1950s San Francisco.

And don't miss out on Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series. These you will want to read in order, so begin with Tales of the City and then go on to More Tales of the City.

SCENES FROM SRI LANKA.

Michael Ondaatje called Sri Lanka "that pendant off the ear of India," and here are some excellent books about the country for your reading pleasure. Adele Barker's Not Quite Paradise: An American Sojourn in Sri Lanka describes the author's Fulbright year teaching at the University of Peradeniya.

Tea Time with Terrorists: A Motorcycle Journey into the Heart of Sri Lanka's Civil War by Mark Stephen Meadows gives you a good sense of a beautiful country that has been wracked by thirty years of a complex civil war.

In When Memory Dies by A. Sivanandan, three generations of a Sri Lankan family try to make sense of not only their personal relationships, but also what is happening to their country as it devolves into a tripart.i.te, seemingly endless war.

Pradeep Jeganathan's At the Water's Edge is a finely written collection of loosely linked stories that evoke the larger issues facing Sri Lanka through the everyday activities of the characters, who must navigate through a difficult present into an uncertain future.

The main character in Roma Tearne's Mosquito is Theo Samarajeeva, a writer who returns to his home in Colombo after the death of his wife and learns that even love can be a victim of war.

I've always loved the fiction of Romesh Gunesekera, so it'll probably come as no surprise that I just adored his fourth (and newest, as I am writing this) novel, The Match, which ranges over three different countries (England, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines) and thirty years. And while there aren't a lot of novels in which cricket plays a major role, this one begins and ends with a cricket match.

And don't forget these: Anil's Ghost, which is perhaps Michael Ondaatje's finest novel, and Arundhati Roy's simply glorious novel The G.o.d of Small Things.

SCOTLAND: MORE THAN HAGGIS, KILTS, AND IAN RANKIN.

I think it was the Ian Rankin police procedural series that made readers familiar with Edinburgh. (Or at least familiar with a particular aspect of the city-grittiness and crime.) If you've never read Rankin and want to begin at the beginning, you'll have to find 1987's Knots and Crosses, which introduced Detective Inspector John Rebus to a soon-to-be adoring public. I'm not convinced they need to be read in order (though many would disagree) and I found Black and Blue to be an outstanding entry in the series. All of Rankin's novels have complex plots, deal with contemporary issues, and are marked by the sort of crackling dialogue that keeps you hungry for more books by him. But you have to like grit....

What a fabulous twenty-first birthday present: Adam Nicolson's father gave him some six hundred acres of land on islands in the Scottish Outer Hebrides. And now Nicolson gives us an in-depth view of his possessions in Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides.

David Yeadon also writes winningly on the same locale in Seasons on Harris: A Year in Scotland's Outer Hebrides.

Reading An Innocent in Scotland: More Curious Rambles and Singular Encounters by David W. McFadden (he also wrote An Innocent in Ireland) will most definitely bring at least a smile to your face, if not a full-blown laugh. This is travel entertainment at its best.

History fans and lovers of all things Scots will most definitely want to read Samuel Johnson and James Boswell's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, describing the eighty-three-day trip they took together in 1773.

Call me silly or uneducated or both, but I never realized that Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scotsman until I read Bella Bathurst's The Lighthouse Stevensons:The Extraordinary Story of the Building of the Scottish Lighthouses by the Ancestors of Robert Louis Stevenson. In spite of the fact that after a recent trip down the Oregon coast I came to the conclusion that if you've seen one lighthouse you've seen them all, I found Bathurst's account of this eccentric, swashbuckling family totally interesting.

You can't take a trip to Scotland without knowing something about the most famous woman in Scottish history. Here are two excellent books about her, the first nonfiction and the second fiction: Antonia Fraser's Mary Queen of Scots (any of Fraser's biographies are worth reading) and Margaret George's Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles (any of the fictional biographies and autobiographies by George are also worth reading).

To get a sense of the wide range of Scottish fiction over the years, try these: Rob Roy (and others) by Sir Walter Scott (of course); Denise Mina's Glasgow-based crime novels, such as Slip of the Knife (be forewarned: they're dark); Val McDermid's A Darker Domain, in which Cold Case Review Team Inspector Karen Pirie deals with two seemingly unrelated cases from the 1980s; Andrew O'Hagan's Our Fathers; A Scots Quair, a trilogy by Lewis Gra.s.sic Gibbon that includes Sunset Song, Cloud Howe, and Grey Granite; The Citadel by A. J. Cronin; Louise Welsh's The Cutting Room; Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (not an easy book to read, because it takes a while to get used to the way Welsh adapts language, but many people believe it's the most important Scottish novel of the twentieth century); Alexander McCall Smith's two entertaining series set in Scotland, the Isabel Dalhousie mysteries (the first is The Sunday Philosophy Club) and the Scotland Street novels (the first is 44 Scotland Street); Sara Maitland's Ancestral Truths, which mostly takes place in Scotland, although an important part is set in Zimbabwe; and Ali Smith's The Accidental and Hotel World.

I haven't listed any of the many romance novels that take place in Scotland because there's a whole book waiting to be written (but not by me) about stories of those hunky men, their kilts, and the women who love them. Let one name suffice for all: Diana Gabaldon. But if there's a particular romance writer you adore, the chances are good that one or more of his or her books take place in Scotland. Ask your local librarian for help in finding them.

SEE THE SEA.

I hope that I read this in a book and it didn't really happen to me, but I fear it did. I should say at once that I have never understood what to do in a sailboat when the wind picks up, despite having it explained to me numerous times. When I was in college, one of my earliest experiences sailing was on the Severn River, and in very short order everything went wrong: big wind, boat capsizing, mast breaking. That's the part I remember (or think I remember), but I have no memory of what came next, although I clearly lived to tell the tale. Not everyone is so lucky. Here are some books about sailors whose grasp of the fundamentals is much better than mine . . . and many of whose outcomes were far worse.

Always a Distant Anchorage by Hal Roth is the perfect choice for those who dream of one big voyage under sail.

At the Mercy of the Sea: The True Story of Three Sailors in a Caribbean Hurricane and Flirting with Mermaids, both by John Kretschmer Berserk: My Voyage to the Antarctic in a Twenty-Seven-Foot Sailboat by David Mercy (not a pleasure trip) Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing Fair Wind and Plenty of It: A Modern-Day Tall Ship Adventure by Rigel Crockett is the tale of the crew and pa.s.sengers of the Picton Castle, a threemasted tall ship, and its eighteen-month voyage around the world. It's the story of two obsessions: that of the Nova Scotia-born author who grew up in a sailboat-fixated family, and of Captain Dan Moreland, who turned an almost seventy-year-old North Sea trawler into a tall ship in order to emulate the great sailing captains of the past.

Fastnet, Force 10: The Deadliest Storm in the History of Modern Sailing by John Rousmaniere In The Greatest Sailing Stories Ever Told: Twenty-Seven Unforgettable Stories, edited by Christopher Caswell, you'll find familiar and unfamiliar names and tales.

Maiden Voyage by Tania Aebi Pacific Lady: The First Woman to Sail Solo Across the World's Largest Ocean by Sharon Sites Adams with Karen Coates Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Sloc.u.m along with Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast are probably the cla.s.sics of this genre.

Sailing the Pacific: A Voyage Across the Longest Stretch of Water on Earth, and a Journey into Its Past by Miles Hordern, who sailed there and back from New Zealand to Chile in his twenty-eight-foot sailboat Sea, Ice, and Rock: Sailing and Climbing Above the Arctic Circle by Chris Bonington and Robin Knox-Johnston gives you two adventures for the price of one.

Sailing buffs won't want to miss Seamanship: A Voyage Along the Wild Coasts of the British Isles by Adam Nicolson.

Ten Hours Until Dawn: The True Story of Heroism and Tragedy Aboard the Can Do by Michael Tougias is a Perfect Storm read-alike, written well before Junger's book.

In The Water In Between: A Journey at Sea, Kevin Patterson-brokenhearted and inexperienced with sailboats-decides to escape his life by sailing from Vancouver to Tahiti. Luckily, he recruits a partner who is sailing savvy (and also brokenhearted).

And for fiction, don't miss the novels by Herman Melville (no need to give t.i.tles here, I suspect), Patrick O'Brien, Alexander Kent, Dudley Pope, and C. S. Forester. Others include Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny, which is a wonderful novel sadly overshadowed by the-it cannot be denied-excellent film, and the novels of Sam Llewellyn, who is to sailing mysteries what d.i.c.k Francis is to horse-racing thrillers.

SERIESOUSLY . . .