This Friday, December 15, is the last day to order from Amazon.com using free Super Saver Shipping and still receive books in time for Christmas giving. So I’m gonna put aside my regular look at the New York Times bestseller list this week and instead point out some matching sets of books perfect for readers of your list.

Monday: books for conspiracy buffs
Tuesday: celebrating the season
Today: armchair traveling
Thursday: on the lookout for UFOs and strange creatures
Friday: lost classics of literature


The Mystery of Easter Island, by Katherine Routledge, is Western anthropology’s first in-depth look at an isolated culture… and also a daring adventure story of around-the-world travel. In February 1913, Routledge, an archaeologist, set sail on a custom-built yacht-with a small crew and the support of British Association for the Advancement of Science, the British Museum, and the Royal Geographical Society-for Easter Island, where she embarked up the first effort to catalogue the island’s mysterious statues, interview the natives, and document their culture, folklore, and traditions. Her scholarship is impeccable — this 1919 work is still considered foundational — but her lively writing and her practical perspective make this a delightful read that thrill armchair travelers and amateur ethnographers alike.

Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan is Westerner Lafcadio Hearn’s love letters to the land of the rising sun. Arriving in in Japan in 1889 on a journalistic assignment, he fell so in love with the nation and its people that he never left, and in 1894, just as Japan was truly opening to the West and global interest in Japanese culture was burgeoning, Hearn published this delightful series of essays glorifying what he called the “rare charm of Japanese life.” Beautifully written and a joy to read, Hearn’s prose enchants with its sweetly lyrical descriptions of winter street fairs, puppet theaters, religious statuaries, even the Japanese smile and its particular allure. A wonderful journal of immersion on a foreign land, this will bewitch Japanophiles and travelers to the East.

In Vanished Arizona: Recollections of My Army Life, Martha Summerhayes offers a compulsively readable account of her life on the American frontier in the late 19th century. A respectable Victorian lady, she left civilized society behind in 1874 to follow her cavalry-officer husband West, to the Wyoming Territory and then to unknown and inaccessible Arizona. Written “at the urgent and ceaseless request” of her children and first published in 1908, this is a unique document of the American exploration and settling of the West, offering a little-heard woman’s perspective on an historical era that continues to echo in contemporary American society. From the deprivations of her kitchen — where she has no choice but to make do with army pots and pans designed for cooking for dozens — to terrifying encounters with wildlife, attacks by Indians, and the challenge of giving birth alone, Summerhayes’ indomitable spirit and sense of adventure shines through.

A favorite of readers of his time, On Horseback: A Tour in Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee is essayist and novelist Charles Dudley Warner’s witty and engaging travelogues of trips through the Southern United States and into Mexico. From the challenges and charms of mounted travel to the restful beauty of the landscapes and the resilience and generosity of the people he encountered, Warner’s observations, first published in the 1880s, are uniquely entertaining.

Eothen: Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East, by Alexander William Kinglake, is a century and a half old, and yet it is as strikingly modern as any literary memoir published today. This is an extraordinary work of travel writing that is more about the author’s internal journey than it is about monuments and museums, one that replicates the personal experience of travel and how it changes who we are. Kinglake, a solitary Western traveler in the Middle East in 1834, writes in an intimate, conversational style, and his sense of humor and irony lend Eothen — the title means “from the early dawn” or “from the East” — an air that still feels as fresh and original in the 21st century as it must have when it was first published in 1844.

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