Epic journeys by ship and by train, stories of survival in wartime, and elephants were some of the topics we discussed at last month’s Open Book Night, when our theme was Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. We asked readers to share a reading journey with us, including books about travel and transportation, favorite armchair adventures, or virtual voyages. We’d love to read your reading recommendations in the comments.

This Friday, July 14, we’ll be sharing book recommendations related to Liberty and Happiness! If you know of a great book about freedom—spiritual, political, intellectual, or physical—find a character’s search for happiness inspiring or instructive, or would just like to tell us about a book that makes you happy, we’d love to hear about it. Please join us in the Corner Room on the first floor at 6 PM for our July Open Book Night. Fiction and nonfiction selections are welcome.

 

We started off our armchair travels with rickshaws and elephants. Joan recommended The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra by Vaseen Kahn, the first book in the Baby Ganesh Agency mystery series, set in Mumbai. She enjoyed this humorous tale featuring Inspector Chopra, who receives the anonymous gift of a baby elephant upon his retirement, and she felt she learned something about India while reading.

 

 

 

We stayed in India with our next recommendation, Sea of Poppies, the first novel in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, named for the schooner that transports the wide cast of vividly drawn characters from India to Mauritius and further to Canton. Set in the 1830s, shortly before the first Opium War, Sea of Poppies is both a rollicking adventure and an examination of the consequences of colonialism and unrestrained greed, told in amazingly rich language.

 

 

 

Our next reader recommended a book she found uplifting, Alicia: My Story, Alicia Appleman-Jurman’s memoir of surviving the Holocaust in Poland and building a new life in Israel and the United States, published in 1988. Our reader found Alicia’s story of overcoming the brutality of the Nazis and the loss of all her family to be a powerful and moving read. This reader also recommended The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story by Diane Ackerman, another story of courage and survival in Poland during World War II, recently adapted into an acclaimed film.

 

 

 

A classic short story set on a transcontinental train journey was our next recommendation. Liz chose Mary McCarthy’s story “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt,” originally published in The Partisan Review in 1941 and in the collection The Company She Keeps in 1942. A young  intellectual woman has an affair with a middle-aged businessman she meets in the club car of a train heading from New York to Portland.  

 

 

In Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria, Noo Saro-Wiwa, daughter of writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, describes her first visit in years to the country where her father was executed by a military regime in 1995. As she travels to urban and rural areas of Nigeria (the 9th largest country in the world by population home to 500 spoken languages, and well over 250 ethnic groups*) the author gains a more intimate understanding of the beauties and problems to be found in her birth country. Two of the more frequent modes of transport Saro-Wiwa describes in the book are okadas or motorcycle taxis, and danfos or minibuses.

*Mabogunje, Akin L.. Physical and Social Geography (Nigeria), in Europa World online. London, Routledge. Access through the Europa World Plus database with your Library card.

 

 

Our next reader was immersed in thoughts of work at the time of our discussion. Looking for advice on how to navigate a difficult work situation, she had just borrowed Fearless at Work by Molly Fletcher. When she has time to escape from work, this reader enjoys historical fiction set during the Tang Dynasty in China (618-907). She also shared some of her real travel experiences in Thailand, where she rode on an elephant.

 

 

Thanks to everyone who joined us for Open Book Night in June. We had a lovely time talking about books with you and appreciate your great recommendations! Readers who come to listen and hear recommendations for books they might enjoy are also most welcome at Open Book Night. Check out these other reading lists to see books recommended at past Open Book Nights. We hope to hear your reading recommendations at our next Open Book Night  or read them in the comments below.