Island Reads
INSPIRATION FOR ITINERANT EXPLORERS, NOMADIC WANDERERS AND CAPTIVE AUDIENCES ALIKE
The eternal question of holiday reading is this: should our reading material be linked to our intended destination, or should it have nothing to do with it? Should we read Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia in Patagonia, and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice in Venice? Or should we take Venice to Patagonia, and Patagonia to Venice? Either way, our experience of a book can be dramatically altered by the place in which we read it.
If you’re on a desert island somewhere in the tropics – assuming this desert island has somewhere that serves you food and water – most likely you’ll have a lot of time on your hands when you’re on dry land. With nothing but the waves as your soundtrack, reading is so much more intense when you’re swaying in a hammock strung up between two palms thousands of miles from home.
You might find you suddenly have the headspace to immerse yourself in a world of magical realism or feel inspired to dive into a work of non-fiction to learn more about the people and places that now surround you. Here are three suggestions for your next desert island adventure…
THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES
Hanya Yanagihara
A powerful work of visionary literary fiction from the Hawaii-born author Hanya Yanagihara, The People in the Trees tells the story of a young doctor, Norton Perina and his 1950s expedition to a remote Micronesian island in search of a rumored lost tribe. There he encounters a strange group of forest dwellers who appear to have attained a form of immortality that preserves the body but not the mind. Uncovering their secret, the doctor returns with it to America where he soon finds great success – though at a terrible cost, not only for the islanders, but for Perina himself. Disquieting yet thrilling, The People in the Trees – which Yanagihara wrote for a change of scene from compiling the New York-based tragedy A Little Life, her Man Booker Prize-nominated modern classic – is an anthropological adventure with a profound and tragic vision of what happens when cultures collide.
ISLAND
Aldous Huxley
In his final novel, Island, Aldous Huxley creates a vision of utopia that is the very antithesis of the technocratic hell of Brave New World. Set on the imaginary Pacific island of Pala, an “oasis of happiness and freedom” where its inhabitants have resisted the trappings of capitalism, consumerism and technology, and mynah birds dotted around the island bark out the order “Attention” – Be Here Now – as people practice tantric sex and drink the “moksha medicine” to attain samadhi. Island is James Locklock’s Gaia Theory made real in a parallel universe, and the culmination of Huxley’s life-long inquiries into Eastern philosophies and psychedelics; a vision of humanity, living in symbiosis with and respect for the physiology of our planet, at our sanest and most admirable.
THE RING OF FIRE
Dr Lawrence Blair
Based on the award-winning PBS documentary series, Ring of Fire is the first-person account of the adventures of two English brothers following in the footsteps of Alfred Russell Wallace as they explore two million square miles of ocean, amongst lands which harbour still uncategorized varieties of creatures and cultures, dragons and pirates, healers and headhunters – the Indonesian archipelago. What begun as a single trip funded with £2,000 of Ringo Starr’s money to chart the ascension of the last remaining king of Sulawesi’s Toraja tribe back to the stars they believed we descended from on flying saucers, while sailing with the piratical Bugis tribe to film the Aru Islands’ Greater Bird of Paradise, turned into a 19-year “odyssey of self-discovery across the last wild gardens of Earth” – and one of the most captivating and intriguing expeditions ever made. With the Ring of Fire films recently remastered and released on iTunes, the Blair brothers’ adventures also make for the perfect Island views.