Vanity Fair has a little section called "Nightstand Reading" where celebrities say what book they're reading -- and sometimes their picks make me laugh because they are typically the most arcane, serious, scholarly books you could imagine. I simply don't believe anyone would read these books.
Me, I just started The Lost City of Z, a true story, about a Victorian explorer in the Amazon looking for a lost civilization. I believe it was a best seller a year or two ago. It's still #520 on Amazon's list. (*That's Amazon, the bookseller, not Amazon, the river.)
So far, so good. The explorer's name is Percy Fawcett and at one time that was a household name. He was supposedly the last of the great individual explorers. I've just read 25 or so pages to establish the background.
What are you reading?
2 comments:
Great book. You will enjoy it. Have you read the book about teddy roosevelt's trip through the amazon-river of fear, I believe thatbis the title?
No, but I was just browsing in Amazon and came upon a book that tells the true story of Henry Ford who tried to establish some sort of typical American idyllic town in the Brazilian jungle. Check that out - it's called Fordlandia (that was actually the name of the town!)by Greg Grandin.
Henry Ford was there for the rubber, and from what I've read this weekend in Lost City of Z, what the Brits and Americans did to the indigenous people in order to harvest the rubber was nothing short of genocidal. I'd never read about that before, but it was brutal.
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