As I discussed last month, today is the first day of my literary twelve days of Christmas. The idea here is to point readers in the direction of a few books they might be missing that would make great gifts. I know it will come in handy as I spent two years working in a bookstore and invariably we had folks walk in and ask for books as gifts and they never had a clue what they should get. The best thing to do was point them in the direction of categories that their friends and families were interested in. I thought it couldn't hurt to do the same thing blog style. So, I'll be recommending titles for the next twelve days in a variety of subject areas, fiction and non and the only requirement is that I love them all. I'll begin the festivities with the travel section.

Most of what I know about Asia is related to American history - I studied Modern Chinese and Japanese history in college, so I could better understand WWII, Korea and Vietnam. But I don't know much about these countries really and I was pretty happy when I came across Kuhaku from Chin Music Press. I wrote about the book and the press in Bookslut in September (actually I pretty much raved about them) so that's a good place to start for why this book is so wondeful. I liked that it was a collection by multiple authors as that gave me several points of view on Japan, I also liked that it was combination of essays and fiction. The artwork is amazing and so is the glossary (a vital part of the book as it is so interesting to read on its own). What I really loved about Kuhaku though is how willing the authors were to get deeply personal about themselves and their subjects. In this book you read about marriages, suicide, westerners in search of a true "zen experiences" and how crazy popular canned coffee is. Parts of it are funny, parts very sad, but all of it provides an intimate look inside the daily life of people living in Japan. There's not a samurai in the bunch - go figure, right? (whatever will Tom Cruise think?)

With The Names of Things, Susan Brind Morrow goes looking for herself and the history of language in the Egyptian Desert. Partly a memoir about her childhood in New York State and coping with some hard family moments and partly about her work as a translator of Arabic and ancient Egyptian languages, this book is hard to classify. Morrow immerses her readers in the places she visits however, in Cairo, the Sudan and mostly in the desert. It is a beautiful book and impressed me both as something to read, and also something to teach me about writing.

Christopher Woodward's In Ruins is a "meditation on ruins and most particularly a history of our fascination with them." Most of the book involves ruins found in England (where Woodward lives) but he does mention others across Europe. He also discusses how ruins or ruined buildings are mentioned in literature and everything from The Planet of the Apes to Dickens makes an appearance. This is one of those books for reading in bits and pieces - for falling into for an hour or so and picking up days later for another chapter. Woodward is a comfortable guide as he considers our collective fascination with the falling apart and falling down and hands out a healthy dose of history for each location he discusses. For Anglophiles in particular, this one is a winner.

Barbara Hodgson is one of my favorite authors - she writes amazing illustrated literary fiction and I have fallen in love with everything she has done. She has two books on women travelers out, the first is No Place for a Lady, the second Dreaming of East (it's on my Christmas list). In No Place, she discusses female travelers, from pretty much the 18th century on, who made their way on camels, horses, elephants and everything else across Europe, Russia, Africa Asia, and well - basically the whole world. While the stories would be fascinating on their own, Hodgson does not put together a book without gathering an enormous amount of illustrated material. There are pictures, maps, guidebooks, drawings, paintings and photos in No Place and the combination of true adventure stories and the illustrations to prove them as fact makes this a gorgeous package. I honestly adore this woman's work - she never does anything other than a first class job.

I took an archaeology course in grad school and while I was puzzled by their obsession with flint knapping (over and over and over again), I loved all the discussions about active digs in Alaska. I think everybody has a bit of Indiana Jones in them and a great arch book that combines history and travel is always a winner with me. Nicholas Clapp did an excellent job with The Road to Ubar which chronicles his search for the fabled city of Ubar in Arabia. There's a lot of desert travel here and establishing expeditions (even getting help from NASA), and exploring ancient maps. Clapp is a documentary filmmaker and he sets a scene beautifully in this book, taking his readers with the team as they stumble across the archeaological find of the century. It's a great adventure book and I'm still pretty impressed that Clapp was able to accomplish what he did.

My guilty sort of pleasure is Amelia Peabody's Egypt by Elizabeth Peters. Anyone familiar with the Peabody mysteries knows what they will find here and there is certainly some tongue in cheek fictional references to characters in the books. But Peters is a renowned Egyptologist and she knows her shit. The book is oversized, packed full of illustrations and fascinating reading. I readily admit to owning and loving both of The Mummy movies and more than a few Peabody mysteries. Peters did a good job with this book for both her fans and anyone interested in Egypt.

Now for me, I'm back to the adventures of Rockwell Kent in Newfoundland and Frank Lloyd Wright at Fallingwater. I also just received a review copy of Brent Hartinger's Grand and Humble that has jumped to the top of the stack. See you here tomorrow for another subject and some more good books.