Gifts of Wonder in Paperback

A while back, I resolved to give books, and only books, as holiday gifts. I have been content since. For one thing, bookstores are agreeable places in which to shop; and now, thanks to espresso bars and lounge chairs, even more so. Also, I believe that old conceit: Books say something about the giver while enriching the recipient.

The question is not how much to spend to please someone, but what book to spend it on. This year has seen many good travel tales and a few fine ones. But carry-overs from past years can enlarge our horizons and stretch our budgets, both.

That was on my mind at the start of my holiday shopping season when I went to the paperback shelves under Travel Literature. I had five friends in mind. In the end, the bill was just pennies over $60, or roughly $12 apiece, with tax. For that, I like to think I’m giving gifts of wonder.

INTO THE HEART OF BORNEO by Redmond O’Hanlon (Vintage, $12).

Friend No. 1 is a very earnest woman who allows herself no frivolity--a trait I regard as an appalling and all-too-common flaw. So for her I select Redmond O’Hanlon and the first of what are now his three improbable jungle adventure books. (The others explore the Amazon and Congo rivers.)

I am almost giddy over this perfect match: O’Hanlon, a scholar and natural history editor of the London Times Literary Supplement, has Oxford credentials. This will satisfy my friend. What pleases me is that O’Hanlon is also a wild man.

He embodies some wisdom I once overheard: Don’t assume because someone is trivial that they are shallow, just as they shouldn’t accept that because you are serious you are also deep. Or something like that.

For a grave person in somber times, O’Hanlon is the antidote: His romp into the wilds of western Borneo with poet-writer James Fenton as sidekick is hilarious. It crawls with leeches, teems with the ordinary humanity of the most extraordinary people. It is sultry, absurd and far from everyday experience. It also happens to be as intelligent as it is fun-loving.

JOURNEYS by Jan Morris (Oxford paperbacks, $8.95).

The problem with friend No. 2 is that he’s gotten out of the habit of reading. Busy with his kids, his career, his tennis game, he’s forgotten what he’s forgone, I’m afraid.

To remind him of the essential pleasure of books, I selected Jan Morris’ “Journeys.” This is the fifth of Morris’ collected travel essays, an accomplished work by a writer at the peak of her confidence. It also serves my purpose because it is lean: a mere 171 pages. I intend to minimize the burden of guilt I inflict with this present.

Morris writes about 13 trips, five of them to U.S. cities. These gem-quality stories bring the fresh but knowledgeable eye of a foreigner to our own lands--as well as to four other continents--and they provide a gauge by which we can measure the change all around us in the 13 years since this book was first published.

ALL THE WRONG PLACES: Adrift in the Politics of the Pacific Rim by James Fenton (Atlantic Monthly, $9.95).

As you can tell, there is a British theme to my mood this holiday season. Who writes better travel than they do? Fenton (traveling companion to Redmond O’Hanlon in the Borneo book above) comes from the great tradition of British foreign correspondents not just drawn to places and events, but engaged in them. He happens also to have a poet’s intimate gift for language.

In this instance, I first picked the book and then considered who should receive it.

I decided to take a gamble and send Fenton back across the Atlantic to a friend who is one of the best American foreign correspondents I know, now based in London. It’s a risk because she already may have read this collection of Fenton’s Asia reporting and, like me, filled its pages with highlighter and yellow sticky-notes. I’ll take the chance, though, figuring it would be better for her to have two copies than none.

Fenton reminds us that some of the most telling and enduring writing about “place” comes from journalists. He takes us back to the fall of Saigon, to the rise of Corazon Aquino in the Philippines, to Korea and Cambodia. This is a book for travelers, not necessarily for tourists.

THE BEST OF GRANTA TRAVEL (Granta, $12).

Friend No. 4 gets as much joy from travel as anyone I know, and reads incessantly on the subject. I’m not apt to sneak up on him with a conventional offering. But with this edition of Granta, I believe I’ll hit him with something fresh.

Granta is a quarterly British “magazine,” published and sold as a trade-size paperback. Travel is one of its specialties. This volume, culled from the first 35 issues, is a light-show of the vivid:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Spain, Ryszard Kapuscinski in Russia, Martha Gellhorn in Havana, Bill Bryson in Des Moines, Salman Rushdie in Nicaragua, Christopher Hitchens in Hungary and 15 more.

ARABIAN SANDS by Wilfred Thesiger (Penguin, $12.95, photographs).

I have written previously about a friend who lives in an Alaskan cabin, 90 miles from any settlement. He treasures every book, so I’ll warm things up for him this winter with journeys to the desert.

A classic: Wilfred Thesiger’s wanderings through the empty quarter of Arabia was published 30 years ago. These travels remind us of that romantic and short-lived age between the time of European exploration and this, the era of the package tour.

Books to Go appears the second and fourth week of every month.