Author: Jeannie

Summer is winding down, and now is the perfect time to mark off another square on your Bookish Bingo card! Whether you’re looking for a title to carry to the beach or a page-turner to carry you away while on a staycation, these books are sure to take you on an adventure.  From the Midwest to Mongolia, from caves deep beneath the sea to flights 30,000 feet in the air, these authors have seen it all—and lived to write the tale.

Starting close to home, Melanie Radzicki McManus’s Thousand-Miler: Adventures of Hiking the Ice Age Trail details her experience walking 1,100 miles of ancient trails throughout the state of Wisconsin.  McManus is not on a leisurely stroll; she is endeavoring to set the record for a female thru-hiker on this trail.  With humor and compassion, she shares stories of her fellow thru-hikers, describes communities near the trail, and digs into the history of the trail.  You’ll see our state through a different lens and might be inspired to walk a mile or two on the Ice Age Trail.

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Our community was settled largely by immigrants from Germany, so it seems fitting that our next stop is that country.  Schadenfreude, a love story: me, the Germans, and 20 years of attempted transformations, unfortunate miscommunications, and humiliating situations that only they have words for is perhaps the longest book title in our catalogue. Rebecca Shuman is a typical Jewish American teen when she encounters her first love—a teenaged boy with a volume of Franz Kafka in his backpack—which leads to the discovery of her real love: all things German.  For the next twenty years, Schuman visits and lives in Germany, trying in both a literal and metaphorical way to make herself understood and to understand. It’s a bildungsroman told with great wit and humor, a snapshot of a young woman discovering herself in a country that’s piecing itself back together after the end of the Cold War.

There’s a trite but rather true impression that most little girls go through a horse-mania phase.  Mine was mostly expressed by repeated readings of Black Beauty.  Author Lara Prior-Palmer, however, decided to sign up for a 1,000-kilometer (621 mile) horse race. In Mongolia. On a whim. As detailed in Rough Magic: Riding the World’s Loneliest Horse Race, Prior-Palmer is nineteen and all at loose ends when she sees an ad for the Mongolian Derby—a race that recreates Genghis Khan’s horse messenger system. She impulsively decides that riding a series of 25 wild ponies across the steppe is the next logical step in her life-long love of horses and riding.  The teenager is woefully underprepared for this race, bringing along scant equipment and unable to work the GPS.  Her win is a testament to her grit, determination, and competitive spirit.  And yet, because of Prior-Palmer’s frank avowal of her foolhardiness (and her spite towards another competitor), manages to save this memoir from the all-too-familiar narrative of the gritty underdog making good.

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If you want to mark two squares with one book for the Bookish Bingo Challenge, Imagine Wanting Only This is the one for you.  Kristen Radtke spins her tale in the form of a graphic memoir, relating scenes and circumstances with a combination of lyrical prose and black-and-white art. Loss of a beloved uncle combined with the unwitting desecration of a photographer’s memorial lead the author into a fascination with ruins. Traveling from Cambodia to Colorado, Radtke’s pursuit of these places reveals an existential restlessness, a fear that settling down and settling in means eventual decay into a ruin herself. If you have never thought of a comic book as an art form capable of moving and challenging its readers, Imagine Wanting Only This will shift your perspective.

Perhaps no other author on my list exemplifies the female adventurer as well as Jill Heinerth.  She led teams that discovered long-submerged ruins of Mayan civilization, and she is the first person in history to dive deep into an Antarctic iceberg.  Her memoir Into The Planet: My Life as a Cave Diver detail her transformation from office drone to renowned cave diver.  Her prose is crisp yet conversational, alternately thrilling with its description of danger and charming with its depictions of underwater marvels.  From the opening sentence to the final paragraph, Heinerth sets the adrenaline rushing and the imagination free.

Other recommendations:

_{Book descriptions are courtesy of Monarch Catalog, except Schadenfreude, a love story: me, the Germans, and 20 years of attempted transformations, unfortunate miscommunications, and humiliating situations that only they have words for—provided by Amazon.}