BOOKS REVIEWED BY JULIE FANSELOW
W
inter is the perfect time to plan an escape to somewhere warm—or start stockpiling road trip ideas for later in the year. These two recent books will help you dream big, both far and near, for places to go and things to see in 2018. They’re both good “armchair reads,” too.
Atlas Obscura
BY JOSHUA FOER, DYLAN THURAS, AND ELLA MORTON Subtitled “An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Hidden Wonders,” Atlas Obscura celebrates strange and beautiful sights around the globe. It’s the sort of book you probably won’t read from front to back. Rather, you’ll want to dip into its 450-plus illustrated pages at random to see what you unearth. There’s the Wisteria Tunnel of Kitakyushu, Japan, which blooms fragrantly for a few weeks each spring. A statue of John Lennon sits in Havana, Cuba, dedicated by Fidel Castro in 2000, nearly four decades after he’d banned the Beatles. The Vanishing Lake of Ballycastle in Northern Ireland emerges when a hole in its bottom gets plugged up with peat—and disappears when the peat becomes dislodged. Closer to home, the Nutty Narrows Bridge in Longview offers safe passage for squirrels. Yes, the Fremont Troll is in here, too. I was working at a bookstore when Atlas Obscura came out in late 2016, and we could barely keep it in stock. But the book is really the print annex of an evergrowing website (atlasobscura.com) where travelers share their own finds. Seattle poet and artist Shin Yu Pai and local attorney/history nerd Jared Steed are among those contributing local tips and occasional tours. Atlas Obscura also offers virtual reality experiences via its website and offbeat treks around the world, with 2018 voyages planned to Mongolia, Mexico City, and Newfoundland. Whether you actually travel or not, you can get happily lost for many hours exploring the book and the website. Bon voyage! Aging with Confidence
Walking Washington BY JUDY BENTLEY
Every block of every town in Washington state has a story. To tell them all would require a whole library, but Judy Bentley has collected a generous sampling in this book. Bentley focuses on 10 cities, outlining loop walks of two to seven miles, each accompanied by maps and archival photos. We see Tacoma’s boom as it became the terminus of the Northern Pacific Railway and consider the chaos in Everett when labor unrest held sway a century ago. There’s more recent history, too. Spokane’s Expo ’74, held a few years after the first Earth Day, celebrated a rising tide of environmental consciousness. “They pulled up railroad tracks, restored much of the (Spokane) river’s flow, cleaned up pollution, and invited the world to celebrate the difference,” Bentley writes. Throughout the book, Bentley details the contributions of Washingtonians who’ve been ignored or marginalized, such as the Japanese immigrants who raised crops east of Lake Washington during the 1920s and 1930s only to be sent to internment camps during World War II. After the war, abandoned farmlands became bedroom communities—and today, an increasingly diverse Bellevue is more city than suburb. Ruth Kirk, a fellow Washington author who died last summer, said of Walking Washington’s History, “by guiding our footsteps, Judy Bentley leads us off the couch and away from the TV set to where the events that shaped our state actually took place.” Even if you don’t leave your comfy chair, you’ll learn much more about Washington in this interesting book.
winter 2018
| 3rd Act magazine 63