Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Five of the best books about rivers, mighty and small

Robert Twigger is an explorer and the author of numerous books, including The Extinction Club, Real Men Eat Puffer Fish, and Angry White Pyjamas, for which he won the Somerset Maugham and William Hill Sports Book of the Year awards. His new book is Red Nile: The Biography of the World's Greatest River. In addition to writing books, he has contributed to Esquire, Lonely Planet Magazine, and Maxim.

For the Telegraph, Twigger named five of the best books about rivers, mighty and small, including:
Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad remains the great African river book, though, when I recently reread it, I realised Conrad spends far less time describing the river than I remembered.
Read about the other books Twigger tagged.

Heart of Darkness also appears on Robert McCrum's list of ten of the best closing lines of books, Mark Malloch-Brown's lis of six favorite novels of empire, John Mullan's list of ten of the best fogs in literature, Tim Butcher's list of the top 10 books about Congo, Martin Meredith's list of ten books to read on Africa, Thomas Perry's best books list, and is #9 on the 100 best last lines from novels list.

--Marshal Zeringue