The Hall of Uselessness, by Simon Leys

Great collection of essays from an author whom I think is one of the best essayists ever!  The topics in this collection are wide ranging, from literature to China to history to the sea.  My favorites were the ones on Chinese art and history (a subject I know little about, so I learned a lot reading them), and the ones on Cervantes, Victor Hugo, and Magellan.  Included in this collection is the one where he (rightfully, in my opinion) excoriates Christopher Hitchens's negative comments about Mother Teresa.

Of Plymouth Plantation, by William Bradford

This is a firsthand account of the founding of the Plymouth settlement in Massachusetts by the pilgrims who came over in the Mayflower. Reading (or rather, listening to the audiobook) it really brought home to me just how difficult it is to settle a new land, especially given the conditions back in the 1600's. Like any other ambitious group enterprise there was politics, intrigue, and all the ups and downs of getting along with one another, dealing with people's foibles, keeping the investors financing the enterprise interested, cultivating alliances with local Native American tribes, and so forth.

There are times when the book drags as Bradford will occasionally go into painstaking detail over things I wasn't too interested in, like exactly what was the cargo on a particular ship or what the terms of a particular agreement were, but this was written as a straightforward record of the settlement's founding, not a novel for readers' entertainment, so I won't quibble over that.

You'll have a new appreciation for what Thanksgiving is all about after reading this.

The Wreck of the Batavia, Prosper, by Simon Leys

<i>The Wreck of the Batavia</i> is a fascinating and concise account of a shipwreck on the Australian coast in the 1600's. The crew and passengers become a little society onto themselves. Once the small contingent of soldiers (whom you might say are the representatives of law and order on the ship) go on an expedition to find drinking water, and the top ranking officers leave to get help at the Dutch East India Company offices in Java, the rest of the passengers fall into the hands of a charismatic psychopath and his small band of mutineers. It is like an eerie glimpse, 300 years too early, on a tiny scale, of the totalitarian governments of the 20th century.  Perhaps there are always such destructive, nihilistic personalities to be found in every generation; it just takes the right combination of conditions to raise them to positions of leadership. I could not put this one down; read it in one night and went to work bleary-eyed the next morning.

<i>Prosper</i> is Leys's nostalgic account of a summer spent aboard the last sailing tuna fishing boat.  His descriptions of that life are vivid and entertaining.  Very welcome relief from the violent story preceding.