PORT ANGELES — Lust is the perfect word.
And Nancy Pearl is full of it. She’s loaded with lust for life, for reading and for telling people about good books.
Pearl, who lives in Seattle, spent two years combing the shelves of shops and libraries on a quest for transporting travel literature. Mysteries. Memoirs. Novels set deep in the maze of Venice, or Havana, or India, or in the heart of Texas.
Pearl, author of three other Book Lust odes to reading, almost couldn’t stop writing this one. But since there was a publication deadline, she had to.
So Book Lust to Go: Recommended Reading for Travelers, Vagabonds and Dreamers was born, and Pearl, perhaps the world’s only traveling evangelist-librarian, is on tour to support her latest lust.
Free reading Monday
Monday night, she’s due at the Port Angeles Library, 2210 S. Peabody St., for a free reading and discussion, after which she’ll sign copies of her books, including the original Book Lust from 2003, More Book Lust from 2005 and 2007’s Book Crush, a trove of recommended books for youths.
Right up front, Pearl proclaims that she’s not wild about traveling — the physical kind, at least.
She’s much more into using a book and an armchair to achieve liftoff, to Sri Lanka, South Africa, Wyoming or Las Vegas.
And Book Lust to Go pulses with her passionate recommendations about which authors are the best at taking you inside the soul of a place.
Open this paperback anywhere, and you’ll be lured in by titles such as The Curve of Time, M. Wylie Blanchet’s exploration of Canada’s Queen Charlotte Islands; Letters from Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi’s writings from the six years she spent under house arrest starting in 1989; The Good Doctor, Damon Galgut’s post-apartheid South Africa novel; and The Daily Coyote, Shreve Stockton’s true tale of life beneath the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming.
Pearl’s picks are for armchair or actual travel; either way, “the books I write about are the ones I really want people to read,” she said, adding that her choices weren’t necessarily best-sellers.
“They just need to be put in people’s hands.”
Pearl, 65, whose likeness has been made into a librarian action-figure doll, who broadcasts commentaries on National Public Radio stations and who speaks at book conferences from here to New Zealand — where she was once an entertainer on a Holland America cruise — also has a personal connection to Clallam County.
Pearl’s student
Jennifer Knight, youth services librarian at the main Port Angeles Library, was Pearl’s student when she was teaching at the University of Washington.
“I take credit for her being in Port Angeles,” Pearl said, “because I told her she would have a better opportunity to make a difference in a community library,” more than in a big urban institution.
That has held true, said Knight, who came to the North Olympic Peninsula a year after graduating from UW in June 2008.
She took Pearl’s “reader’s advisory” course on how a librarian can connect a reader with the right book at the right time.
“I use what I learned every day,” Knight said. “It has been invaluable . . . with all kinds of readers,” from children to their parents and grandparents.
Some books not on list
On her quest for titles to include in Book Lust to Go, Pearl did toss out a lot of things.
One piece of travel nonfiction not in this collection is Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert’s tale of a year divided among Italy, India and Bali.
“I didn’t care for it,” Pearl said. As with many a memoir, Eat was a tad too self-indulgent for her taste.
Pearl does, however, include Gilbert’s first novel, Stern Men, a coming-of-age story about a woman living on two small islands off the coast of Maine.
Pearl’s own book tour travels have taken her to the Midwest, New York and Washington, D.C.
In recent years, she has also gone to Estonia and twice to Australia.
“I’ve been incredibly fortunate,” Pearl said. But this is a woman with book lust, not wanderlust.
“In general, if I can find a good book, I’m happy,” she said.
Pearl also relishes a relatively new activity: tweeting via Twitter.com, where she has some 2,000 followers, and posting on Facebook.com. She has about 4,000 friends there. “Isn’t that bizarre?” she asked.
Social networking is just another chance to do what she loves: connect great writers with ardent readers.
Writing a novel
Pearl’s next project is, gulp, a novel.
“I’ve written short stories. And I have a novel I wrote when I was 18, but reading it is a little painful,” she said.
Now, at 65, she’s writing a work of fiction about a decade in the life of a couple, from age 25 to 35.
“It’s very scary to write fiction at all,” Pearl said. “Part of it is I’m so critical of books.”
For now, Pearl is delighted to be returning to the Peninsula.
She spoke to a crowd at Chimacum High School last November in a presentation sponsored by the Jefferson County Library and filled the Raymond Carver Room at the Port Angeles Library in December 2007.
Pearl added that the sponsor of her Monday appearance, Port Book and News in downtown Port Angeles, is a favorite bookshop.
“Anything I can do to help independent bookstores,” she added, “I will do.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3550 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.