Paris to the Moon, Rowing to Latitude and The Island of Lost Maps

Surprise at unanticipated convergences and resonances is one of the delights of reading what you happen to toss into the suitcase hurriedly on the way out the door for a vacation. My daughter gave me Miles Harvey's The Island of Lost Maps for Father's Day. I bought Paris to the Moon because Adam Gopnik's New Yorker essays had convinced me that Gopnik is the best writer of English prose today. And I found Rowing to Latitude on the "Discover Great New Writers!" shelf at the local Barnes & Noble, where it became irresistible the moment Jill Fredston catapulted me back to my childhood: "One of my favorite children's stories," she says in her acknowledgments, "is Holling Clancy Holling's Paddle-to-the-Sea." God's plenty is in these three books.

All three authors are adventurers. With his wife and young son Gopnik moved to Paris. Early on they saw, in a shop window, a 19th-century engraving of a train leaving the Right Bank, headed for the moon. This is an apt image for Gopnik's exploration of French culture, cooking, politics, medicine and more, though he disarmingly calls the book "less a tour of any horizon than just a walk around the park."

"There are two kinds of travelers," he says. "There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see and sees it, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it." The first way, we assume, is the better. But that's our prejudice, not Gopnik's fresh insight: "The first visitor has an easier time, but I think the second visitor sees more. He is constantly comparing what he sees to what he wants, so he sees with his mind, and maybe even with his heart, or tries to."