JASON LUTES’S BERLIN featured on NPR

I travel, primarily for work, but I am not a Happy Traveler, and most everything about the experience makes me extremely anxious, including the seemingly simple event of leaving home. But my new book, Book Lust To Go: Recommended Reading for Travelers, Vagabonds, and Dreamers, is filled with accounts of great explorations, novels set in countries other than the U.S., histories and pure armchair travel.

So, in one way of looking at it, I am the entirely wrong person to write a book recommending travel books. But, in fact, I am probably one of the best people to write this kind of book, because all my life I have been a virtual traveler — through books — to places far and near. Here's an eclectic and eccentric list of some of my favorite travel books.

Berlin: City Of Stones (Book 1)

By Jason Lutes, paperback, 209 pages, Drawn and Quarterly, list price: $22.95
Berlin: City Of Smoke (Book 2)

By Jason Lutes, paperback, 200 pages, Drawn and Quarterly, list price: $19.95
Using the medium of the graphic novel to great effect, Jason Lutes's Berlin: City of Stones and Berlin: City of Smoke offer a history of the city in a way that's accessible and yet mind-opening. All the benefits of a good novel are here: three-dimensional characters, a dynamic plot and a well-drawn setting.

As in the best graphic novels, the pictures expand the story in a most satisfying way. These two volumes were originally part of Lutes' ongoing comic book series, called, quite simply, Berlin; they offer the reader a history of Germany in the 1930s, in the years leading up to Hitler's rise to power and the outbreak of World War II. Comparisons, as the saying goes, are odious, but this is equally good — though very different — from Art Spiegelman's iconic Maus.