Sadie Stein is contributing editor of The Paris Review, and the Daily ’s correspondent. As Schalansky writes at its start, “Paradise is an island. Remember: this is a book about isolation. Born on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall, as a child Judith Schalansky could travel only through the pages of an atlas. It starts landslides of thoughts and emotions. The chapters are short enough to make it convenient reading, but be warned: there is nothing comforting about it. It was the winner of the prize for the most beautiful German book of the year in 2009, the German Design Award in 2011, and the Red Dot Design Award in 2011. There are still places on earth that are unknown. The atlas contains maps of 50 islands chosen by the author with accompanying descriptions of their natural and human histories, often written in a subjective, impressionistic style. This is a book that makes no sense, and took a tremendous amount of energy-and yet it exists, and is as a result peculiarly inspiring. A rare and beautifully illustrated journey to fifty faraway worlds. Indeed, what I like about it (besides its portable size and digestible scale) is its distinct whiff of madness. It reminded me slightly of Lauren Redniss’s recent study of weather, Thunder and Lightning, and also of Bruce Chatwin, and a little of the fantastical travel journals of past eras, in which writers freely matched personal observations with conscientious fact-finding. And the thunderous echo of waves breaking against the hollows of the jagged coastline never ceases.” Of the antipodes the author writes, “cattle that are brought here die quickly and quietly in the dun-colored steppes of grass. Facts sit side-by-side with a kind of highly personal fiction we are given latitudes and detailed maps, but also lore and speculation. Kilda in the Atlantic, the Carolines of Micronesia, the American Pagan-is a prose poem of sorts. The book looks serious, until you read that quirky subtitle: it looks like a pocket atlas.

At least, not too precious-despite the somewhat whimsical conceit, the author approaches her idiosyncratic task with seriousness. The subtitle is Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will, but don’t worry: this book isn’t precious. There’s a book I’ve returned to again and again, ever since its clementine-orange cover first caught my eye at a museum bookstore: A Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky, translated from the German by Christine Lo.

Pocket atlas of remote islands