The heading of the e-mail read: "Staycation your way to the exotic." And I thought: This is probably the fastest that a new obnoxious noun has been transmogrified into a verb.

Which was sort of interesting, since the press release was about Berlitz. "Staycation your way to the exotic" was just another way of saying: "Struggle to learn a foreign language."

This was the closest any of the countless press releases about the 10-letter word have come to mentioning what is - to me at least - the obvious activity for a stay at home vacation: reading travel books.

And there are a bunch of new ones to choose from.

The Wild Places, by Robert Macfarlane. A journey through the untamed parts of England and Ireland. Got a glowing review in Sunday's New York Times Book Review.

Traversa, by Fran Sandham. The account of a walk from the coast of Namibia to the coast of Tanzania. For everyone who's said there are no more travel adventures left.

City of Heavenly Tranquility: Beijing in the History of China, by Jasper Becker. The checkered past of a city - its vast culture and rich characters - that is slowly disappearing.

Zeus: A Journey Through Greece in the Footsteps of a God, by Tom Stone. An intriguing mix of travel and mythology.

Strolling in Macau, by Steven K. Bailey. A small, informative and well-written guide by a former Sun-Sentinel freelancer.

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Last night at Books & Books, Alan Furst, the popular novelist of Second World War intrigue, read from his new novel, The Spies of Warsaw.

I had read it quickly over the weekend, carried along by the story of a French military attache working in his country's embassy in Poland in 1937. What attracted me to the story was not just the setting - Warsaw, where I lived in the late 70s and early 80s - but the subject. In 1979, during an interview about my visa, I was offered an extension if I became an informer. I declined, and left the country three days later.

About 60 people gathered in the bookstore last night to hear Furst speak. He prefaced his reading by saying that, of all his novels, this was the one with the most resonance to today. I was surprised at first, as the book's pre-war atmosphere kept taking me back to the Cold War.

But he described this as his "9/10 book." And he explained that the military attache gathers vital information about an impending German attack on France which none of his superiors take very seriously. Hard evidence is presented and the people in power opt to ignore it.

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Sunday, the New York Times Book Review asked a bunch of writers to recommend books for the presidential candidates to read.

Predictably, no travel writers were invited, and even more predictably, no travel books were recommended.

So I offer my own modest suggestions. Let's start with something by Freya Stark, perhaps Beyond Euphrates or Baghdad Sketches. The candidates could learn a lot about this now pivotal part of the world by reading a woman who got to know it intimately and loved it passionately. A woman whose faith in the development of democracy in the region, at least when brought by a foreign power, also proved to be unfounded.

Since everyone agrees on the importance of China, I recommend learning about it from Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present. A former Peace Corps teacher, Hessler has become one of the most insightful interpreters of China for the West.

And since candidates endlessly praise their fellow citizens (their potential supporters), I recommend Henry Miller's The Air-conditioned Nightmare. This account of the novelist's journey through his homeland in the early '40s, after a long stint in Paris, is a harsh and sobering look at some of our national faults, and would be a helpful corrective for two men who, over the next five months, will criticize administrations and systems but never, never, the American people.

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