1,000 Places to See Before You Die. That sounds fairly final.

Patricia Schultz, free-lance travel writer and all around experienced traveler, has compiled the world's largest to-do list. It took her seven years, and along the way one of her editors died, perhaps from too much travel, perhaps not. (This editor had sailed up Papua New Guinea's Sepik River and camped out in the Sahara Desert with Bedouin guides.)

I don't know if it was travel that got her, or something much more ordinary, but whatever it was, reading this book definitely will have you thinking about your possible end. Because there's no way you can do half the 1,000 places listed here in a reasonable amount of years. And if you do visit more than a few of these locations you're bound to step on a rusty nail sooner or later.

You might end it all at Huahine in the Society Islands exploring a ceremonial temple; or find yourself at the mouth of the Amazon visiting Ver-O-Peso Market. There you'll find great fruits and vegetables and other exotic products from the deep jungle. You'll have a great time, unless you pet one of the poisonous frogs.

The 1,000 places range from fairly exotic to plainly mundane. The book fairly bursts with new ideas for those brave enough to travel the world.

Schultz does note, "This book represents travel opportunities in an ideal, peaceful world. However, that's not the world we actually live in."

As I leafed through the compact yet meaty paperback I found myself mentally compiling my own must-go-there-long-before-I-die list and patting myself on my sun-burned back for having already been to a decent number of the 1,000 places she describes.

1,000 places in 974 pages. I expect a lot of readers will have fun with this book.

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These days if you asked me for a good book to read, I'd be likely to recommend the new novel by Jonathan Raban, Waxwings.

Raban is an expatriate Englishman now raising a daughter in Seattle. In the past he's written excellent non-fiction travel books and memoirs, so the appearance of this novel is something of an event for his fans.

In a recent interview Raban admitted, "An American novel is what I was scared to write, given my English accent and my English teeth. Writing an American novel for me would be like a dog trying to walk on its hind legs."

I found Waxwings quintessentially American. Perhaps it requires a literate outsider to clearly and humorously depict the madness and silliness of the recent dot-com boom times.

One memorable character in the novel is Chick, a Chinese immigrant who arrives in America half-dead and half-buried in a shipping container. Customs officers crack open the crate and Chick slips away into a new life.

"There are streaks of me in all the characters," Raban said. "Chick is collecting American words like 'sweat equity' in a notebook and that is me; I keep that notebook...

"A writer has to discover himself or herself in every character. Of course, there are elements of autobiography... Would you trust a novel that's written by somebody who's observed all of the Ten Commandments, or, for that matter, any of them? To write about greed, you need to know greed yourself. Envy? Ditto. Lust? Ditto. I think that, in this novel, there are all sorts of bad feelings and bad behaviors among several characters and I hope there is a bit of me in every one.

"Living in Seattle for 13 years does not qualify me to write an American novel, so I stayed away from reading American writers I admire like Don DeLillo... I was mostly reading English social comedies where brilliant high comedy and nightmare are never far away from each other and that has relevance for Waxwings. It's nothing if it's not funny. And it's also nothing if it's not pretty damn serious."

Pack Waxwings in your wheeled duffel when visiting some of those 1,000 places you're going to try to see before you die.

Aired Sunday October 19, 2003 at 10:55 am and Monday October 20, 2003 at 8:40 am

Orders/Information:

1,000 Places To See Before You Die: A Traveler's Life List by Patricia Schultz. Workman Publishing paperback $18.95 ISBN 0761104844.

Waxwings by Jonathan Raban. Pantheon hardcover $24.00. ISBN 0375410082.

Read the entire Raban interview here: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/books/142471_raban06.html. It was published October 6, 2003 in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, byline John Marshall, book critic.