Any suggestions of books about Bali?
 

I read amd loved, Eat,Pray, Love but is there other books you have read and enjoyed??

Oddly there hasn't been a lot of fiction located in Bali. For contemporary accounts I like anything by Catherine Wheeler (Ibu Kat).

Three non-fiction classics about Bali in the early days of tourism are A House In Bali, The Island of Bali and Dancing out of Bali.

There are several serious anthropological studies, but they are slow going.

For the arts, I love Made Wijaya (Michael White) on architecture and landscaping -- and gossip -- and Judy Slattum on masks and performing arts. I also like Jonathan Copeland's encyclopedic Secrets of Bali though it rambles a bit.

The most authoritative book on Bali (in my opinion) was written by Miguel Covarrubias around 1929 after the spent a couple of years studying the culture and arts. He is the one who created the iconic simple line drawings of Balinese dancers. The book is called "the island of Bali." and it is very readable and I have been re-reading it for years in fact. But it's not a novel.

One of the most famous, which is debated as to the total veracity of the woman's accounts, is the true-life story of the western woman who called herself Ketut Tantri and wrote "Revolt in Paradise," which spans her arrival in Bali before WWII and her "adoption" by a royal household yada yada... She was the real-life Surabaya Sue who helped Indonesia fight against the Japanese occupiers.

My book Jacinta's Destiny is a fiction novel based in Bali, interweaving the Balinese traditions and culture into an easy to read book.