While, we're at it, The Catalog of Cool's Hiply Writ books - including Frankenstein, Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins, Heraclitus, Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter and...
INTO THE HEART OF BORNEO- Redmond O'Hanlon (Random House). In 1983, British naturalist O'Hanlon and his poet-journalist buddy James Fenton took off for the world's third-largest island to contend with rivers, tropical jungles, and mountains no Westerners had tackled in 50 years. Into The Heart Of Borneo -- one of the hippest travel books ever -- is O'Hanlon's half-surreal, mostly hilarious report on their crack-brained expedition. Armed with books, medications and liquors and daily doused with anti-fungus powder until their "erogenous zones looked like meat chunks rolled in flour," the pair and their three antic Iban guides meet with nations of pests (leeches, wild-boar ticks, inch-long ants) and dazzlingly rare creatures (fish-eagles, pig-tailed macques, dinosaurlike water monitors) alike. They see 800 weird kinds of trees and have almost as many bizarre jungle-inspired dreams. Though the rumored blowpipe-toting Bornean cannibals never materialize, the explorers are obliged to teach the natives they do encounter the seven-step disco and to improvise war dances for them in raucous -- and bibulous -- tribal jam sessions. The Iban tribesmen, O'Hanlon writes, always lay down when they "know that they are going to laugh for a long time." Definitely the sort of book to take lying down. P.F.