Maybe it's my newfound love of all things tiki, but I picked up Herman Melville's autobiographical novel/travelogue TYPEE: A PEEP AT POLYNESIAN LIFE (1846) at Books, Inc., for five bucks and am so far heartily enjoying this adventure story about cannibals, coconuts, tattooed naked people, and tiki torches galore. Good stuff. It's the first of a series of South Sea "novels," which include OMOO, next on my tiki reading list.
As a side note, Melville was, like me, a native New Yorker. He also got to be friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne, the lucky guy.
