Reader Katie recommends Simon Winchester's Krakatoa for some insight into the mess that is the tectonically active Sunda Shelf of Indonesia. I haven't read it, myself, and Amazon Reviewer opinion is divided, but there you are.
A book that I have read, and can recommend highly, is William Pene du Bois' The Twenty-one Balloons. It's a children's book, and concerns the ballooning adventures of 19th century professor and explorer William Waterman Sherman, who crashes onto Krakatoa just prior to the eruption and discovers a wonderfully oddball, incredibly wealthy commune of inventors and gourmands who have all adopted single letters of the alphabet as surnames... sort of the lighter side of Indonesian tectonics. I read it as a kid and still hold its illustrations and large swatches of its text in vivid memory.
