Skip to main content

Travel literature, part 1

I love to read about travel, foreign cultures and geography, and always have. My favourite non-fiction books when I was growing up were accounts of travel to such far away places as South America, India and China.

Here are some of my favourite travel books that are available in English. I’m leaving out the expatriate memoirs, i.e. Peter Mayle and co., and may post on those later. The honourable mentions and TBR will come later.

Antony Bourdain: A Cook’s Tour. Irreverent and funny warts’n’all account of Bourdain’s journey of discovery around the world in search of good food and extreme eating, with camera crew in tow.

Karen Connelly: Touch the Dragon: a Thai journal. Connelly spent a year in Thailand as an exchange student and the book is about her experiences of seeing Thai culture from the inside.

Edith Durham: High Albania. Durham travelled for her health, and made a special study of the Balkans at the beginning of the 20th century. Part travel memoir, part anthropology, this book clarified to me some of the ancient feuds underlying the hatred the ethnic groups of the Balkans have for each other. Read it online: High Albania

Gerald Durrell: All of his travel books. My favourites are probably The Bafut Beagles, The Whispering Land and The Drunken Forest. (My favourite Durrell book ever is My Family and other Animals, which, as it is about living abroad rather than travelling, falls under the heading of expatriate memoir).

Bill Holm: Coming home crazy: an alphabet of China essays. Holm spent a year teaching English in China. This essay collection describes various aspects of his life in China. The jumping back and forth can be a bit confusing if the book is read as a story and not as an essay collection.

Frank Kusy: Kevin and I in India. I picked this book up second hand in Nepal and found it fascinating. It is in the form of diary entries by the author, about his and his travel companion’s experiences in India. I always recall my own journey when I read it.

Michael Palin:
*Around the World in 80 Days. Palin and camera crew follow in the footsteps of Phineas Fogg around the world, using ground and sea transport only.
*Pole to Pole. Palin and co. travel from the North Pole to the South Pole, through Europe, Africa and S-America, mostly on land and sea.
*Full Circle. This time it’s the Pacific Rim, starting and ending in Alaska.
*Sahara. Palin travels around the Saharan countries.
*Himalaya. And the Himalaya mountains.
Although you know that much of what you see in the TV series is faked to some extent – Palin is, after all, travelling with a camera crew but “pretending” to travel alone, and the journeys are not all unbroken - the journals give glimpses of what he experienced when the cameras were off. The journals make a fascinating read, and a good supplement to the TV series.

Jane Robinson, ed.:Unsuitable for Ladies. An anthology that I highly recommend. It has excerpts from travel literature by women over the ages.

Tim Severin: Crusader. Severin, a professional adventurer, set off with two horses to retrace the route taken by the crusaders from France to Jerusalem. Rich in historical detail, and it’s interesting to read about his relationship with the horses.

Mark Shand:
*Travels on my Elephant. Shand bought himself an elephant, named her Tara, and travelled with her around India.
*Queen of the Elephants. The sequel to Travels on my Elephant. Shand sought out Parbati Barua, the queen in the title, and trained as a mahout under her tutelage and the watchful eyes of a camera crew. The resulting TV series was not only entertaining, but also helped bring to the spotlight the plight of the Asian elephant.

John Steinbeck. Travels with Charley: In search of America. Steinbeck’s classic travel story.

Colin Thubron:
*Among the Russians, driving through the European parts of the Soviet Union.
*Behind the Wall: a journey through China, travelling around China, alone and unable to speak the language.
*The Lost Heart of Asia, travelling through the “-stans” that once were part of the Soviet Union, shortly after its fall.

Comments

Stuttfótur said…
Dunno if you know John Gimlette..? I love his book "At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig" about his travels through Paraguay, mixed with interesting tidbits about the history of the place. That's one wild country!
Bibliophile said…
I have this book on my BookMooch wishlist. After reading Graham Greene's "Travels with my Aunt" I have always wanted to know more about Paraguay.

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme