Reading in Reykjavík

This is the third What's in a Name challenge book I finish, the topographical feature , that of course being a marsh . This means I am halfway there, and one more TBR book down. The Marsh Arabs is a travelogue that, along with another travelogue by the same author, Arabian Sands , often appears on lists of best travel books and classics of the genre. It's easy to see why. The style is straightforward and no-nonsense, yet never dry or boring and it was refreshing for a change to read a travelogue by someone who knew exactly who he was and what he was doing, rather than the more common "searching for meaning and/or identity" travelogue so common today. In 1951 to 58 Wilfred Thesiger spent several months of each year in the marshes of southern Iraq, getting to know the inhabitants, their way of life and customs. He seems to have travelled to this particular area in search of people who were not yet too modernised to have lost all connection with their past and ...

Genre: Travel Area covered: Train journey (by stages) from London to Baghdad, with stops in Italy, various Balkan states, Turkey, Syria and various cities and archaeological sites in Iraq. Published in: 2004 This is an enjoyable read about setting out on a journey with the slimmest of excuses, in this case visiting places Agatha Christie travelled to and through when she set out to make a new life for herself after her divorce from her first husband, and to go to the places where she lived in with her second husband, an archaeologist who spent his working life digging up ancient cities in Iraq. Eames visited various places which one would have travelled through on a train journey between England and Iraq in 1928, which is when Agatha Christie first made the trip aboard the Orient Express , following her traumatic divorce from her first husband. Once the trip could have been made in a few stages (for example directly, without disembarking, from Paris all the way to Istanbul), b...