Tag: Travel Books
Backpacker Novels: A Conversation
by Rolf Potts, Kristin Van Tassel | 11.11.10 | 11:17 AM ET
Rolf Potts and Kristin Van Tassel discuss travel fiction and their essay, Sons of "The Beach"
Email to friend
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! BuzzNew Travel Book: ‘A Moveable Feast’
by Jim Benning | 11.10.10 | 2:07 PM ET
Lonely Planet has just published a new anthology to whet travelers’ appetites, A Moveable Feast: Life Changing Food Adventures from Around the World. Edited by Don George, it includes never-before-published tales from Simon Winchester, Anthony Bourdain, Andrew Zimmern and several World Hum contributors, myself included.
George, Andrew McCarthy, Johanna Gohmann and Anita Breland will be reading from the book tonight at Lolita Bar in New York City as part of David Farley’s Restless Legs Reading Series.
I’ll join George, Larry Habegger and Amanda Jones in a reading Sunday evening at Book Passage in Corte Madera.
If you’re around, stop by and say hi.
New Travel Book: ‘100 Journeys for the Spirit’
by Eva Holland | 10.25.10 | 12:19 PM ET
The new guidebook rounds up 100 destinations that feed the soul. Twenty-five of those spots get write-ups from well-known travel writers, poets and novelists, including Pico Iyer, Jan Morris and Paul Theroux. The Telegraph features several excerpts from the book—here’s Pico Iyer, in the foreword:
We all know how we can be turned around by a magic place; that’s why we travel, often. And yet we all know, too, that the change cannot be guaranteed. Travel is a fool’s paradise, Emerson reminded us, if we think that we can find anything far off that we could not find at home. The person who steps out into the silent emptiness of Easter Island is, alas, too often the same person who got onto the plane the day before at Heathrow, red-faced and in a rage.
Yet still the hope persists and sends us out onto the road: certain experiences can so shock or humble us that they take us to places inside ourselves, of terror or wonder or the confounding mixture of them both, that we never see amid the hourly distractions and clutter of home.
They slap us awake and into a recognition of who we might be in our deepest moments.
Foreign Policy Tackles the State of Modern Travel Writing
by Eva Holland | 10.06.10 | 1:16 PM ET
The magazine lines up three perspectives. First up, Bookslut‘s Jessa Crispin emphasizes the greatness of the travel classics, in contrast to today’s offerings. Here’s Crispin:
There’s a reason why you still find so many dusty paperbacks of In Patagonia stuffed in the back pockets of travelers in Argentina. Chatwin’s book is not simply the story of one man’s journey—it reveals the timeless nature of the land and its people by rooting his adventures in the odd and surprising history of the place. But somewhere down the line, that sort of thing went out of fashion. Both travel and writing have changed dramatically in the past 50 years, with the result that it’s been ages since we’ve seen a work that lasts beyond the remaindering season.
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro cites recent works Suketu Mehta’s “Maximum City” and Rory Stewart’s “The Places in Between”—both on our list of the 100 most celebrated travel books of all time—in his rebuttal, arguing that travel writing, with its frequent focus on the lives of distant “others,” is more relevant than ever:
The signal geopolitical event of our time—9/11—was enabled by globalization’s emblematic technologies (the Internet, jetliners) and carried out by a small group of individuals raised in “remote” cultures. Increasingly, it’s an obvious truth that choices made by peoples and nations everywhere may transform the planet’s societies in cataclysmic ways. And so the traditional domain of travel writers—the texture of everyday life; cultures, belief systems, and personal climes—has suddenly become interesting to a whole new audience.
Graeme Wood, meanwhile, sees a lot to dislike in today’s travel writing—but also reason for hope. He starts out arguing for a “catastrophic turn” in travel writing, picking on “Eat, Pray, Love” as symbolic of that turn. He writes, it’s “a whole memoir premised on the notion that even the most decadent, boring, and conventional kinds of travel somehow heal the soul and can turn a suburban ninny into a Herodotus or a Basho.” Ouch. But then Wood eases up, saying that this “doesn’t mean the generation of widely roaming travel writers is finished. Many know that a plane ticket is no guarantee of wisdom and that what one sees on arrival is both more and less than the full story.”
I find this last approach most compelling. Sure, there’s a lot of bad travel writing out there, and it’s never been easier to publish or to find, but there are also plenty of thoughtful, talented traveling writers committed to telling great stories about the world they move through.
Six Spots to Relive ‘Travels With Charley’
by Robert Reid | 09.23.10 | 10:43 AM ET
Robert Reid Fifty years ago John Steinbeck began the road trip that begat a travel classic. Robert Reid unearths the spots where you can still make like the author -- minus the poodle.
Retracing Steinbeck’s ‘Travels With Charley’
by Jim Benning | 09.20.10 | 3:50 PM ET
Fifty years ago this week—on Sept. 23, 1960—John Steinbeck set out on the 10,000-mile road trip that would inspire the classic American memoir, “Travels With Charley.”
This Thursday, writer Bill Steigerwald will set out to retrace Steinbeck’s journey. He plans to write about it, using the trip as “the frame for a book that compares simple, poor, square 1960 America with 2010 America.”
He admits the two journeys will be very different.
Steinbeck camped out under the stars a bunch of times. I won’t. He drove a clunky uncomfortable truck with a Spartan camper shell on its back. I’ll stay at pre-1960 motels when I can and drive a 2010 Rav4 I can sleep in when I must. When Steinbeck was on the road he had only an AM radio and pay phones to keep him tethered to the world. I’ll have enough communication gear for a trip to the moon.
The book “Travels With Charley” will be my map/guide/timeline to the places Steinbeck went and the things he mused, complained or fretted about. Unfortunately, “Charley” is not a travelogue and wasn’t meant to be. It’s often vague and confusing about where Steinbeck actually was on any given date, and Steinbeck, who died in 1968, left no notes, no journal, no expense records.
There’s more information and an interactive map here.
Pico Iyer’s ‘10 Best Travel Books for Your Second Act’
by Eva Holland | 09.20.10 | 12:31 PM ET
Over at Second Act, a site aimed at the over-40 crowd, the author of “Video Night in Kathmandu” shares his “wildly subjective list of the books that have moved me to think about life in new ways and transported me to the farthest corners of possibility.” Four of his picks—along with two of his own books—appeared on our list of the 100 most celebrated travel books of all time.
New Travel Book: ‘Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin’
by Eva Holland | 09.13.10 | 5:11 PM ET
A collection of the author’s letters is due out in February. Many were sent to family and friends—including fellow travel writers Patrick Leigh Fermor and Paul Theroux—during his travels around the world. Nowness.com has a few brief excerpts; here’s a tantalizing favorite:
To Francis Wyndham, Lima, Peru, 1974
I have done what I threatened. I suddenly got fed up with N.Y. and ran away to South America… I intend to spend Christmas in the middle of Patagonia… I’m working on something that could be marvelous, but I’ll have to do it in my own way.
Chatwin’s “In Patagonia” and “The Songlines” both made our list of the 100 most celebrated travel books of all time.
David Byrne’s ‘Bicycle Diaries’ Audio Book to Feature Music, Sounds
by Jim Benning | 09.09.10 | 1:34 PM ET
The “Bicycle Diaries” audio book comes out Sept. 28. I’m intrigued. From DavidByrne.com:
The audiobook version of Bicycle Diaries is available as individual chapters in a podcast-style download exclusively via this site. In addition to music and narration by DB, it also features location sounds, creating an atmosphere more akin to a radio show than a simple reading of the book.
We published Cycle Killer, an excerpt from the book, last year.
Hanging Ten with the Havana Surf Club
by Michael Scott Moore | 09.08.10 | 12:37 PM ET
Reuters In an excerpt from his new book, "Sweetness and Blood," Michael Scott Moore tracks down the origins of surfing in Cuba
Interview with Michael Scott Moore: ‘Sweetness and Blood’
by Jim Benning | 09.08.10 | 12:32 PM ET
Jim Benning talks with the author of a new travel book about the spread of surfing around the globe
New Travel Book: ‘Dreaming in Chinese’
by Jim Benning | 08.31.10 | 6:42 PM ET
Anyone who has ever tried to learn even a few words of Chinese will appreciate the difficulty of the task. It turns out it was a serious challenge even for a woman with a Ph.D. in linguistics and six languages already under her belt.
That would be Deborah Fallows, author of the new book, Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love and Language.
NPR just profiled her. My favorite passage from the radio piece concerned her attempt to order take-out Taco Bell, of all things:
Her tones weren’t very good at that point, though, so Fallows’ request for “takeout”—dabao—was met with a blank stare from the Taco Bell employee. Fallows tried saying dabao with every combination of tones she could think of—rising tones, falling tones—and when that didn’t work, she started pointing at the menu, and then miming the action of walking out the door with a bag of food. After a consultation with several other employees, finally—eureka! Yes, dabao! Yes, of course, they did takeout.
World Hum Travel Movie Club: ‘Eat, Pray, Love’
by Eva Holland, Eli Ellison | 08.16.10 | 8:49 AM ET
A big-screen incarnation of author Elizabeth Gilbert heads to Italy, India and Indonesia. Eva Holland and Eli Ellison go along for the ride.
The Travel Writing of Paul Bowles
by Jim Benning | 07.23.10 | 11:57 AM ET
Paul Bowles is best known for his 1949 novel The Sheltering Sky, but he produced quite a bit of travel writing during his lifetime, including one of our 100 Most Celebrated Travel Books of All Time (see #87). Much of his shorter stuff, covering places as diverse as the Costa del Sol and Sri Lanka, has just been collected into an anthology edited by Rough Guides founder Mark Ellingham. It just earned a positive review in The Independent.
Michael Jacobs calls particular attention to a piece included in the anthology about travel writing itself.
In this 1958 piece, Bowles voices concerns only too relevant today.
At a time when “in theory anyone can go anywhere”, he saw the genre as having shifted in emphasis “from the place to the effect of the place upon the person”. However, he thought that the sort of people likely now to travel would be generally unsympathetic towards subjective impressions and prefer a work containing practical information. Bowles believed that a travel book should be nothing more than “the story of what happened to one person in a particular place”, but he feared “such books form a category which is doomed to extinction”.
Fortunately for those of us who love great travel writing, they’re not quite extinct yet.
10 Wanderlust-Inducing Travel Novels and Story Collections
by Frank Bures | 06.29.10 | 3:11 PM ET
iStockPhoto Frank Bures on the books to read when you're seeking inspiration
Travel Reads for Summer Laughs
by Eva Holland | 06.22.10 | 4:30 PM ET
The Baltimore Sun offers up a list of funny travel books for your summer beach-reading needs. Three of our 100 Most Celebrated Travel Books of All Time—“In a Sunburned Country,” “Under the Tuscan Sun” and “The Innocents Abroad”—made the cut. (Via The Book Bench)
William Dalrymple’s Trans-Global ‘Spinal Tap’
by Eva Holland | 06.22.10 | 10:41 AM ET
Writing in The Daily Beast, William Dalrymple looks back on a nine-month book tour that, from the sounds of it, almost warrants a book of its own. Here’s an enumeration of his companions on the trip:
[A] smoky-voiced Tamil diva who is struggling to keep alive a dying sacred song tradition from the temples of Tamil Nadu on the southern tip of India; six Sufi mystics from a shrine in the badlands of Pakistan who sing the poetry of an 18th-century saint in a strangely haunting falsetto, and who between gigs have been fending off the Pakistani Taliban from taking over their home town; five dope-smoking Bauls, the minstrels of Bengal who travel from village to village teaching tantric mysticism through their songs; and a dancer and part-time prison-warder who is believed in Northern Kerala to be the human incarnation of the God Vishnu; he travels with his side-kick, a small-town taxi driver who has a second career as a theyyam make-up artist and drummer.
Dalrymple’s “City of Djinns” recently landed on our list of the 100 Most Celebrated Travel Books of All Time.
Interviews With Travel’s Most Celebrated Authors
by Eva Holland | 06.18.10 | 3:20 PM ET
Over the years, we’ve interviewed several of the authors that appeared on our list of the 100 Most Celebrated Travel Books of All Time. Here they are, talking about travel, writing and everything from the Dalai Lama to Chinese driver’s exams:
Interview with Greg Mortenson: One Traveler Changing Lives
David Frey asks the bestselling author about the “Three Cups of Tea” approach to travel and life
Interview With Peter Hessler: Behind the Wheel in China
Frank Bures asks the New Yorker writer about his new book, “Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory”
Interview With Alain de Botton: ‘A Week at the Airport’
Frank Bures asks Heathrow’s first writer-in-residence about non-places, taking time to arrive and what airports tell us about ourselves
Interview With Paul Theroux: Invisible Man on a Ghost Train
Jim Benning asks the author of “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” about his new book, aging and the challenge of disappearing in the age of the BlackBerry
J. Maarten Troost: Enduring Pollution and Reptile-Laden Lunches in China For Our Benefit
David Farley chats with the author of “Lost on Planet China” about the Olympic Games, Tibet and eating not-so-well in the Middle Kingdom
Tony Horwitz: Rediscovering the New World
Ben Keene talks to the author of the new book “A Voyage Long and Strange” about travel, American myths and the importance of visiting places where “history happened”
Pico Iyer: On ‘The Open Road’ and 30 Years With the Dalai Lama
The iconic travel writer’s new book taps into his personal experiences with the Dalai Lama. Kevin Capp asks him about the exiled spiritual leader’s “global journey.”
Michael Palin: The New ‘New Europe’
David Farley asks the Monty Python member-turned-travel host about the call of the road and his new television series
Jeffrey Tayler: Facing Africa’s ‘Angry Wind’
Jim Benning asks The Atlantic’s Moscow correspondent about travel writing, his latest book and the allure of the world’s most remote regions
Jeff Greenwald: Travel During War
As war rages in Iraq, Jim Benning speaks with the travel writer about his anti-war stand, his call for Americans to journey abroad, and his new organization, Ethical Traveler
Why My Travel Book Will be Called ‘Walk the Lost World of the Great Black Sea’
by Michael Yessis | 06.15.10 | 12:23 PM ET
I’m confident it will be a best seller. Here’s why: I fed the titles of the 100 most celebrated travel books of all time into a word cloud creator, and, as you can see, all the words in my title are quite popular.
Readers and critics will love my book. Sean Penn will buy the movie rights. I will be rich.
The 100 Most Celebrated Travel Books of All Time
by World Hum | 06.15.10 | 9:07 AM ET
The definitive list of travel books that travel writers, editors, bloggers and readers love best