Three Travel Books: Cullen Thomas’s Picks

Travel Blog  •  Frank Bures  •  06.07.07 | 2:12 PM ET

Cullen Thomas is the author of “Brother One Cell.” We just published an interview with him, and we also asked him for three travel book recommendations. Here’s what he told us:

imageSailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum.
Thomas says: “I read this recently. Slocum is dry, steady, salt of the earth and sea. He doesn’t write with flair or with much emotion even, but the humility of his great, personal voyage, the utterly simple beauty of it, is sacred. And the window onto the world of the 1890s that he provides is often fascinating.”

Justine by Lawrence Durrell.
Thomas says: “The Egypt he conjures is bewildering and magical. The story seems to have come out of a fever dream. It’s languid, cerebral, lust-filled. Even though we find ourselves in the exotic Near East, we’re deep in the familiar, universal dramas of the heart.” 

In Light of India by Octavio Paz.
Thomas says: “A collection of excellent essays by the former Nobel laureate and Mexican ambassador to India. He’s frequently scholarly in his approach and yet, through his poetic turn of mind, he beautifully expresses the wonder and spirit of travel—as in his epiphany on ‘perfections of the finite’ as he stares out from a ruined minaret in Herat.”