Travel Blog: Literary Travel
‘American Chinatown’ in Photos
by Eva Holland | 08.24.09 | 9:31 AM ET
To mark the release of Bonnie Tsui’s American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods, the Book Bench has a short, worthwhile slideshow.
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Yahoo! BuzzHeathrow Gets its First Writer in Residence
by Eva Holland | 08.19.09 | 1:12 PM ET
Literally. All this week, Alain de Botton—the author of “The Art of Travel”—will be sitting at a desk in the middle of Heathrow’s new Terminal Five, typing away. The end result of the stint? “A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary,” a short book that will hit shelves in September.
The project has taken some heat because de Botton is being sponsored by the airport authority, but he maintains he’s been given complete editorial freedom to explore the airport in its best and worst moments. “There are not many industries where you find 20 people camped on your doorstep, like plane and trainspotters, to find out how it works,” he told the Guardian. “You will not find people doing that outside Tesco, saying ‘look at that chicken tikka arriving.’ People are fascinated by this and I share that fascination.”
As do we. Rob Verger recently spent 24 hours at JFK and blogged about the experience for World Hum.
Could Literature Cure the Fear of Flying?
by Eva Holland | 08.19.09 | 12:08 PM ET
In the latest issue of Granta, Javier Marias has a fun and thoughtful essay about his fear of flying and how it has started to abate in recent years. And, he believes, “a little more literature” would help him, and other nervous fliers, feel even more confident:
I would like to ask Iberia, in this the twenty-first century, to abandon their anodyne patriotic gestures and adulatory nods to the Catholic Church—all those planes called Our Lady of the Pillar and Our Lady of Good Remedy, The City of Burgos and The City of Tarragona—and instead choose names that are more cheerful and more literary. I, for one, would feel safer and more reassured, more protected, if I knew I was flying in the The Red Eagle or The Fire Arrow or even Achilles or Emma Bovary or Falstaff or Liberty Valance or Nostromo.
(Via The Morning News)
Who Are the 100 Greatest Writers of All Time?
by Eva Holland | 08.12.09 | 10:26 AM ET
According to the folks at This Recording, these are. The list has a few surprises—and a few surprising omissions. Isak Dinesen, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain are among the travel types that made the cut. (Via The Book Bench)
The Travel Bookshop Turns 30
by Eva Holland | 08.10.09 | 9:05 AM ET
The Notting Hill landmark, which has the distinction of being the only travel bookstore—that I know of—to play a role in a Hugh Grant romantic comedy, celebrates its 30th birthday later this summer. Travel Bookshoppers Saara Marchadour and Julian Mash shared their top 10 travel books with the Guardian to mark the occasion. It’s an excellent list—a couple of the authors overlap with our own fifth anniversary list of the top 30 travel books.
A Resuscitated Keats House Reopens
by Eva Holland | 08.06.09 | 3:59 PM ET
The Hampstead house where John Keats wrote “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and spent some of his final, tubercular days has reopened to the public after a two-year, $700,000 restoration. This Wall Street Journal story has some nice details about the house, and about Keats’ own literary pilgrimage to the one-time home of Robbie Burns.
Safaris: Saviors of the Printed Word?
by Eva Holland | 08.04.09 | 1:07 PM ET
In the latest installment of Bookspotting, Book Bencher Vicky Raab spied Wired’s New York editor, Mark Horowitz, toting a stack of travel books—real ones, in hard copy!—in preparation for an African safari. What, no Kindle?
Raab writes: “Horowitz acknowledged that he was ‘totally Kindlized,’ but he was a bit worried about recharging, and none of the titles he had purchased are available as downloads. Still, he said that he may bring his along for the plane ride.”
Fair enough. The man does work for Wired, after all. His list of essential pre-safari titles is a good one, with everyone from Isak Dinesen and Peter Matthiessen to Stanley and Livingstone represented.
NPR Types Pick 100 Best Beach Books for NPR Types
by Michael Yessis | 07.30.09 | 1:04 PM ET
Almost 16,000 “book-loving NPR Types” have finished voting on the best beach books of all time. The top 5:
1) The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling
2) To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
3) The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
4) Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding
5) Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
My suggestion from last week finished at No. 99.
New Travel Book: ‘Oxford Revisited’
by Eva Holland | 07.29.09 | 10:42 AM ET
Justin Cartwright’s new travel memoir, about returning to his alma mater in an effort to understand how it shaped him, lands in bookstores next week. Bookslut has a mostly positive review.
Chelsey Philpot writes: “As a young man arriving from South Africa, Cartwright recounts how he was romanced by Oxford even as he still felt himself to be an outsider. His winding tour of old haunts and Oxford landmarks is interrupted by his memories as well as philosophical ruminations ... Under a less skilled writer, such leaps would be clunky. However, Cartwright manages to meld both grand themes and small observations by remaining unabashedly cerebral even as he discusses drunken girlfriends or the tourist appeal of J. R. R. Tolkien (one of Oxford’s celebrated professors).”
Dead American Poets: The Grand Tour
by Eva Holland | 07.27.09 | 2:04 PM ET
Walter Skold has found a novel use for his summer vacation: traveling around the U.S. in search of the graves of poets, and tracking his efforts in a photo blog. The Book Bench offers a quick review: “There’s little in the way of written musings, but the photos do a lot of talking. Dorothy Parker’s gravestone, reflecting the glare of a harsh flash, reads: ‘For her epitaph, she suggested: ‘Excuse my Dust.’’”
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Ex Lands a Book Deal
by Eva Holland | 07.24.09 | 10:49 AM ET
Eat, pray, grab a share of the limelight? Michael Cooper, the ex-husband whose divorce launched a three-country search for meaning and a phenomenon of a bestseller, will publish “Displaced,” a memoir about “overcoming the divorce and embarking on his own world journey,” in late 2010. For anyone who’s counting, that makes two “man’s version” spin-off titles so far. (Via The Book Bench)
Postmodern Reads From Around the World
by Eva Holland | 07.23.09 | 3:59 PM ET
The Los Angeles Times books blog, Jacket Copy, offers up a fun annotated collection of 61 essential postmodern reads—and, with authors hailing from Japan, Bosnia, Chile, Italy and beyond, it’s a globally flavored list. Turns out that extraordinarily long (or extraordinarily short) books that—among other listed qualities—play with form, comment on their own bookishness and blur reality and fiction know no borders. (Via Kottke)
A Beach Book Bounty for Travelers
by Michael Yessis | 07.21.09 | 12:53 PM ET
Some consider this beach reading. Most people, though, want something a little fluffier. A little something, as NPR puts it, “enthralling enough to inoculate vacation-goers against the vagaries of missed flights and bad weather.” To find the best beach books ever, NPR has put it to a vote. They’ve narrowed down the list of nominees to 200. You can vote for 10 books.
You can’t go wrong, by the way, by casting one of your votes for Carl Hiaasen’s Florida romp, Sick Puppy.
Gadling, too, is in the mood for a beach read. Katie Hammel’s six great beach reads for travelers includes books from Bill Bryson, Rolf Potts and Eric Weiner.
Mapped: Literary San Francisco
by Michael Yessis | 07.21.09 | 10:28 AM ET
The San Francisco Chronicle commissioned a beautiful map of San Francisco “composed of some of the very words—from novels, poems and essays—that animate our city.” It’s “loosely inspired” by the literary map of St. Petersburg, Russia, we linked to in February. (via @roncharles)
R.I.P. Frank McCourt
by Eva Holland | 07.20.09 | 10:29 AM ET
The author of “Angela’s Ashes,” the Pulitzer-winning memoir about his impoverished Irish childhood, has died at 78. The Limerick Leader looks back at McCourt’s last visit to his childhood home, when he tagged along on the “Angela’s Ashes” walking tour, while Book Bencher Cressida Leyshon remembers editing the first excerpts of the unpublished manuscript for The New Yorker.
