The Globe and Mail is hard at work on a list of the 50 Greatest Books—each week through 2008 they’re adding another entry—and some of our favorite fictional travelers are representin’. It’s only week 17, and already The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Gulliver’s Travels and Don Quixote have made the cut. I won’t hold my breath waiting for a nonfiction travel narrative to make the list, but stay tuned to see if Sal Paradise or Odysseus show up later in the year.

Related on World Hum:
* 10 Greatest Fictional Travelers
* World Hum’s Top 30 Travel Books

It looks sharp. In an online video, editor Jason Crowley vows to bring the literary journal “into the 21st century” and to reinvest in “more long-form narrative reportage.” Given that Granta has published some of the world’s best travel writers over the years—most notably under Bill Buford’s editorship—that’s great news.

Related on World Hum:
* Travel Writing, Heartbreak and Granta’s 100th Issue

Nice to see surf writing getting some well-deserved attention. The annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books takes place this weekend on the campus of UCLA, and among the many scheduled panels is one entitled “Surf Culture: Shooting the Tube.” Panelists include author and former Surfer magazine editor Steve Hawk and novelist Kem Nunn. Today’s Los Angeles Times has a story that (oddly) speculates on what they might discuss. Also of interest at the festival: “Nonfiction: Blurring Boundaries,” a panel featuring, among others, travel writers and festival regulars Pico Iyer and Tony Cohan. A complete schedule can be found here.

Related on World Hum:
* The Enduring Appeal of ‘The Endless Summer’

Photo by colmsurf via Flickr, (Creative Commons)

Thomas Kohnstamm’s now infamous book hit booksellers this week, spurring another batch of reviews, considerations and rants around the web. Among them: 

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The seemingly omnipresent Pico Iyer popped up on NPR yesterday with a You Must Read This essay on “The Quiet American.” Why does he always pack the Graham Greene novel in his carry-on? “The novel asks every one of us what we want from a foreign place, and what we are planning to do with it,” he says. “It points out that innocence and idealism can claim as many lives as the opposite, fearful cynicism. And it reminds me that the world is much larger than our ideas of it, and how the Vietnamese woman at the book’s center, Phuong, will always remain outside a foreigner’s grasp. It even brings all the pieces of my own background—Asian, English, American—into the same puzzle.” Iyer recently spoke with World Hum about Tibet and the Dalai Lama.

"Wandering, reading, writing—these three activities are for me intimately linked,” writes Edward Hirsch in an essay in Sunday’s Washington Post.

That’s not all that’s on the spiritual menu at Nashville’s Hotel Preston. It also offers versions of the Bible, the Torah, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, the Book of Mormon and other spiritual texts in an effort to “make everyone feel at home when they’re away from home,” writes one of the hotel’s bloggers. “Yes, even you Scientologists out there!” I’m writing this post from a Hilton in Los Angeles, and this story is making me feel spiritually underfed. 

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The timing is remarkable. After Pico Iyer spent five years working on his new book about Tibet’s spiritual leader, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama hits bookstores today—at a moment when Tibet is making headlines around the world. If nothing else, it assures Iyer’s work will find an audience beyond armchair travelers and Tibet admirers. We’ve just posted an interview with Iyer in which he explains why travel is at the heart of the book. Elsewhere on the Web, reviews and related Dalai Lama profiles are beginning to trickle in.

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We recently noted that Paul Theroux’s next book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, due out in September, retraces the journey he chronicled in 1975’s The Great Railway Bazaar. Perhaps that’s why he’s now reflecting on his motivations behind the original journey, and his feelings about travel writing at the time. Whatever the reason, fans of “The Great Railway Bazaar” should enjoy this essay in the Guardian.

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We won’t get to see Jan Morris’ last book until she passes away. It will be called “Allegorizings,” and it’s already finished—except for one chapter. The legendary 82-year-old writer told Publishers Weekly that the book revisits her “lifetime’s preoccupations—place and animals and all the things that have interested me. ... But, of course, I’m also looking back at them from a peculiar vantage point. There is a theme, which I suppose may remind the audience that even the most superficial writers can have a thread of more serious philosophical thoughts going through your mind.”

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Like Hemingway and Melville, Joseph Conrad transformed a life of adventure into gripping novels. As Adam Kirsch notes, he was “a ship’s captain, visiting ports from Malaysia to Venezuela. He attempted suicide in Marseilles, had a ship blown up under him in Sumatra, almost died of dysentery in the Belgian Congo, and fell in love with a mademoiselle in Mauritius.” A biography, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, by John Stape, explores the many facets of Conrad’s character. In recent weeks, it’s been receiving mixed reviews.

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The American Book Review has made its list of the 100 best final lines from novels. Coming in at No. 5, from a book featuring a couple of our favorite fictional travelers, the last lines from “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”: “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” The American Book Review site doesn’t have a Web page with the complete list, but you can download a pdf of it here.

Related on World Hum:
* 10 Greatest Fictional Travelers
* Disney’s Tom Sawyer Island: Too Old Media for 2007

Photo of the Mississippi River by bluepoint951 via Flickr, (Creative Commons).