World Hum’s Most Read: Aug. 30-Sept. 5

What We Loved This Week: Jose Feliciano, Rub’ al Khali and Raw Oysters

Don’t Be Cruel: Traveling ‘Elvis’ Draws Attention, Groans

It’s Not Easy Being Green and Crucified

A Tourist With a Shovel and a Hoe

When she arrived in Kenya to volunteer with the Maasai, Daniela Petrova looked down her nose at tourists there to have a good time. But was her own motivation much different?

How Should I Spend My Time in Spain?

Vagabonding traveler Rolf Potts answers your questions about travel

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

Eat Ceviche in Lima

Grab a Cusqueña and get comfortable. As Nicholas Gill explains, a trip to a Peruvian cevichería can be an all-day immersion in good conversation and raw seafood.

Unsentimental Journeys: Wrestling With Paul Theroux

Bronwen Dickey considers “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: 28,000 Miles in Search of the Great Railway Bazaar”

My Travels, My Feet

After taking one too many headless torso shots of herself, solo traveler Sophia Dembling started snapping photos of her feet around the world, from the Grand Canyon to Red Square

Seven Reasons to Have a Foreign Fling

Sure, having an overseas romance is fun. But Terry Ward points out seven other benefits to cross-border love, mon petit chou.

Crime Fiction Where You Least Expect It

At a risk of inviting somewhat circular log-ick into Julia Ross’ argument, no less a prose authority than Clive James has already deconstructed the ["international/ foreign"] crime novel(s) as essentially travel guides. “Ideally, an author should turn out a sequence of detective novels that will generate a bus tour in the city where they are set.” Next argument, please, Julia.

Ian

http://www.clivejames.com/crime-fiction

“[...] finally there is nothing left of the books in the memory except the place they are set in.

Essentially they are guide books. Thats why a maverick detective from Edinburgh outranks a maverick detective from Glasgow, and why we cant get enough of the detective from Venice, and why even Elmore Leonard, who can get so much out of a small American city whose main drag consists almost entirely of franchises some of which, admittedly, come equipped with a dead body in the dumper out in back still gravitates towards Los Angeles as the natural stamping ground of Chili Palmer, who neatly reverses the cliché of the cop with criminal tendencies. [...]”

It’s not all crime fiction, but National Geographic Traveler does have a whole library of travel novels o help get you inspired.

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/traveler/extras/travellibrary/library.html

More from Nat Geo Traveler:  Don George is now writing an online monthly book review for us, and he recently picked Dead Man in Paradise by J. B. MacKinnon. which he called “part detective story, part memoir, and part travelogue,” about a real-life murder of the author’s uncle in the Dominican Republic.  He also picks Sylvia Sellers-Garcia’s debut novel, When the Ground Turns in its Sleep, about a mystery set in a Guatemalan village:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/traveler/extras/travellibrary/george0712.html