Books on Travel Writing
Summer is a time for travel and adventure. We compiled a list of books showcasing the best in travel writing. The books can be borrowed from the Roslindale Library.
The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of An American in Britain
By Bill Bryson
Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to discover and celebrate that green and pleasant land. The result was Notes from a Small Island, a true classic and one of the bestselling travel books ever written. Now he has traveled about Britain again, by bus and train and rental car and on foot, to see what has changed–and what hasn’t. Following a route he dubs the Bryson Line, from Bognor Regis in the south to Cape Wrath in the north, by way of places few travelers ever get to at all, Bryson rediscovers the wondrously beautiful, magnificently eccentric, endearingly singular country that he both celebrates and, when called for, twits. With his matchless instinct for the funniest and quirkiest and his unerring eye for the idiotic, the bewildering, the appealing, and the ridiculous, he offers acute and perceptive insights into all that is best and worst about Britain today.
The Travel Writer’s Handbook: How to Write– and Sell– your Own Travel Experiences
By Jacqueline Harmon Butler
In this new edition, Butler updates her bestselling handbook for the 21st century with helpful tips on conducting Internet research, utilizing new advancements in digital photography and finding helpful applications on mobile phones. She also helps aspiring writers navigate the changing world of publishing by exploring blogging, new travel websites, and social media, all while discussing how best to expand your platform.
A Moveable Feast
By Ernest Hemingway
Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway’s most beloved works. A Moveable Feast brilliantly evokes the exuberant mood of Paris after World War I and the unbridled creativity and enthusiasm that Hemingway himself experienced. In the world of letters, it is a unique insight into a great literary generation, by one of the best American writers of the twentieth century.
Wild by Nature: From Siberia to Australia, Three Years Alone in the Wilderness on Foot
By Sarah Marquis
One woman, 10,000 miles on foot, 6 countries, 8 pairs of hiking boots, 3,000 cups of tea, 1,000 days and nights. Not since Cheryl Strayed’s adventure on the Pacific Crest Trail has there been such a powerful epic by a woman alone. In Wild by Nature, National Geographic Explorer Sarah Marquis takes you on the trail of her ten-thousand-mile solo hike from Siberia to Thailand, at which point she was transported by boat to complete the hike at her favorite tree in Australia. Against nearly insurmountable odds and relying on hunting and her own wits, Sarah Marquis survived the Mafia, drug dealers, thieves on horseback who harassed her tent every night for weeks, temperatures from subzero to scorching, life-threatening wildlife, dengue fever, tropic ringworm, dehydration, and a life-threatening abscess. This is a story of adventure, human ingenuity, persistence, and resilience that shows firsthand what it is to adventure as a woman in the most dangerous of circumstances, what it is to be truly alone in the wild, and why someone would challenge themselves with an expedition others would call crazy. For Marquis, her story is about freedom, being alive and wild by nature.
Pagan Spain
By Richard Wright
A master chronicler of the African-American experience, Richard Wright brilliantly expanded his literary horizons with Pagan Spain, originally published in 1957. The Spain he visited in the mid-twentieth century was not the romantic locale of song and story, but a place of tragic beauty and dangerous contradictions. The portrait he offers is a blistering, powerful, yet scrupulously honest depiction of a land and people in turmoil caught in the strangling dual grip of cruel dictatorship and what Wright saw as an undercurrent of primitive faith. An amalgam of expert travel reportage, dramatic monologue, and arresting sociological critique, Pagan Spain serves as a pointed and still-relevant commentary on the grave human dangers of oppression and governmental corruption.
Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother-Daughter Story
By Sue Monk Kidd
In a probing literary collaboration that moves from Greece to their home in Charleston, S.C., novelist Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees) and her daughter, Taylor, explore and record the changing stages of a woman’s life.
On The Road
By Jack Kerouac
Inspired by Jack Kerouac’s adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naivete and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.
Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica
By Zora Neale Hurston
As a first-hand account of the weird mysteries and horrors of voodoo, Tell My Horse is an invaluable resource and fascinating guide. Based on Zora Neale Hurston’s personal experiences in Haiti and Jamaica, where she participated as an initiate rather than just an observer of voodoo practices during her visits in the 1930s, this travelogue into a dark world paints a vividly authentic picture of ceremonies and customs and superstitions of great cultural interest.
Into The Wild
by Jon Krakauer
In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, a party of moose hunters found his decomposed body. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.
The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World
By Eric Weiner
Draws on the author’s experiences as a foreign correspondent to evaluate more than three dozen countries for their happiness potential, in a survey that includes profiles of such locales as the American shores, glacial Iceland, and the Bhutan jungles.
Comments are closed.