Little islands are all large prisons: one cannot look at the sea without wishing for the wings of a swallow.
―Richard Burton
TraveLit--A blog about travel literature.
Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys.
Travel Quotation
December 14, 2013
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Book Review
December 14, 2013
Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot On and Never Will.
By Judith Schalansky. Translated from the German by Christine Lo. Penguin, 2009, 143 pp.
Islands occupy a fascinating place in the Western imagination. Conceptually, they exert a strong pull, but they pull in contradictory directions. On the one hand, they offer a dream of freedom, solitude, a perpetual idyll; on the other, a nightmare of imprisonment, isolation, and permanent abandonment. As Judith Schalansky observes in her elegant and original book, “Paradise is an island. So is hell.” Read More
Books you might like: Reader recommendations
December 3, 2013
Margaret Piton, writer, editor, lecturer, and blogger at yourtravelwriter.blogspot.com recommends two of her favorite books: Travels in Siberia by Ian Fraser, and Siberian Dawn by Jeffrey Tayler. "Both," she writes, "are very readable accounts of travel through one of the little explored but beautiful parts of the world."
Books you might like: Reader recommendations
December 3, 2013
Travel writer Elaine J. Masters recommends two books that she says she has adored: The Voluntourist:A Six-Country Tale of Love, Loss, Fatherhood, Fate, and Singing Bon Jovi in Bethlehem by Ken Budd, and My Gutsy Story an anthology of short narratives compiled by Sonia Marsh.
Links of Interest
December 3, 2013
On her web site, A Traveler's Library, freelance writer Vera Marie Badertscher reviews books (and sometimes movies) that inspire travel whether they would be found in the travel section or not--novels, non fiction, travel narrative, memoir, history, etc.--that have a strong sense of place and/or culture.
Books you might like: Reader recommendations
November 30, 2013
Wynelle Evans, a broadcast media producer and a devoted reader of literature about the Antarctic, recommends Antarctic Navigation, a novel by Elizabeth Arthur about a woman who becomes obsesssed with Robert Scott's expedition to the South Pole.
Books you might like: Reader recommendations
November 22, 2013
Maureen Blevins, writer, traveler, and blogger (maureenblevins.blogspot.com), recommends Roads by Larry McMurtry and Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing. “Both,” she writes, “are exceptional.”
Book Review
November 20, 2013
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
―Marcel Proust
A Sacred Landscape: The Search for Ancient Peru
By Hugh Thomson. Overlook, 2007, 330 pp.
For decades people have lamented the death of real travel, complaining that there are no new discoveries to be made in our much-traveled, well-known world. Hugh Thomson offers a different perspective in A Sacred Landscape, warning against complacency about the extent of our knowledge. Indeed, in Peru, where excavation has been slow, monuments and artifacts of the most ancient civilizations have only recently begun to emerge, offering glimpses of the fascinating cultures that are the focus of this book. Read More
Book Review
November 9, 2013
Tibetan Venture: In the Country of the Ngolo-Setas
By Andre Guibaut. Translated by Lord Sudley. Introduction by Pamela Nightingale. John Murray, 1947. Oxford University Press, 1987, 206 pp.
When Andre Guibaut and Louis Victor Liotard reached Tibet in 1940, they were headed for a region of the country that was unmapped and largely unknown to the western world. This was their second expedition to Tibet, but the first to the high plateaux inhabited by nomadic herdsmen notorious for their brutal hostility to intruders.
The aims of the mission were geographical and anthropological, and Tibetan Venture covers both aspects of the journey. But the heart of this gripping book is the death of Liotard, who was shot by bandits, leaving Guibaut at once grieving for his close friend and fearfully alone in an alien and dangerous land. Read More
Book Review
October 22, 2013
“People travel to wonder at the height of the mountains, at the huge waves of the seas, at the long course of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass by themselves without wondering.”
―Saint Augustine, Confessions
A Journey Around My Room and A Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room
By Xavier de Maistre. Translated and with an introduction by Andrew Brown. Foreword by Alain de Botton. First published in 1795. Hesperus Classics, 2004, 138 pp.
The 18th-century French writer Xavier de Maistre, under house arrest for 42 days, with only a servant and his beloved dog for companions, cleverly transformed the experience into a kind of travelogue: the destination, his bedroom; the sights, everything within it; the commentary, his observations and philosophical musings.
Partly a satire on travel writing, partly an essay on life, A Journey Around My Room was extremely popular in France when it appeared in 1795. Indeed, it inspired a sequel, A Nocturnal Expedition Around My Room, which has the author hanging out his window, contemplating the stars as well as an enticing woman on a neighboring balcony. Read More