Hello everyone,
I was wondering if any of you had any good suggestions for non-fiction travel stories, particularly road stories. I work in a public library and have an upcoming project where I'll be compiling non-fiction road/travel stories. I've got some of the big ones covered, like "The Motorcycle Diaries" and "On the Road," but open to all other suggestions.
Thanks!
You said you have the "big ones" covered, so presumably you have all the numerous
Travelers' Tales volumes, but just in case, perhaps those are worth a look.
Of course, all the Bill Bryson books fit in this category.
I think
Three Cups of Tea might fit, though it would be an unusual take on travel.
Colin
Thubron...silk road and driving through siberia
William Dalrymple to xanadu, and travelling in the middle east and india
Freya Stark going everywhere
Wilfred Thesiger crossing deserts
Eric
Newby with grain ships and slow boats and long walks in the Hindu Kush
Jonathan
Raban travelling the badlands of America and coasting round britain
Robert Byron going overland across the middle east
Apsley
Cherry-Gerrard walking across antarctica
Paul
Theroux taking roads and trains and kayaks
Bruce
Chatwin blurring the line between fiction and fact as he travels in patagonia
William Least Moon on the blue highways
Edward Abbey railing against cars and fighting for the wilderness
more...?
Message edited by its author, Feb 7, 2008, 1:54am.
If the road can be a river, I recommend
Redmond O'Hanlon.
Rory Stewart's walk through Afghanistan held some serious interest for me even as I tired of reading about that part of the world.
Colin Fletcher's walks and canoeing in the wilderness are inspiring, that is if the road can be a trail.
Robert
re: 8. Rory Stewart is an incredible writer, and his walk to and through Afghanistan is well worth reading.
Here are two very odd ones:
The Emigrant's Guide to Oregon and California by Lansford W Hastings
Originally published 1845, available in reprint. The author promoted a "shortcut" route to California, but he had never checked out the route in person. The group who attempted to follow the Hastings cutoff are known today as the Donner Party.
The Clumsiest People in Europe or, Mrs. Mortimer's Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World by Todd Pruzan
Message edited by its author, Feb 7, 2008, 12:30pm.
Wow! Looks like I came to the right place...
Thank you all so much for the suggestions!
Into China's Heart aka
China's Sorrow by
Lynne Pan. She left China when she was a little girl, so she has an insider/outsider point of view.
Red Dust by Ma Jian. Definitely an insider's China travel story, though I don't know how much is fact and how much is fiction.
Lost Heart of Asia by Colin Thubron. Central Asia in the early 1990's.
Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux. Because there aren't too many trains in Africa, he does a lot of road travel in this recent one.
Message edited by its author, Feb 16, 2008, 9:15pm.
This isn't a road trip, but is one of the best nonfiction books I've ever read...and it came from the travel section.
An Unexpected Light by
Jason Elliot tells the story of a young man who travels to Afghanistan during the Russian invasion, goes home to Britain, and returns to Afghanistan about l0 years later, just as the talihban is taking root. Absolutely fascinating.
American Pie: Slices of Life (and Pie) from America's Back Roads is great, The writer is a reporter at a NYC newspaper who took a year off to drive across the country and find out where the best slices of homemade pie can be found. I love the writing style.
Not so much a narrative as a travel reference book, I have
Eccentric America and
Eccentric Britain, which may be of interest to someone getting ready for a trip. These are from a series and list the quirky aspects of localities in each country.
Great listings. Suggest
Silverland by Derva Murphy which is not only a great travel book, mostly by train, but is also an insight into the people and places, present and past of this remote region with a great selective bibliography at the end.
I fully agree with recommendations to Rory Stewart. He's a fantastic writer, original and daring, and resonates with simple observations, that are more telling than any other publication on the afghani people, its politics etc....
Christ Stopped at Eboli is also one I think could fall under travel (somewhat)
Two all-time favourites of mine are:-
As I Walked Out One Midsummer morning by
Laurie Lee What started out as a young country lad walking to London, carrying a tent, a violin and a box of treacle biscuits, turned into a walk to the Mediterranean. He played his fiddle for his supper in bars and cafes. It was 1935 and Spain was on the brink of civil war.
Full Tilt by
Dervla Murphy which is her account of her bicycle ride from Dublin to India in 1963. You could add pretty much anything by Dervla Murphy to your list.
A couple of more recent journeys following expeditions by Scottish explorer,
Mungo Park are
The Road to Timbuktu by Tom Freemantle and
this one by inflatable canoe on The Niger in Mali -
The Cruellest Journey by
Kira SalakI just brought home
Italy Out of Hand : A Capricious History by
Barbara Hodgson, a handy hard bound with old world illustrations and articles about place name origins, historical personalities an forgotten facts about Italy. i base these description on the first few pages that I've read and the other sections that I scanned. Looks like a worthwhile bargain I have, :)
I think the original road book would be The Travels of Marco Polo. It's quite engaging and also fascinating to realize that many of the towns and experiences he describes were the first for Western eyes.
I'm finishing up The Geography of Bliss right now. It's a book by an NPR correspondent who got tired of covering war stories all the time and decided to travel to the world's happiest places (and a couple unhappy ones) to seek their wisdom. It's light but amusing with some insights. A plus since you're from a public library: it's available in an audiobook version narrated by the author.
LynnB - thanks for the tip (message 18). I just started
An Unexpected Light. What a great book !
Message edited by its author, Apr 24, 2008, 7:33am.
The Meadowlands by Robert Sullivan is one of my favorite nonfiction books, and tangentially related to travel. Sullivan travels to a swamp located about five miles from New York City that is so disgusting and fascinating I can't even describe it. Sullivan visits the place a number of times, and eventually tries to take a canoe trip through it. I think it's a fun take on a travel story because it reminds me to think about writing on things we'd normally overlook, and that you can have an adventure just about anywhere.
...And don't forget to check out those threads in the LT group "Travel and Exploration Literature".
This is a great thread. I hardly ever read non-fiction (one or two a year) but had fond memories of reading
Long Way Round: Chasing Shadows Across the World a couple years ago and thought I might like to try another book like that, which is how I found this thread.
I've already requested
The Geography of Bliss from the library (Thanks caffron!) and just wanted to share how excited I am to find this list!
>34 - they have done
Long Way Down now too, if you mean the Ewan McGregor journeys?
Pico Iyer's
Video Night in Katmandu was great, he's also written other books about travel. Now almost 20 years old!
Paul Theroux's two books on train travel -
The Great Railway Bazaar and
Riding the Iron Rooster - now quite old too - but interesting - especially if you travel to those places now. Only thing I didn't like about those books was Theroux's rather misanthropic /curmudgeonly persona.
Vikram Seth also wrote a great book about traveling in China,
From Heaven Lake - written about the same time as Riding the Iron Rooster - but much nicer guy. It also helps that he speaks Chinese. Interesting insights as he is from India (but has lived in the UK and USA).
Message edited by its author, Jun 4, 2008, 12:24am.
How funny - what I love about Theroux IS his curmudgeonly persona! Takes all sorts...
I highly recommend
McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery In Ireland by Pete McCarthy. Very funny and very insightful. McCarthy was the child of a mixed English/Irish marriage. He was brought up in England but spent summers on his grandmother's farm in Ireland. This book is a humorous account of McCarthy's travels throughout Ireland investigating his Irish roots.
One of my personal favorites:
Shutterbabe : adventures in love and war
Kogan, Deborah Copaken.
Resources for non fiction travel books are obtainable from the book publishers and the internet and the LibraryThing's search for travel books.Paul Theroux wrote many travel books. Michael Palin is another British travel stories writer.
Adventures of a Red Sea Smuggler, by Henry de Monfreid (also known by other titles in its re- and re-publication over the years). One of my favorite books travel/adventure (with a spiritual underpinning). Monfreid apparently wrote dozens of books, about travel and adventures in far off places, but this is the only one I know about that has been translated, to English from French, and is still available.
also Long Way Down by the same authors. This is also a good read.
I've just started
China Road by
Rob Gifford about his travels on Route 312, which goes from Shanghai on the East China Sea to Korgaz on the Kazakhstan border, 2998 miles or 4825 kilometers. I love listening to Rob Gifford, and can just imagine him reading this book out loud.
I'm very excited about reading this book.
I have 3 copies to give away of
The Geography of Bliss here. (Sorry I had indicated it would be posted yesterday but it really is posted today, Monday.)
Message edited by its author, Jan 12, 2009, 8:43am.
I have almost finished
KINGDOM BY THE SEA; a Journey around Great Britain by Paul Theroux. Throughout the entire book the author moans about the fact that the British people are not Bright, Highly-Educated, Refined, Sensitive, Insightful, Aesthetic and Prosperous, but rather Poor, and Poorly-Educated, Working Class Clods. He says there is too much in the way of unattractive industrial development, run-down homes and towns, and too little initiative to revive the country. By the end, one wonders where in the world is a place that would meet his standards. Apparently the only solution for Britain is to eliminate most of the people (except those like himself) and raze almost all British homes and industry. A sour view all the way around. And stay away from all those poor people struggling to survive Britain's bankruptcy from WWI and WWII.
How about Bill Bryson? He's an American who married a Brit and has lived there for many years. My favorite of his is
In a Sunburned Country about traveling in Australia.
I'm a Stranger Here Myself is his story of returning to the US after many years away, and seeing it through the eyes of a visitor. And
A Walk in the Woods is about hiking the Appalachian Trail. He's very funny, and good for a chuckle.
I liked
Hokkaido Highway BluesWill Ferguson is Canadian so unlikely to be found in the States, plus his book is OOP, but you never know.
Funny guy, interesting road trip.
my two cents
Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier by Alexandra Fuller
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Scribbl...It is not only a trave/road story but more a trave-through-emotions-and Africa landscape-story.
The author, who was raised in Rhodesia during the war, early 70s when she was a little girl, tries to pull herself toghether and to understand what happened to her country and to the women and men, it doesn't matter if they are black or white she doesn't side any parts, who were involved , most of them against their will. She embarks on a journey with an ex white soldierwho plainly lost his mind as a result of the violence he carried out and was exposed to, and because of the way he was raised and the principles he was taught. They criss-cross Rhodesia and Mozambic visiting places where hideous things happened.
At the moment I'm in love with An Innocent Abroad by
Mark Twain (can't fix the touchstone sorry)
You can find it on the project gutenberg
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/r...Message edited by its author, Feb 11, 2009, 9:24am.
I quite liked Tim Moore's Spanish Steps; One Man and his Ass on the Pilgrim Way to Santiago because a I've always wanted to walk it myself and b I like donkeys....not as funny as Bill Bryson but I can't read Bill all the time..his Neither Here Nor There book travelled with me on a family holiday round Europe and found us some very strange places to go to..every time we got to a new place I would bore everyone with 'Bill says to go to.... The Cemetary of the Capuchins in Rome springs to mind..thanks Bill!
I've always wanted to walk it too--there are scads of memoirs about people walking the Camino. I usually interlibrary loan them.
Good point, I had forgotten this sort of book.
I'm not at all religious so not sure how and why I first started to want to do the walk..probably no chance now as legs arn't as good as they used to be! Maybe will do one of those expensive holidays where you have a back up vehicle kinda cheating though! perhaps will just read about it instead!
I would definitely recommend "A Walk Across America" by Peter Jenkins. It's an easy read and full of adventure and life experiences. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
#58, funny you should list that book. I'd never heard of it, but ran across it about a month ago at the Friends of the Library sale and picked it up for $1 after reading the intro. I'm looking forward to it.
Just finished
The Caliph's House by Tahir Shah. Informative, amazing, and often hysterically funny.
59 - ooh, I've got that on my Amazon wishlist and it's nearly time (TBR reducing nicely) to pick the first batch of books to buy with my Christmas/Birthday amazon vouchers...
It's not due out til May but I saw a Publishers Weekly review of Matthew Algeo's book, Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip.
Talks about the Truman's postpresidential 2,500 mile roadtrip in a 1953 Chrysler. The Truman's thought they'd be travelling incognito. Sounds quite interesting.
sorry, apparently my finger stuttered
Message edited by its author, Mar 27, 2009, 9:02pm.
Not exactly a 'road' story, but how about a tale of rowing across the ocean. I just finished Tori McClure's book and thought it was pretty gripping.
Pearl in the Storm
alas, the touchstones ain't working. maybe tomorrow.
#58: I read
A walk across America a couple of months ago and quite enjoyed it. It was an interesting insight into small town America and into people's nature in general.
Suggadelic:
At risk of sounding too self-serving, I'd like to suggest a book I wrote: Journey on the Estrada Real: Encounters in the Mountains of Brazil. It's about my hike down a road that the Portuguese built in Brazil in 1697. Now it's just a dirt road winding 800 miles through the mountains. You can read excerpts at cheneybooks.com.
Great Plains by
Ian Frazier is excellent. I second Pico Iyer and my husband adores Redmond O'Hanlon though I haven't read him. I'm told Kingbird Highway is also an excellent read, even if you're not that into birding.
I don't know if it qualifies exactly as a travel or road book but
Confederates in the Attic by
Tony Horwitz is one of my all-time favorite nonfiction reads (as is Great Plains) -- Horwitz travels around the South, at first goofing with Confederate war re-enactors but then exploring the more serious ways in which the Civil War still reverberates through the culture. His books since then,
Blue Latitudes and
A Voyage Long and Strange take a similar approach to looking at history -- Capt. Cook's voyages in the Pacific and the period of North American/Caribbean exploration between Columbus and the Pilgrims -- by visiting the places it happened and looking at how it is preserved/presented/interpreted.
Round Ireland With A Fridge by Tony Hawkes is a good one, and there is
Eight Feet In The Andes by Dervla Murphy. And though it is not exactly light subject matter, there is also Martin Gilbert's
Holocaust Journey.
There are a number of memorable movies, and any of them could have associated books :
Easy RiderVanishing PointStephen Spielberg's
DuelAnd though they are not 'road', the Great Railway Journeys (BBC TV) have books linked to them :
Frayn, M. et al (1981), Great Railway Journeys of the World, BBC Books, hardcover, ISBN 0-563-17903-1
Anderson, C. et al (1994), Great Railway Journeys, BBC Books, hardcover, ISBN 0-563-36944-2
Allen, B. et al (1996), More Great Railway Journeys, BBC Books, hardcover, ISBN 0-563-38717-3
Wildebeest in a Rainstorm: Profiles of Our Most Intriguing Adventurers, Conservationists, Shagbags and Wanderers
http://tinyurl.com/dfkrsmWonderful to see a thread go this long and still be interesting and relevant! My favourite, all time favourite travel books are by Patrick Leigh Fermour
A Time of Gifts and
Between the Woods and the Water. He set out as a 17 year old in 1933 to walk to Constantinople (now Istanbul). The first book gets us to Hungary, the second a stroll across Hungary and Rumania to the Iron Gates on the Danube. The third volume never appeared and I don't know of Fermour is even still alive. Vivid writing, with a sort of nostalgic golden summer glow, a picture of the last days of an old Europe soon to be destroyed, and never able to be rebuilt or come back. I have reread these, eventually buying the Folio Society editions, many times, and I am always lost in a dreamworld of being a young man on the road experiencing life with open arms in a place that was basically welcoming, despite the looming clouds of Nazism. Love them and can't recommend them enough.
This message has been deleted by its author.
That's wonderful, because he must be in his 90s now! Thanks I'll look up the link. There is a comment in Between the woods and the water about finding the diary from those years in a country house in the Danube delta sometime in the 1980s after leaving it behind in the 1930s. That also sounds like a marvellous story.
I have just read the Dalrymple article, and a beautiful piece it is too. He is also an utterly fine writer. It is good that there is still beauty in this world.
Linda Raven Moore's story of her solo motorcycle trip from California to Texas and back might be suitable. It's called
A Little Twist of Texas and can be purchased directly from the author or
through Amazon. Full disclosure: Linda and I are friends, and I am mentioned (albeit briefly) in her book.
Be sure to include the immortal On The Road, by Jack Kerouac, from 1957.
A cross-generational travel memoir by a Peace Corps volunteer who ended up traveling the U.S. with his adopted 90-something Nepali mother, Aama:
Aama in America (and a subsequent volume, Aama' journey), best introduced on the author's website:
http://broughtoncoburn.com/One of the most amazing quotes from Aama in America was when Aama was exploring Las Vegas with Mr. Coburn (the author): "Your machines are your gods"
But my favorite quote from Aama in America always stops me in my tracks: "Why do you treat strangers like family and family like strangers?" Aama sure gets right to the heart of the matter.
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