Travel Literature

[PennKen2009]

I have an assignment coming up in school, I need to find a piece of travel literature, a novel. I was wondering if anyone could refer me to a good piece of action and exciting nonfiction travel literature. I appreciate it so much. We read i think it was, Etheria in class and a few others from that time period, but I need a full novel.

[stlukesguild]

A "non-fiction novel"?

[PennKen2009]

yeah that really doesn't make sense now that I read it huh lol. I was in class and I was just typing it in in jumbles lol. Anyways I need to read a story that is on a journey, it can be Non fiction or a novel there that sounds better lol.

[Whifflingpin]

There are so many tales of travel that your question is almost like "Think of a book" Those listed below are all "stories that are on journeys." The non-fiction ones are all as exciting as the fiction. If you can get hold of "My Journey to Lhassa" that is possibly the most extraordinary. "Mason & Dixon" is most relevant to a Pennsylvanian, but is also quite a hefty read for a school assignment.

Epic of Gilgamesh
Oddysey
Travels of Sir John Mandeville - NF (maybe)
Don Quixote
Candide - Voltaire
The Bible in Spain - George Borrow - NF
Raggle-Taggle - Starkie - NF
The Burden of the Balkans - Edith Durham - NF
The Lawless Roads - Graham Greene - NF
As I walked out one midsummer morning - Laurie Lee - NF
My Journey to Lhassa - Alexandra David-Neel - NF
Tulku - Peter Dickinson
Voss - Patrick White
Riddley Walker - Russell Hoban
Mason & Dixon - Thomas Pynchon

[JoanS]

the savage detectives by Bolano.. the best novel of last 10 years..

[PeterL]

If you want non-fiction travel mliterature, then Sir Richard F. Burton's First Footsteps In East Africa or A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah (1855) would be very good. There are many more such books, but those provide opportunities for analysis.

[mS_?]

The Epic of Gilgamesh is really short, cheap, and easy to understand despite it being so old. If you want to be challenged a little more then read The Odyssey. Don Quixote is also really good but it's long.

[the silent x]

Eaters of the Dead - Michael Crichton is a good journey novel, it is alos based in non-fiction, the only problem might be, is he never reaches his destination.

[thelastmelon]

"Red Dust: A Path Through China" by Ma Jian.
(I'm interested in reading this book myself)

[Whifflingpin]

I notice that my list above contains no sea travel, and few women, so, staying with first-person non-fiction:

Joshua Slocum - Sailing alone round the World;
Any of the buccaneer accounts, e.g. Dampier's "New Voyage around the World," Woodes Rogers' "A Cruising Voyage Round the World" or Basil Ringrose's journal, included in Exquemeling's "Buccaneers of America;"
Rosie Swale - Children of Cape Horn;
Freya Stark - The Southern Gates of Arabia, etc.;
Lady Mary Wortley Montague - Letters (This would be a choice different from most of your classmates - A portion of these letters, taken together, describe Lady Montaues experiences travelling from England to Constantinople in the 1700s)


There is so much choice, you should really narrow the field a bit, by giving more detail about what you are looking for.

[Midas]

You say it can be either non-fiction or novel?

If the latter, how about:- 'Around the World in 80 days' (Verne)


One thing about Around the World in Eighty Days, is that to the contemporaries of Verne, the concept would have been almost impossible to imagine, which was the attraction of the story.

When he wrote this book, he probably had no idea about how much the world would advance, though, like Wells, he was a visionary, so I may not be wholly correct there.

Today, with the technology we have, we can physically travel around the world in less than a week, though we would see little of it except from the air. But also today, we have the power to travel around the world in a few seconds with computers, and even live television, and see, and communicate with people on the way.

If you must also write something on the subject, as well as read on it, the above conclusion could be woven into quite an interesting treatise, one which brings in the lateral idea that 'travel', today. can be virtual, as well as
the obvious physical. And it is this which is actually making the journeys shorter, and easier, and the world - 'smaller.'

Just an idea.

[stlukesguild]

I notice that my list above contains no sea travel, and few women...

And where are the cross-dressing albino French-Canadian midgets? You call yourself politically correct? Bah!:rolleyes:

Seriously, for non-fiction you might check out Goethe's Italian Journey... Tocqueville's Democracy in America in which the author's tour of the fledgling new country provided some brilliant observations on American culture and politics that are still relevant today... or you might compare Samuel Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland with James Boswell's A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides both of which were the result of a vacation trip taken by the two British authors together.

[ennison]

Seriously?? You mean that was not serious??

[Whifflingpin]

"I notice that my list above contains no sea travel, and few women..."

"And where are the cross-dressing albino French-Canadian midgets? You call yourself politically correct? Bah!"

I loathe, detest and abominate political correctness.

I mentioned sea travel and women because, within travel literature as a whole, accounts of sea voyages and accounts of travel by women form significant sub-genres.

Where, indeed, are the cross-dressing albino French-Canadian midgets? Has anyone seen them lately?

[Haroldskimpole]

They are non-fiction, but anything by Patrick Leigh Fermor is good. As a teenager in the 30s he walked to Istanbul and wrote two travel books, The Time of Gifts and Through Wood and Water (IIRC) describing his journey.

He was a highly literate young man although a drop out from his private school.

He always combined bookish enthusiasm with enthusiasm for ordinary life in all its variety. His description of the Caribbean in the 50s The Travellers Tree is fascinating.

He was fluent in Greek as he was parachuted into occupied Crete during WW2 to act as a spy.

[Morrisonhotel]

Two classics of travel literature:
Dickens's American Notes and Twain's The Innocents Abroad.

[Logos]

Robert Louis Stevenson (http://www.online-literature.com/stevenson/): Travels With A Donkey (http://www.online-literature.com/stevenson/travels-with-a-donkey/) <-- pretty funny! and In the South Seas (http://www.online-literature.com/stevenson/in-the-south-seas/).