Travelogue Recommendations

[Dark Muse]

I rather enjoy novels like Thoreau's Walden which revolve around ones experiences and observations within nature. I also enjoy learning about different cultures an as such I find myself have very conflicting feelings regarding Travelogues. Every now and then I will come across one which peeks my interest because it sounds like it is something I might enjoy reading about, but I cannot quite get fully motivated enough to commit to reading it. There is always that one part of me that thinks do I really want to dedicate my time just to read about some complete stranger describing their vacation? Why do I actually really care what they did or think? Same reason why I don't ask random people how their day was, cause I don't really want to know.

I am trying to overcome that bias that the misanthrope in me has about Travelogue books. Because they might actually be enjoyable and interesting.

Most recently I came across a book called "The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific" And it does sound intriguing, and the fact that many people criticize the author for being too cynical, and negative and insulting of the people he meets, kind of peeks my interest all the more, because I too am cynical and negative. Traveling around just to mock and judge the people you meet sounds like something I could get on board with (yeah I know I am terrible). But the fact that the book is over 500 pages long is a deterrent. That seems overly long to commit to reading a travelogue.

Has anyone read "The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific?" or other books by Paul Theroux and would you recommend this book or other works by that author?

And are there any travelogues you thought were particularly good and that you would recommend and think I might perchance enjoy?

[Diggory Venn]

Hi DM,

I can offer you a few recommendations, though you might consider them a little too old-fashioned. They can be viewed as a social commentary of the times as well as travelogues, but see what you think;

Robert Louis Stevenson:
Travels With A Donkey In The Cevennes (1879)
The Silverado Squatters (1883)
Across The Plains (1892)
The Amateur Emigrant (1895)

Daniel Defoe:
A Tour Through The Whole Island Of Great Britain (1727)

William Cobbett:
Rural Rides (1830)

The last three Stevenson titles concerns his travels through America, so if you are American they could be of particular interest to you.

[Poetaster]

Pillars of Hercules by Paul Theroux. It's the only book by him I've read, my dad basically forced me to read it - I'm glad he did, it's a very fine travelogue.

[Dark Muse]

Hi DM,

I can offer you a few recommendations, though you might consider them a little too old-fashioned. They can be viewed as a social commentary of the times as well as travelogues, but see what you think;

Robert Louis Stevenson:
Travels With A Donkey In The Cevennes (1879)
The Silverado Squatters (1883)
Across The Plains (1892)
The Amateur Emigrant (1895)

Daniel Defoe:
A Tour Through The Whole Island Of Great Britain (1727)

William Cobbett:
Rural Rides (1830)

The last three Stevenson titles concerns his travels through America, so if you are American they could be of particular interest to you.

I am a fan of Stevenson's works so I will have to look into those.

[Jackson Richardson]

Patrick Leigh Fermor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Leigh_Fermor

Time of Gifts is a wonderful book.

[ennison]

When I was young I read A Alpin Macgregor's book The Western Isles and I realised that travel books are usually more revealing of the "towrist" than the place. However there are worthwhile books in that genre despite that general truth. O Hanlon, Newby, Tschiffely, Fleming, Raban etc etc

[Eiseabhal]

In general those who are passing through write more about themselves, having little time to pick up anything deeper and in some cases no inclination to do so. Some "towrists" though are genuinely interested and enquiring and go beyond the stereotype view and the cliched claptrap. Some writers who have spent a short while in a place adopt a know-it-all approach which can be very irritating. Macgregor's various travel books are very entertaining if one likes vicious pen portraits. He was less an outsider than he seems for he had served with Highland soldiers in the Great War.

[Jackson Richardson]

I realised that travel books are usually more revealing of the "towrist" …Newby… etc etc

And why wouldn’t they be? Apart from instruction manuals, all books are expressing their author’s experience or imagination. I don’t read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall for information but for Gibbon.

I thought that nowadays even scientific theory works on the basis that there is no access to pure facts irrespective of the observer.

Eric Newby is a good and amusing read and an endearingly humane man as I remember.

[Eiseabhal]

Perhaps Jonathan other people do pick up non-fiction hoping to be enlightened about the subject rather than the author. In Theroux's case it shows that he is a cantankerous old sod. So I stopped bothering with his complaining books a while ago.

[ennison]

I knew that about AA Eiseabhal. In fact I think it was precisely because of his front line experiences that he set off on his post-war travels in the Highlands. Well I like to see myself lampooned but I reserve the right to have a deep and abiding hatred of those who do so (Tis only fair) I wonder how they might feel those who have read of themselves scorned by Bill Bryson or John "Foot" Macleod. I agree about Theroux. Grumpy git. Hey ... So am I

[Ecurb]

IN Spain a couple of years ago I read Iberia (Michener) and "Death in the Afternoon" (Hemmingway). In Sicily a year and a half ago I read Lawrence Durrel's travelogue (Sicilian Carousel?) and "Sicilian Odyssey" by Francine Prose. They were all good.

[Klasik]

My first post! :biggrin5: Anyway, the greatest travelogue I've ever read is A Barbarian in Asia by Henri Michaux. It's more than eighty years old, but it's timeless, like only the best literature can be.

However, if you like reading about voyages of self-discovery, where the author bows down to the non-Western wisdom of other cultures, this book is not for you.

Michaux is absolutely irreverent, which is what makes him so refreshing, funny and instructive. What we have here is an extremely intelligent and witty young man who voices his opinions on everything from gods to cows, using the most vibrant style. Admittedly, it is all rather abstract, going straight to the heart of the matter, with real-life situations used only as illustrations of various national traits. Still, I had a great time reading it and re-reading it. When I recommended it to a friend who spent four years in India, she said he described the country as she would if she had his nerve.

The man's freedom of expression is fascinating... and controversial. Here are a few passages from the book:


The white man possesses a quality that has enabled him to make his way: disrespect.
Disrespect, being empty-handed, must fabricate.
The Hindu is religious, he feels that he is connected with everything.
The American has hardly anything. And even that is too much. The white man does not allow himself to be hypnotized by anything. If you are absorbed by studies, games, sports or family you are not modern. (...)

The Hindu has a thousand idols.
Does Don Juan love women? Hum. He loves to love. The Hindu adores to adore. He cannot help it.
Love is not what they feel for Gandhi; they adore him, his portrait is in all the temples, it is prayed to. Through him they communicate with God. (...)

The rajahs have trained thousands of Hindu menials for thousands of years to be cringing cowards. And this cringing, inconceivable to one who has not seen it, is more frightful, more painful to behold than all the miseries and the famine and the endemic cholera. (...)

When I saw the Hindus and the Moslems, I understood at once what a strong temptation it was to the Moslems to give the Hindus a good licking, and the pleasure the Hindus took, on the sly, pitching a dead dog into Moslem mosques. (...)

With the Arab, all is anger. His creed is full of threats: 'There is no other God than God.' His creed is a retort, almost an oath - he scolds. He gives no quarter.
An Arab garden is a lesson in austerity, cold and rigorous.
The desert is the Arab's nature and all other nature is dirty, anti-noble and disturbs his mind. No painting, no flowers. 'All that is weakness.' (...)

[ladderandbucket]

Redmond O'Hanlon's Congo Journey is a good read.

[Jackson Richardson]

Here’s a travel classic which the two Scots on this thread may criticise, Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland.

Johnson produced the influential English dictionary which makes him the English equivalent of Noah Webster in the US. We know a lot about his conversation in his later life due to the biography of him by his younger Scots friend, James Boswell.

Johnson was notorious for his prejudice against the Scots. Even in the dictionary he has a little dig at them when he defined oats as “a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”.

In 1775, Boswell persuaded Johnson to tour with him around Scotland and the Hebrides. At that time this was journey to a very rough, primitive and poor area. Although Johnson does not dwell on it, this was only 40 years after the Highlands had been brutally suppressed by the lowland Scots and the English. Johnson shows great compassion and sympathy towards the Highlanders without anything like the sentimentality that would be attached to them after c 1810 and the writings of Walter Scot. This was a critical period in Scots history. He writes in an inimitable style which I find magnificent, for example is comment on the holy island of Iona:

Far from me and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona!

[Eiseabhal]

Lady in coach to J: Sir you smell (He was lax in matters of personal cleanliness)
J: Nay Madam! You smell; I stink

Who could not admire such wit!

[Jackson Richardson]

Although that makes me snigger, I wouldn't call it an example of wit.

[TheFifthElement]

Pretty much anything by Dervla Murphy, but I highly recommend Full Tilt.
To the River by Olivia Laing
Tracks by Robyn Davidson
A Woman in the Polar Night by Christiane Ritter (amazing book)
Rings of Saturn by W. G Sebald
Anything by Jan Morris - I've only read Conundrum (which is not a travel book!) but Morris is an excellent writer and highly regarded as a writer of travel books. I've heard Venice is an excellent book as is Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere.
For a different angle, Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel is marvellous as is Jenny Diski's On Trying to Keep Still.
Oh, Findings by Kathleen Jamie. Also very good.

[Gilliatt Gurgle]

Perhaps:

Zuni: Selected Writings of Frank Hamilton Cushing
The RA Expeditions by Thor Heyerdahl
and the greatest travelogue of all time...The Travels of Marco Polo

[Jackson Richardson]

Some time back I thought I'd try Charles Dickens' travel books, American Notes and Pictures from Italy. After all, I thought, Dickens' descriptions are wonderful and his plots, with their sentimentality, coincidences and melodrama, a bit embarrassing. The travel writing will be description and no plot.

I have to say they were a disappointment. Dickens seems to need the sentimentality etc to be alive. Don't recommend his travel books.