Travel writing is sometimes enjoyable. Both the quality of writing and my interest in a specific location might vary wildly. Bill Bryson and Mark Twain amuse even in ordinary places. Shackleton writes surprisingly well of adventures in a more unusual one.
I enjoy old-timey travel books when they describe places or events that are long gone or now exist in very different ways. I was reminded of Twain and Shackleton after stumbling upon the Penguin “Great Journeys” excerpts from much bigger works. Maybe excerpts are not a bad idea, not every traveller writes concisely and not all travel writing ages well.
What is your favourite travel writing? What would you recommend to others?
I read and enjoyed that whole Penguin series. A really good selection. Some were hard to find! I then read many of the books they were excerpted from.
I recommend Richard E. Byrd’s Alone, about his 1934 Antarctic adventure, Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World, about the race to the South Pole, and for more contemporary journeys, any of Michael Palin’s travel books. Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s An African in Greenland is a pretty amazing story.
Years ago, I read a book about an English woman who rode a bicycle across the US solo. It was an interesting read and unfortunately, I don’t remember her name, the title of the book or exactly when she made her trip. It was an interesting read and I wish I could remember something about it and give it another look.
My impression is, he has a good eye for detail and is a compelling storyteller. I am mostly familiar with Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to el-Medinah and Meccah. An old-school adventurer.
I read Charles Darwin’s “The Voyage of the Beagle” not long ago, after my psychiatrist of all people recommended it. We know today how crucial a voyage this was in the history of science, and it’s really well told and written.
Extreme travel. Pete Goss competed in the Vendée Globe, a nonstop, single-handed round-the-world yacht race. Spoiler: He barely survives sailing through a hurricane, then gets radio communication telling him another sailor needs help. He turns around and sails back into the hurricane attempting to save his competitor!
Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts,Between the Woods and the Water, and The Broken Road. The author set out to walk from Rotterdam to Constantinople as a bright, feckless 18-year-old in the 1930s, but he didn’t get around to writing up his adventures until decades later (and still hadn’t finished the last volume when he died at the age of 96 – the last few chapters are taken straight from the diary he kept as a youth). It’s at once the story of a charming kid setting out on his big adventure and (mostly) having the time of his life, and a much more sober reflection on a vanished world; the shadow of the Holocaust and World War II and the Iron Curtain are always looming over the places and people he encounters, and the adult narrator knows it.
Tristram Shandy, from the late 18th century, has a book which consists of travel writing. (Book 7, I believe.) Sterne says something to the effect that a travel writer can be identified as claiming that they know more about a place after a week there than people who have lived there all their lives.
42 years old now, so ‘old-timey’ to some extent (no cell phones or Internet play any role!): Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon (born William Trogdon).
I read Blue Highways when I was 18 and since then I’ve gone over some of the stretches of highway Heat-Moon was on to see how much they have changed. I’ve noticed in particular, that the section of US 101 on the Oregon Coast has become more developed.
