Armchair Travel

29 Oct 1997 12:11

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I like travelling, but in some ways I like reading about travel even more: I can fit it into my salary, for one thing, and for another it's sometimes fun to read about travelling to places I'd never really want to go, like Antarctica.

Recommended:
• Evan S. Connell
  • A Long Desire
  • The White Lantern
• Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey and Maturin novels are (among many other things) quite excellent travelogues for the early years of the 19th century.
• Aurel Stein, On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks: Brief Narrative of Three Expeditions in Innermost Asia and Northwestern China [Review]
• John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan

To read:
• Tommaso Astarita, Between Salt Water and Holy Water
• Brian Fagan (ed.), From Stonehenge to Samarkand: An Anthology of Archaeological Travel Writing
• Goetzmann, New Lands, New Men
• P. J.Griffiths, Great Journeys
• Hsu, The Mediterranean Was a Desert
• Mark Jacobson, 12,000 Miles in the Nick of Time: A Semi-Dysfunctional Family Circumnavigates the Globe
• Kirch, Music in Every Room
• Jean Malaurie, Ultima Thule: Explorers and Natives in the Polar North
• Robert McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World [Blurb]
• Jeannette Mirsky, To the Arctic! The Story of Northern Exploration from Earliest Times
• Mirsky, Great Chinese Travelers
• Alan Moorehead, The Blue Nile
• Karin Muller
  • Along the Inca Road
  • Hitchhiking Vietnam
• Dervia Murphy, The Ukimwi Road: From Kenya to Zimbabwe
• Ruth Padel, Tigers in Red Weather: A Quest to See the Last Wild Tigers
• Michael Palin, Pole to Pole: North to South by Camel, River Raft and Balloon
• Francine Prose, Sicilian Odyssey
• Jill Schneider, Route 66 Across New Mexico
• Tim Severin, The China Voyage: Across the Pacific by Bamboo Raft
• Tahir Shah
  • In Search King Solomon's Mines
  • Trail of Feathers: In Searcfh of the Birdmen of Peru
• Jean Bowie Shor, After You, Marco Polo
• Rebecca Sonit, A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland
• Strassberg, Inscribed Landscapes (imp. Han trav. writing)
• Janet Wallach, Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell [Yet Another Victorian Eccentric]
• Sara Wheeler, The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle [Review by Jessa Crispin, which captures nicely some of the pleasures of armchair travel reading]
• Rogers E. M. Whitaker, All Aboard with E. M. Frimbo: World's Greatest Railroad Buff