I go through stages when I read more or less than usual. Sometimes I might have a book on the go for a few weeks, other times I’ll start and finish it in just days, often holding the book with one hand while I cook and eat my dinner with the other. Living alone with limited internet access and a schedule of split shifts that makes me want to go to bed in the afternoon has left me plenty of time to read in the last few months. I’ve discovered some great books and authors lately and thought I’d share them with you in case you’re looking for some inspiration.
Paul Theroux
An excited discussion about books and travel with some lovely ladies on Twitter led to the creation of #travelbookclub – we choose a book, read it and then discuss it on Twitter at the end of the month. When choosing our first book, Rachel from Vagabond Baking had just started reading Theroux’s Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and suggested we join in. About 10 pages in I wondered how I could call myself a lover of books and travel and trains without ever having read Theroux. He’s a great believer of the journey being the focus over the destination. Ghost Train to the Eastern Star retraces a train journey from London to Japan he had made 30 years ago (told in The Great Railway Bazaar). Theroux, who writes his notes daily while travelling, has an amazing eye for detail and a skill for capturing fascinating nuggets of information. Last week I finished The Old Patagonian Express, in which he travelled (again mostly by train) from Boston in the United States to Patagonia, the very tip of South America. He is unforgiving in his descriptions of places and people and one of my greatest fears is meeting him on the road. I wonder what he’d say about me…
A Small Place in Italy
Eric Newby
Another travel writing great I hadn’t heard of until #travelbookclub. Newby’s job is travel writing, but this book isn’t about any trip he took. It’s about his holiday home of 25 years in Italy. I struggle to understand the desire to return to the same destination every holiday for 25 years, but this book could sway me. Eric and his wife, Wanda, bought the run-down, cockroach-infested villa on the Tuscan border in 1967. It became not just a second house, but a second home. Newby recounts their renovation efforts, Italian red-tape and the characters that were their neighbours and friends. If you don’t want to buy an old house in Italy by the time you’ve turned the last page, well…actually, there’s no question because you will.
Chile: Travels in a Thin Country
Sara Wheeler
Many people tell me I’m adventurous in the way I travel (solo, CouchSurfing etc), but I’m well aware that in the scheme of things, my travels are tame. This book was another reminder. A stranger tells Sara she should write a book about Chile, so off she goes. She explores from top to bottom, hitchhiking with Bolivian truckers, camping on remote islands, and passionately throwing herself into the people and the culture. While I sometimes don’t enjoy female authors because I find, like female comedians who fill their show with jobs about boobs and periods, that they let their gender cloud everything else. That wasn’t the case here. Wheeler, like Theroux, is very skilled at combining travel anecdotes and personal experience, with history and facts. I loved not only her writing, but also her insatiable curiosity and adventurous spirit. This book made me want to challenge myself further as a traveller.
Red Tape and White Knuckles
Lois Pryce
I have to say upfront that I hated this book. I can’t remember ever struggling with a book this much. It was a #travelbookclub selection and I had to set myself a goal of reading a certain number of pages each day just to get to the end. But I feel I should tell you about it because everyone else in #travelbookclub loved it. So perhaps it’s just me. Pryce rides her motorbike through Africa, starting in England, down through France and into Tunisia and then all the way to Cape Town. It is an incredible journey – there is no denying that. It’s just a crap book. The writing is long-winded and amateur and the book focuses far too much on the author and not enough on the world around her. It was just too self-indulgent. More time was spent telling us what she was eating, how she was sleeping, that she was wearing the same clothes and couldn’t wash her hair instead of about the people and places she was riding through. It was made worse by several declarations of how travelling by bike made her feel more in touch with her surroundings, compared to being locked in a car. But that connection never came through. But as I said, everyone else in #travelbookclub enjoyed it.
Never Cry Wolf
Farley Mowat
A couple of weeks ago I found a memo saved in my phone: “Farley Mowat”. Many months ago a friend had suggested the Canadian author to me and I hadn’t given it another thought. I asked him the other week which books I should read and he said that although he hadn’t read it himself, Never Cry Wolf was apparently fantastic. I ordered it. I opened it. I couldn’t put it down. This was one of those books I kept reading while eating and even brushing my teeth. In Mowat’s early days as a naturalist he was sent on assignment to the Artic and spent two summers and a winter studying wolves. Never Cry Wolf is funny, educational and a reminder of how blind (ignorant?) humans can be to the effect we have on the world. I admired how Mowat kept the wolves (George, Angeline, Uncle Albert and the pups) at the heart of the book when so many writers would have launched into dramatic monologues about how stranded they felt at being dumped in the Artic with no communication to the rest of the world. This book was amazing.
Coming up
I have a few books on loan that need to go back to their owners before I leave the UK so my reading list is pretty busy for the next few weeks.
First up is Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands. A few months ago I read Sand Dance by Canadian adventurer Bruce Kirkby. Kirkby’s journey was inspired by Thesiger’s travels in Arabia in the late 1940s. There’s nothing like reading the original, but my copy isn’t mine, so I have to finish it before I leave.
Another borrowed book is Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari – as if I wasn’t already desperate to visit Africa. In case you can’t tell, I’m loving his work. This time Theroux travels from Egypt to Cape Town in Africa. The book is quite big so I’ll take it away to Ireland next week. Hopefully a week away will be long enough to knock it over so I can give this copy back. I’m sure it’s missed.
When I discover a new author I enjoy I immediately want to read everything they’ve ever written. So after devouring Never Cry Wolf, I’m excited for Farley Mowat’s Sibir as I’m also eager to explore Siberia. I got a teeny taste in Eric Newby’s Big Red Train Ride, but I can’t wait to read Mowat’s work again. He’s so entertaining. The copy I have is small, but also has small writing so that means it will be easy to carry and take a while to read so with that in mind, I’m saving it to take away with me to Serbia at the end of August.
Other than those I’ll also be filling in my days with some Agatha Christie’s as I plan to visit her grave just before I leave the UK.
