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T H I S+W E E K >Favorite travel books
Two Towns in Provence
Natural Opium
The Snow Leopard
Roughing It
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Readers' Tips and Tales
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Tuesday, July 1 American Byways
A full list of all
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favorite travel books
BY DON GEORGE | mindful of your summer reading pleasure, this week's Wanderlust asked four of our favorite readers -- Peter Mayle, Dwight Garner, Amanda Jones and Lynn Ferrin -- to write about their favorite travel books. Our goal was to put together an eclectic list of titles for you to take and read under rustling palm fronds, to the swish of the salt-scented sea. But if you're reading under your living room lamp, to the whir of the air-conditioner, that's all right too. Either way, we hope these books entice and transport you. Every August I chair a four-day conference for travel writers in Marin County, and as part of my duties I teach a workshop every morning. During the course of this workshop I am invariably asked the same question we posed: "Who is your favorite travel writer?" And so through the years I have had the extremely difficult and pleasurable task of trying to figure out just who my favorite travel writer is, and why. What I look for in travel writing is the four Ps: sense of place, person, passion and perspective. Great travel writing has to transport you to wherever the writer is, has to bring it to life all around you -- its sounds, tastes, textures and scents as well as its appearance. Often it will bring some of the people in that place to life too, with dialogue and description. But beyond these, great travel writing must also be informed with passion and perspective, must get beneath the surface of the place to touch and reveal its spirit and soul. Such writing must intimately and profoundly involve the writer, must record the writer's own engagement with a place. The writer must grapple with it, get inside it and then reflect on that encounter, put it all in some kind of larger perspective -- so that we come away from the work with an enhanced sense of both who we are and what our planet is really all about. Happily, the travel literature of the past quarter-century is rich with writers who have accomplished this, and so narrowing an answer down to just one writer has always seemed impossible to me. But I have come up with a pantheon of six writers and six works that I love and learn from with each rereading: "The Snow Leopard," by Peter Matthiessen: If I had to choose just one book to recommend, this would be it. But since Amanda Jones writes eloquently about it elsewhere in this issue, I'll just add a few words. I read this book 18 years ago, at a critical juncture in my life, when I was trying to decide whether to continue the very comfortable existence I had built up in Japan or return to a United States that was rapidly becoming more and more foreign to me. Matthiessen's brave, wise/foolish, searingly honest and startlingly evocative, learned and meditative account of his seemingly fruitless and ultimately fruitful odyssey to see a snow leopard in the Himalayas gave me the courage to make an almost paralyzing leap in my own life. This book overflows with wisdom and pain, doubt and wonder, and Matthiessen explores and describes with exhilarating precision and insight both himself and the world of mountains and monasteries through which he is traveling. "Coming Into the Country," by John McPhee: I like to pair "Coming Into the Country" with "The Snow Leopard" because both books are about long, arduous explorations of big, wild, alluring places -- but the authors employ strikingly different means to tell their tales. McPhee is not a meditative writer in the way that Matthiessen is. His art is to portray a place in exhaustive detail -- jigsawing landscape, history, reportage, dialogue, portraiture and narrative into an astonishingly complex, beautifully clean-fitting picture puzzle of the place. His eyes and ears are sharp, his research and knowledge are staggering, his language is exact and lean, and he is able to bring a scene to life without intruding on it himself. And yet his prose is infused with a love for his subject that compels the reader to feel an equally impassioned concern for the land and its people. "In Patagonia," by Bruce Chatwin: I like this book for its dialogue, its characterizations and its daring, mesmerizing, disjointed style. Chatwin doesn't write a smooth chronological narrative, but rather creates a kind of cubist portrait of his travels, composed of extremely short chapters that mix snatches of history, encounters with locals and renditions of their tales and Chatwin's own observations and reflections. The result is a remarkably fresh re-creation of his journey and his own encounter with Patagonia. "The Great Railway Bazaar," by Paul Theroux: Although he has written more novels than works of travel narrative, Theroux is probably America's most famous travel writer. This book was his first travel work, and it has an engaging rawness and enthusiasm to it, as well as Theroux's trademark delight in discomfort, sense of irony and humor, reveling in oddness and an extraordinary ability to capture people, conversations and places with a few telling details. In his later works Theroux becomes a jaded narrator, but in this book he is still an exuberant traveler, and his enthusiasms and ironies mingle in a deeply entertaining -- and enlightening -- way. "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," by Annie Dillard: Dillard is never thought of as a travel writer, but I think this meditation on and description of the area in Virginia where she lived for several years is an exemplary evocation of a place. What I particularly admire about Dillard is her ability to focus intensely on something small -- a square-foot patch of creek and bank, let's say -- and bring its minute details to sprawling life. This is triumph enough, but then she magically spins away from that toward the opposite end of the scale, linking the intricate world she has just described to the way life forms evolve around the planet, or some fundamental principle of the universe. Dillard constantly reveals things in a new light, illuminating connections I had never thought about before. "Journeys," by Jan Morris: Morris is my favorite travel writer, and any one of her books is worth reading. I chose "Journeys" for this list because it's a slim volume and easily accessible, and because it presents all the qualities I love in Morris' work: her easy, seductive voice; the inimitable music of her prose; her profound delight in the It would be easy to name another half dozen, of course, but these six will get you off to a great start. What they all share is a hungry curiosity about the world, and an ability to reveal that world through small details -- a gesture, a fragment of speech, a closely observed corner. We'd love to know your favorite books, too: Please share your literary discoveries in the Wanderlust section of Table Talk. And in the meantime, happy summer travels -- armchair and otherwise!
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surprises and edges of the world; her encyclopedic learning and her ability to effortlessly blend past and present, endowing history with resonance and personality and making insightful points about the fundamental characters of people and places without our even realizing it.
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