BOOKS

Travel books range in style from the documentary to the evocative, from literary to journalistic, and from the humorous to the serious. They are often associated with tourism and include guide books, meant to educate the reader about destinations, provide advice for visits, and inspire readers to travel.

 

Travel writing may be found on web sites, in periodicals, and in books. It has been produced by a variety of writers, such as travelers, military officers, missionaries, explorers, scientists, pilgrims, social and physical scientists, educators, and migrants. Englishman Eric Newby, the Americans Bill Bryson, William Least Heat-Moon, and Paul Theroux, and Welsh author Jan Morris are or were widely acclaimed as travel writers, although Morris is also an historian and Theroux a novelist.

 

Travel literature often intersects with essay writing, as in V. S. Naipaul's India: A Wounded Civilization (1976), whose trip became the occasion for extended observations on a nation and people. This is similarly the case in Rebecca West's work on Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941).

 

Sometimes a writer will settle into a locality for an extended period, absorbing a sense of place while continuing to observe with a travel writer's sensibility. Examples of such writings include Lawrence Durrell's Bitter Lemons (1957), Deborah Tall's The Island of the White Cow (1986), and Peter Mayle's best-selling A Year in Provence (1989) and its sequels.

 

THE CREATIVE REALM'S RECOMMENDED TRAVEL BOOKS

 

1. Eric Weiner - A Geography Of Genius 
2. Ben Judah - This Is London 
3. Aaron Lauritsen - 100 Days Drive 
4. Peter Hessler - Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory
5. Adam Skolnick - One Breath: Freediving, Death, and the Quest to Shatter Human Limits