Where shall we go today? For me, there is nothing to rival a quick trip around the world and back through the eyes of a good travel writer. All of these books offer short and sweet escapes to take you away from the here and now, and possibly inspire you on your own epic journey.
Better than Fiction edited by Don George is a well-chosen collection of true travel stories by authors who are better known for their fiction, including Isabel Allende, Alexander McCall Smith, Pico Iyer, as well as lesser-known authors from around the world. An interesting and eclectic mix of stories, often focusing more on the philosophical, meaning-seeking elements of travel than straight travelogues.
Bryce Courtenay states in Getting Travel Dirt Under Your Fingernails that "good travel is returning home a slightly bigger part of everyone and not quite the same person as when you set out."
An especially good illustration of this is A Small World After All by Charles Finch who, by attending the 2010 World Cup in Cape Town, South Africa, manages to meet and learn about most of the 32 nations that have gathered there. He learns that alcohol and a love of sport can transcend most cultural barriers. But when he meets the team from North Korea, a small and strangely inanimate group, it's the lines that can never be crossed that make the deepest impression of all.
A similar but more introspective collection is Open Your Eyes: Extraordinary Experiences in Faraway Places, edited by Jill Davis. Again it features prominent authors (Lois Lowry, Katherine Paterson and others) writing on their travels, but many are childhood or adolescent memoirs of living abroad, of what it means to be foreign and to represent one's home nation to strangers who range from inquisitive to hostile to plain indifferent.
The best of these is Little American Mom, Big French Briefcase by Susie Morgenstern, in which the author writes from her daughter's point of view the effect of living in Nice, immersed in French society, with a loud, confused American mother constantly in tow.
To give modern day travel a bit of perspective, The Adventurer's Handbook: Life Lessons from History's Great Explorers by Mick Conefrey gathers together eclectic tips and tales from mainly 19th and early 20th century explorers.
The book is roughly organized into five sections: Getting Started (planning and raising funds), Getting Going (hazards of climate and environment), Getting Along (the human side of expedition life), Getting There (focusing in depth on the success or failure of six particular expeditions) and Getting Back (the hard job of returning home to fame, poverty, or both).
Delightfully quirky, you can learn how one British explorer managed to fend off an attack of local tribesmen in Bolivia by ordering his soldiers to play the accordion and sing as though "passing a jolly hour in an English pub." Soon the arrows stopped flying and the men were invited into the local village "where cordial relations were quickly established."
Fraud by David Rakoff is a humourous collection of essays loosely based on the author's experiences in different countries, from his unique perspective as a gay Jewish Canadian transplant New Yorker. Probably my favourite is Arise, Ye Wretched of the Earth, the story of Rakoff's idealistic teenaged self spending a summer at an Israeli kibbutz (communal farm) and learning quickly that harvesting the fruits of your labour isn't quite that romantic.
When he and the other boys are sent on a mysterious late-night poultry packing operation, "we greeted the news with that respectful Hemingway Silence of the Y Chromosome." Sadly, Rakoff died recently (2012), so this will be his final collection. If you haven't read his essays and are a fan of David Sedaris, this collection is worth hunting down.
All of these titles and many more are available at your local library. Happy armchair travelling.
A Good Read is a column by Tri-City librarians that is published every Wednesday. Anthea Goffe is a librarian at the Terry Fox Library in Port Coquitlam.
