Favorite travel writing
Discover the best travel writing books with our curated list of favorites. Explore captivating journeys, cultures, and adventures through top-rated travel literature.
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ID: 0719567262
(Type: books)
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Holy Cow
by Sarah Macdonald
In her twenties, journalist Sarah Macdonald backpacked around India and came away with a lasting impression of heat, pollution and poverty. So when an airport beggar read her palm and told her she would return to India—and for love—she screamed, “Never!” and gave the country, and him, the finger. But eleven years later, the prophecy comes true. When the love of Sarah’s life is posted to India, she quits her dream job to move to the most polluted city on earth, New Delhi. For Sarah this seems like the ultimate sacrifice for love, and it almost kills her, literally. Just settled, she falls dangerously ill with double pneumonia, an experience that compels her to face some serious questions about her own fragile mortality and inner spiritual void. “I must find peace in the only place possible in India,” she concludes. “Within.” Thus begins her journey of discovery through India in search of the meaning of life and death. Holy Cow is Macdonald’s often hilarious chronicle of her adventures in a land of chaos and contradiction, of encounters with Hinduism, Islam and Jainism, Sufis, Sikhs, Parsis and Christians and a kaleidoscope of yogis, swamis and Bollywood stars. From spiritual retreats and crumbling nirvanas to war zones and New Delhi nightclubs, it is a journey that only a woman on a mission to save her soul, her love life—and her sanity—can survive.
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ID: 0312424191
(Type: books)
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Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals
by Wendy Dale
From salsa dancing in a rum-induced haze and struggling to exercise in Colombia (“the guerillas were using the track again today”), to crossing international borders unconventionally and dodging bombs in Lebanon (“the good news was that they were ‘small bombs’”), Wendy somehow manages to find herself in the midst of hysterical, adventurous, and often illegal situations. Case in point—every time she heads to Costa Rica, she is forced to visit another prison. Although a jail may not be everyone’s idea of a place to ?nd a date, Wendy soon falls in love with a man, a country, and its people and risks everything she has to clear his name. Avoiding Prison and Other Noble Vacation Goals is a bumpy and hilarious ride in which Wendy discovers that a successful vacation—much like that elusive thing, happiness—can be found in some of the most unlikely places imaginable.
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ID: 0452267455
(Type: books)
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ID: 0767921992
(Type: books)
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River Town
by Peter Hessler
A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the Kiriyama Book Prize In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking the first time in more than half a century that the city had an American resident. Hessler taught English and American literature at the local college, but it was his students who taught him about the complex processes of understanding that take place when one is immersed in a radically different society. Poignant, thoughtful, funny, and enormously compelling, River Town is an unforgettable portrait of a city that is seeking to understand both what it was and what it someday will be.
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In a Sunburned Country
by Bill Bryson
Every time Bill Bryson walks out the door, memorable travel literature threatens to break out. This time in Australia. His previous excursion along the Appalachian Trail resulted in the sublime national bestseller A Walk in the Woods. In A Sunburned Country is his report on what he found in an entirely different place: Australia, the country that doubles as a continent, and a place with the friendliest inhabitants, the hottest, driest weather, and the most peculiar and lethal wildlife to be found on the planet. The result is a deliciously funny, fact-filled, and adventurous performance by a writer who combines humor, wonder, and unflagging curiousity. Despite the fact that Australia harbors more things that can kill you in extremely nasty ways than anywhere else, including sharks, crocodiles, snakes, even riptides and deserts, Bill Bryson adores the place, and he takes his readers on a rollicking ride far beyond that beaten tourist path. Wherever he goes he finds Australians who are cheerful, extroverted, and unfailingly obliging, and these beaming products of land with clean, safe cities, cold beer, and constant sunshine fill the pages of this wonderful book. Australia is an immense and fortunate land, and it has found in Bill Bryson its perfect guide.
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I'm a Stranger Here Myself
by Bill Bryson
A classic from the New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body. After living in Britain for two decades, Bill Bryson recently moved back to the United States with his English wife and four children (he had read somewhere that nearly 3 million Americans believed they had been abducted by aliens—as he later put it, "it was clear my people needed me"). They were greeted by a new and improved America that boasts microwave pancakes, twenty-four-hour dental-floss hotlines, and the staunch conviction that ice is not a luxury item. Delivering the brilliant comic musings that are a Bryson hallmark, I'm a Stranger Here Myself recounts his sometimes disconcerting reunion with the land of his birth. The result is a book filled with hysterical scenes of one man's attempt to reacquaint himself with his own country, but it is also an extended if at times bemused love letter to the homeland he has returned to after twenty years away.
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Bitter Lemons of Cyprus
by Lawrence Durrell
'He writes as an artist, as well as a poet; he remembers colour and landscape and the nuances of peasant conversation. Eschewing politics, it says more about them than all our leading articles. In describing a political tragedy it often has great poetic beauty.'
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ID: 0879516712
(Type: books)