8 books for travel lovers, perfect to bring in holiday!
Reading and travelling are two activities that could perfectly go together. Furthermore, reading is quite always the favourite pastime of all travellers!
Travelling has always been a beloved argument by writers and novelists, the most of which published unmissable reflections on the subject. Travel books offer undoubtedly a unique perspective on the explored and narrated places by the authors, with uncommon observations to be taken to heart (thanks to their sensitivity to particulars and narrative ability).
A good book is a perfect companion for your travel: it makes you dream, it isn’t intrusive, it stays with you only when you decide to and inspires you to try and live new adventures.
If there is always space for a book in your bag or suitcase, you will appreciate for sure our advices on 8 unmissable travel literature titles.
If you’re planning to leave don’t forget to bring with you a book or an e-book, so you can follow Tiziano Terzani’s advice (one of the most beloved travel writers):
Books are the best travel companions: they talk when you need it, they keep quiet when you want silence.
They keep company without being invasive. They give a lot, asking for nothing
Vip Limousine wishes you good read and have a nice trip!
1 - On the Road, Jack Kerouac
Sal Paradise, a young New Yorker with literary ambitions, meets Dean Moriarty, a guy from the West. Dean just left the reformatory and starts to wander challenging middle-class’ conventions, always searching for intense experiences.
Dean decides to go back to West and Sal joins him; it’s the first of a long series of trips that will imprint a new dimension in Sal’s new life. Dean’s continuous escape has a heroic characteristic and Sal can’t stand to admire him, also when, feverish in Mexico City, is abandoned by Dean, that gets back to the United States.
The afterword is written by Fernanda Pivano.
Kerouac’s narrative style deserve a remarkable attention: it’s rhythmical and spontaneous, agitated, often repetitive and less captivating in the final part; its great evocative power makes more true main characters’ sensations and emotions..
It seems that the American author had recorded what he saw: nature, people, view descriptions.
On the Road is apparently a simple novel, but it contains different interpretations: at the beginning it appears as a travel novel or simply the description of a group of young troublemakers; historically and in literary theory it is a fundamental document in order to understand the Beat Generation and see closely many of its exponents’ way of thinking.
Morally, it could be defined a coming-of-age novel, not for the effective change in their life, but for the increased awareness of life.
There is something in this novel that permanently survive in spite of the years past after its publication, and it is something that hardly will go out of fashion, it is constituting Kerouac’s protagonist: the topic of personal liberty, the decision-making power, the ability to choose, for better of for worse, his own direction, his own journey.
The road is nothing else than the path that each of us choose for ourselves, far from impositions, from the idea of middle-class tranquillity (which today is well disguised, but not dead).
«We gotta go and never stop going ‘till we get there.»
«Where we going, man?»
«I don’t know but we gotta go.»
2 - The run of the hound. From Pittsburgh to Los Angeles on Greyhound, by Alex Roggero
In this book the author tells his trip round the USA; 15.000 km along forgotten streets, chasing or being chased by the "greyhound", the mythic American intercity bus.
In the 1930s and 1940s the company was the favourite American means of transport, and its magnificent Art Deco stations designed by the most famous architects of that age represented in each city, also in the most isolated, the symbol of progress and adventure.
From the dirt roads of the West deserts to the highways wanted by Eisenhower, Greyhound’s buses were the kings of the road. Going back today on the Greyhounds along the old highways, that was the background for the adventures of generations of travellers, means to discover old splendours and small daily miseries.
They are hidden in gas stations with the strangest shapes, appear on the declassified Old Route 66 – mistreated by the advertisers from all around the world, but always the most famous of the old routs of America.
A vibrant, messy, sometimes poetic novel. But it is also true, boiling and seesawing: as a coast to coast trip.
3 - Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer
Chris Mc Candless is an 18 years old young man. His parents Walt and Billy realised the American dream of the self made man: they enriched themselves working a lot and hard.
Once finished the college, Chris has a guaranteed future: 20.000 dollars in his bank account, his parents are ready to support him in any study he wants to dedicate himself and exceptional grades that assure him the access at the most prestigious American Universities.
On the contrary to what is expected from him, Chris donates to charity his savings and starts a trip to Alaska searching for the truth, his truth, not the one that society prepared for him.
During the trip, Chris learns how to get on all right and to be completely autonomous: he obtains season jobs, learns how to move without his own means and to control hunger.
But most of all, gradually, he starts to realise that human solidarity is essential for him to go on in his trip.
(Attention Spoiler!) Unfortunately he wholly understands this last truth when there is nobody to help him and his destiny is already irremediably marked. Chris, in the last stop of his trip, in Alaska, remains without provisions and he has to eat berries and hunted animals to survive. A lethal mistake bring him to eat a toxic root that cause his death.
This novel is based on a true story: the author Jon Krakauer was charged to write an article on the finding of the boy. Krakauer get into the story and decided to write a novel helping himself with the found diary and the testimonies of Chris’ sister and friends that he met during his trip.
Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships.
4 - The Wangs vs. the World, by Jade Chang
Charles Wang emigrated from Taiwan to the USA many years ago and he created a cosmetics empire. He risked a lot of hazardous investments without knowing that one of the biggest economic crisis of our history was getting closer – the one of the 2008, when he lost everything: factories, shops, houses, cars.
But now Wang has a plan: he’ll go to China, where he has never been, and will get back all his family’s lands, confiscated during the revolution.
He has to cross the United States to get together all his Americanised sons: a girl – college student passionate about fashion, a boy – university student that dreams to become a comedian, and arriving in New York, the elder girl – a successful artist in crisis both in her job and in her sentimental life.
This vivid novel on the road – through squalid motels, sweaty and alcoholic wedding parties, too affectionate relatives or stupid and ignorant Americans – allow Jade Chang to cleverly construct a puzzle of short tableaux of the America that is changing, while getting familiar with its most devastating crisis and is going to elect its first African-American president.
A family saga of cultural dis-integration, accompanied by shiny pages that explain the crisis, getting also human pain.
In the unequal fight against everyone, the Wangs, not entirely belonging to no one of the two worlds divided by the Pacific, understand that their different roots allow them to rediscover most of all themselves.
But Wangs’ long travel on the road has just started.
5 - Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed
Wild is, first of all, the real story of a brave woman. The story of a brave woman that lost everything and is afraid, but has the strength to collect the pieces of her life and to put them back together.
After her mother’s premature death, her marriage traumatic shipwreck and a difficult and messy youth, Cheryl, at just 26, ends up with a completely twisted life.
Searching for a sense and for herself, she decides to cross the wild America on foot through mountains, forests, wild animals, arduous rocks, impetuous torrents, scorching hot and extreme cold.
An adventure and coming-of-age novel, talking about escapes and rebirths, about fear and courage. An intense writing, as the story it tells, from which are coming out the strength and the charm of uncontaminated places and the vulnerability of human condition in front of an impressive and powerful nature.
More than the road, the actual centre is the traveller. It doesn’t matter how long did you go or how many times did you risked your life: travel’s purpose is to go beyond your own personal limit, your fear, to prove yourself, thus to come back changed and stronger. Which conquest is better than this?
6 - A Fortune-Teller Told Me, by Tiziano Terzani
In 1976 a Chinese fortune teller adviced Tiziano Terzani, a well-known Italian journalist and writer, news correspondent for the German weekly Der Spiegel and collaborator to the Italian dailies “Repubblica” and “Corriere della Sera”: "Pay attention. In 1993 you’ll run a big risk to die. In that year never take a plane". In 1992 Terzani was tired and doubtful about the sense of his work and in that moment he remembered the prophecy and perceived it as an occasion to look the world with new eyes: he decided not to take planes for a year, not renouncing to travel.
The result of that experience is a book that is together adventure novel, autobiography, travel story and travel report.
It’s the travel topic that marks Terzani’s character and in this book the reader “lives” the described Asia, mostly the change of perspective due to the loss of planes: transfers are not immediate anymore but last long days. There are more encounters, stories, and landscapes that otherwise wouldn’t be seen and so the distance’s worth it. The achievement of the destination has taste of conquest and of complete satisfaction.
It was a wonderful decision and 1993 became one of the most extraordinary years I’ve ever spent: I had to die and I was reborn. It seemed a curse but it was a blessing.
7 - The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
A man and a boy, father and son, without a name. They are pushing a shopping cart, full of the little left along an American street. The end of the journey is invisible.
About 10 years before, the world has been destroyed by a nuclear apocalypse that transformed it in a dark, cold place without life, inhabited by gangs of desperate people and marauders. The is no past and no future.
While the two are moving to the South hoping there is a hotter whether, the father tells his own story to his son. He remembers his wife trying to kill herself instead of becoming victim of the horrors following the nuclear holocaust, and child’s birth during the war.
All their belongings are inside the shopping cart, the food is little and they have to periodically adventure themselves through the ruins, searching for something to eat.
McCarthy’s style is dry but descriptive. He’s telling us what is happening, showing us exactly what it is, not explaining what the characters are feeling nor thinking while doing something.
But behind every single word there is a meaning going far beyond the surface of what we are reading.
Moreover, in this novel McCarthy’s writing appears more poetic. He’s not writing sonnets nor with rhymes, but at some points, in some fragments, McCarthy’s isn’t a “simple” prose.
Being a post apocalyptic novel, the reader may expect a spectacular and engaging plot. The idea is actually the same of the most similar novels: very few people left alive, the surviving are travelling around the world trying to survive and why not, to rebuilt some kind of society.
A self selling story that probably for this reason could cause different expectations from what will actually happen. The development of the story, in fact, can’t be considered an evolution of the initial idea.
It’s nothing else than the continuous repeating of the situations lived by the characters: they are hungry, thirsty, in danger. “The Road” isn’t an action novel, it isn’t a psychological thriller, it isn’t an adventure book: it’s, instead, a novel talking about introspection, significance, depth.
It is a metaphor of surviving: something that is showing us the pure man, the one choosing between what is right and what is needed, still if he has the possibility to choose.
8 - As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
A crazy trip on a unhinged barouche, floods, inflamed barns and hopeful vultures accompanying Addie Bundren’s grotesque funeral.
Around the coffin there are Addie’s husband, her daughter and 4 grandchildren, all pushed by different secrets and hunchbacked in their indescribable destinies. Faulkner wrote this novel (his fifth) just in six weeks: it’s summer 1929, he’s 32 years old, working at night in a power station and has just published his “The Sound and the Fury”.
“As I Lay Dying” represents his technical evolution, where the monologue voices get multiplied in a spiral sequence, becoming then a rare harmony of dissonance.
The apparently simple plot of the story is illustrated in a very complicated way: there isn’t just one narrator, but it changes in each chapter, even if often it comes back in a couple of pages. This expedient gives us the possibility to understand each character’s point of view, even if just in few lines.
