LiteraryTraveler.net

With winter winding to a close, there is no better time to hop in the car, roll down the windows, and enjoy the warm breezes of spring as you venture off to places unknown.  From John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley to Jack Kerouac’s iconic On the Road, literature is ripe with tales of road trips, penned by authors sharing their experiences traveling the country.  With summer fast approaching, isn’t it time to imagine your own cross country adventure?

Over the years I’ve often planned hypothetical road trips for myself, drawing zigzagging lines with a Sharpie across maps of the United States, hopeful to take my own journey one day. But of all the lines I have drawn, my favorite always takes me a southern route from the North East down through Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana. I believe one reason it’s my favorite route is because the South has been so vividly portrayed in literature. From the grandiose to the grotesque, Southern writers from Flannery O’Connor to Margaret Mitchell have painted brilliant portraits of the South in their works.

While I long to witness the natural beauty the South has to offer, see the Mississippi River and experience the splendor of the Louisiana bayou, I am sure even these urges have their root in my experience of Southern literature.  So it only makes sense that on any road trip through the Southern U.S., literary travelers pay homage to the literary greats that lived and wrote there. While New Orleans is well known for its associations with literature, from Tennessee Williams to Truman Capote, the South is brimming with less well-known but equally fascinating ways to connect with literary history.

In Atlanta, Georgia, let the wind take you in the direction of the Margaret Mitchell House and Museum on Peachtree Street.  While it took Mitchell almost a decade to finish the epic Gone with the Wind, you can tour the museum in a couple of hours, viewing her living space and a selection of her letters.  Travel to Atlanta this April 20-22^nd, and receive free admission to the house during the Atlanta Dogwood Festival, an event that draws artists from around the world.

If you take your adventure to Savannah, visit the one-time residence of writer Flannery O’Connor.  While A Good Man is Hard to Find, the author’s childhood home, located on East Charlton Street, is not!  The house where the author resided from 1925-1938 contains some of the original furnishings.  For more O’Connor memorabilia continue on to Georgia College and State University, where there is a room dedicated to the famous alumnus that houses her writing desk and typewriter, among other artifacts including the author’s own personal library of more than 700 titles.

In Mississippi, honor William Faulkner with a visit to his Rowan Oak estate located in Oxford.  Originally built in 1844, the property is now owned by the University of Mississippi and visitors are admitted to view the space where Faulkner lived and worked for over thirty years.  The Oxford, MS Convention & Visitors Bureau offers a more extensive map of “Faulkner Country.” So download one here, and meander at your own pace through the stomping ground of this twentieth century great.

Like John Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley, “we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” The next stop is up to us.

A reader could be forgiven if, just a few chapters into The Most Beautiful Walk in the World, he or she were to lower the book and ask, “Wait: where are the walks?” As it turns out, John Baxter’s loving homage to the charming, winding streets of Paris is not so much a book recommending where to walk, but the je ne sais quoi of the walk. An Australian expatriate who has lived in Paris for 20 years, Baxter’s book brims with the flavors, scents, modern myths, and personal anecdotes of Parisian street culture.

Indeed, the book might well have been titled The Accidental Literary Tour Guide. An aficionado of the literary giants whose close ties to his adoptive city are legendary – among them Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Joyce – Baxter finds himself gently shanghaied into leading literary tours in Paris. Wary of lulling his clients to sleep with dates and names, Baxter quickly realizes that his tourists “didn’t want their Paris. They wanted mine. Plenty of time when they got home to read Flaubert or a history of the French Revolution. What they wanted now was to reach out and touch the living flesh – to devour and be devoured.”

As a result, The Most Beautiful Walk in the World is less a “how to” guidebook and more a thought-provoking stroll with a historian friend. Whether admiring an antique shop’s unique opium pipe, browsing art galleries for a Matisse, walking in the historic footsteps of a serial killer, or drinking absinthe with a trio of Texan ladies on their first excursion outside the U.S., Baxter’s walks are graceful, intimate anecdotes, providing a spectrum of luminous glimpses into the heart of one of the most beautiful and fascinating cities in the world.

Hemingway drinks in the Plaza Del Gastillo, July 1959.

Today’s edition of Key West Friday is going to focus on something very near and dear to my own heart: literary cocktails. More specifically, I want to talk about one of the greatest mixologists of the 20th century—I’m speaking of Ernest Hemingway, of course—and his personal creations.

Though some may think of Hemingway as just another author you had to read in high school, overlooking Hemingway’s massive influence on American culture, masculinity, and writing would be a sorry mistake. Even if we leave aside his incredible literary talents, Hemingway was far more than simply a writer. He was a celebrity before we truly had celebrities; he single-handedly defined a generation in a way that few authors have since. While his perpetually disillusioned anti-heroes certainly played a role in capturing and symbolically creating the post-war American, (Hemingway’s case is, I happen to believe, one of those chicken-or-the-egg issues. Did he simply record what he saw, and capture the disenchanted drifting of many young men, or did his novels contribute to a certain image of the American identity that was beginning to coalesce? I imagine it was a bit of both) his actual person was just as instrumental in the process. He was, according to those that knew him, a force of nature.

He let loose his forceful personality during his time in Key West, where he lived for several years before relocating to Cuba. During this time, Hemingway did little to reel in his natural vivaciousness, and found himself what PBS’s Michael Palin describes as “Hemingway’s wild adventures:”

In a rain-splattered Key West street, he duked it out with Wallace Stevens after the poet had insulted him. In his beloved boat, Pilar, he battled man-sized fish (managing to shoot himself in both legs while trying to gaff one shark). Hemingway belted back drinks at Sloppy Joe’s, a speakeasy that went legal after Prohibition ended. While at his favorite watering hole, he befriended a young journalist named Martha Gellhorn, who traveled with him to Spain to cover the civil war there. Eventually, she would become his third wife.

As Palin makes clear, these episodes were often fueled by alcohol. But what kind of alcohol?

Here we have to turn to another source. According to the wonderful site Codex 99, in 1937, Hemingway created a drink that Charles Barker later included in his book The Gentleman’s Companion. Hemingway called it a “picker-upper” but it went down in history as “Death in the Gulf Stream.” Despite the morose name, the actual mix sounds rather delicious. For those of you interested in celebrating Key West Friday at home, here’s the recipe for Hemingway’s scary little cocktail:

2 oz. Lucas Bols Oude Genever
4 dashes Angostura
1 lime
Add crushed ice to a thin tumbler. Lace the ice with 4 dashes of Angostura and add the juice and crushed peel of 1 lime. Nearly fill the tumbler with Genever.

Of course, you can always go the traditional route and make yourself a mojito, but we think this Death sounds much more impressive. Happy drinking.

Courtesy of Joanne Harris/Leonardo Cendamo Photography

“Publication was never my initial objective,” admits British author Joanne Harris. “I kept writing because I liked it, and on some level I guess I had to do it… but when my first book was published, I was absolutely delighted. And better even than just being published, I was actually read by people,” she told Literary Traveler, laughing.

In case you are unfamiliar with Harris’ work (or deceived by her humble attitude), she is one of the most popular British writers living today. Though her most famous novel may well be Chocolat, which was made even more memorable by the film with Johnny Depp, she has also penned everything from young adult novels (Runemarks) to cookbooks (The French Kitchen).

Along with Bill Bryson, Joanne Harris was invited on board Cunard’s the Queen Mary 2 as part of their Literature & Liners series, where she spoke to the passengers about her two greatest passions: writing and food. After her book signing, we were able to sit down with Harris for a private interview—which we naturally recorded.

In this latest installment of Literary Traveler TV, Joanne Harris talks to our editors about the experience of traveling on such a grand old ship, how she became a writer, and perhaps most interestingly, her thoughts on the intersections between food, travel, and literature. “I think food has always been a popular theme in literature. I’ve been wrongly–but flatteringly—attributed this task of having brought food in fiction into popularity, but it’s not at all true. I think, with it’s link to travel, it’s also one of the most accessible ways to learn about another culture.”

Learn more about Joanne Harris and her literary musings by watching our video interview here. And for more Literary Traveler TV, please check out our YouTube channel.

Courtesy of Cunard

Last summer, your editors at Literary Traveler were lucky enough to cross the Atlantic on the majestic and elegant Queen Mary 2. The week-long Transatlantic cruise offered most everything we overworked writers need—excellent food, plenty of rest and relaxation, and of course, a bit of literary stimulation.

The trip we attended on the grand old liner wasn’t your average cruise. Literary Traveler was invited to attend one of their Cunard Insights enrichment programs, the 2010 Literature and Liners trip, alongside influential authors like Kate Atkinson, John Berendt, Bill Bryson, and Joanne Harris. During our stay, we were able to attend Q&As with the authors, panel discussions, and book signings.

In order to better document the journey, we also brought our camera. To learn more about the Queen Mary 2—including details about its history, the various amenities available onboard, and the surprising attractions that draws thousands of passengers each year—take a look at our video on YouTube. And stay tuned for further details about the author discussions with Bill Bryson and Joanne Harris.

Photo by Kerry Lee

Bali.  It’s beautiful, it’s exotic.  It’s probably your dream honeymoon (or at least mine).  A couple I’m friends with (who are well-traveled) have told me it’s “the most romantic place they’ve ever been.”  But what do we know about Bali, really?  That it’s near Australia.  Or maybe it’s an island.

There’s much more to Bali than you think.  For example, did you know film legend Charlie Chaplin lived there?  Writer Kerry Lee takes us literary travelers into the strange, exquisite world of Bali, which Colin McPhee wrote about in A House in Bali.  Lee’s article explores the music, storytelling and unique mix of people on the island.

Literary Traveler: You mention the women ex-pats of Bali.  Did you feel you fit into their group and the ex-pat community as a whole?

Kerry Lee: The women expats and I came from a pretty similar background, so in that respect I fit into the group.  Same education, same social and economic upbringing, though the women were from Europe, South Africa, as well as the United States.   The similarities ended there, however.  Though they lived in this foreign country, they clung to each other for most of their social life, and didn’t spend a lot of time with native Balinese.  Their children attended international schools, like The Green School.  Because foreigners cannot own property or business in Bali, each of them had married Indonesian men, and then started their various enterprises.  There was also a suggestion of “runaway” about them.  On their own, they had moved halfway around the world and started a whole new life, leaving friends and family behind.  While I am a traveler, it is always good to come home.  I didn’t get this feeling from them.

LT: How do you think a big personality like Charlie Chaplin would’ve fit in when he lived in Bali?

KL: Apparently Charlie was loved in Bali, though the Balinese hadn’t seen his films prior to his visit.  From what I have read, the crowds, especially children, loved him wherever he went.  They thought he was very funny!  An article in the New York Herald on June 12, 1932 said, “There were no mobs making frenzied efforts to see them (Chaplin and brother Syd), no newspaper reporters to ask if they liked this or that, and no cameramen attempting to get intimate portraits.”

Noel Coward was also Chaplin’s traveling companion, and he wrote this verse while they were there:

As I said this morning to Charlie,
There is far too much music in Bali.
And although as a place it’s entrancing,
There is also a thought too much dancing.
It appears that each Balinese native
From the womb to the tomb is creative,
And although the results are quite clever,
There is too much artistic endeavor.

Which leads to your next question …

LT: Bali is also known for its beautiful art, especially its wood carvings and paintings.  Did you immerse yourself in the art of Bali as you did with the music and oral literary tradition?

KL: The most incredible art museum in Bali is the Agung Rai Museum of Art (more commonly referred to as ARMA).  The museum grounds are immense, with perfectly coiffed gardens and in the morning, the museum is virtually empty.  The permanent collection includes works by such well-known artists as Ida Bagus Made, Walter Spies (another interesting story), and many other Indonesian artists.   Balinese art is extraordinarily beautiful and divine, and I spend quite a bit of time at this museum.  With an entrance fee of $2.50, one couldn’t go wrong.

LT: Is Balinese gamelan music visceral?  How did you feel hearing it?

KL: The gamelan is so outside of what music means or sounds like in the West.  Visceral would be a good way to describe it – I felt a little on edge listening to it, because it was impossible to know where the sounds were going. The music was always an accompaniment to a dance, a play, or a puppet show, and was an integral part of the show.   It set up a tension, an edgy anticipation, and always resulted in a surprise, both visual and auditory.

Please continue reading the article Colin McPhee’s Musical Life in Bali.

When the Killing’s Done by T.C. Boyle is a highly anticipated novel for 2011.  But did you know the novel is place-oriented?  In other words, we consider it a “travel” or place-oriented work of fiction.

Boyle’s novel takes place in the North Channel Islands, off the coast of Santa Barbara, California.  The North Channel Islands are considered the US’s Galapagos Islands in regard to its precious, endangered wildlife.  Foreign animal species are brought to the island.  It is Alma, the biologist protagonist, who must kill off these invasive, foreign species who are killing the native species of the Islands.

The novel takes an in-depth look into wildlife preservation of the North Channel Islands.  Biology is at the forefront of the story, including descriptions of the island itself.

We hear When the Killing’s Done is literary fiction and descriptive prose at its best.  Even better, it incorporates a travel/place element.  It’s definitely on my reading list for 2011.  How about you?

Note: When the Killing’s Done is set to release on February 22, 2011.  Order your advance copy today with the Amazon Kindle!

* Here’s a great, LT article on biology entitled Edward Abbey Desert Solitaire in the Pinacate Biosphere Reserve.  Enjoy!

Where did all those travel agents go?  Remember those friendly people who would sell you fabulous tours and excursions?  You would sit down, tell them what you want and voila! … a seven-day cruise to Mexico.  However, certain jobs, like travel agents, are dwindling, since we are our own travel agents with websites such as Orbitz, Expedia and Priceline.

This is just one point made by novelist Douglas Coupland.  His series of 45 tips entitled “A Radical Pessimist’s Guide to the Next 10 Years” was recently published in the Toronto Globe & Mail. The list is definitely radical.  Coupland says it’s all going to get worse, extreme weather patterns will take over, expect less, stupid people will be in charge and the middle class isn’t coming back.  Ouch.  That’s a lot of negativity for the next 10 years.

But he does speak some truths.  And in regard to extreme weather, won’t it be nice to travel to places that have consistent weather?  And what about all those long lost travel agents?  They’ll float into the abyss, never seen or heard from again.

Coupland’s list actually brings up a good point.  How do we stay positive for 2011 and beyond?  In a time of negativity, it’s hard to stay positive.  On the news, all we hear is “the recession is getting worse.”  We’re at a 10 percent unemployment rate.  Job creation seems nonexistent.  Where’s our FDR and where’s our change we were promised?

I once read an article about how the real entrepreneurs come out in tough economic times.  Creativity blossoms.  Hard work wins out.  That’s how I approached a tough 2010 and how I’ll approach 2011 and the next 10 years.  I look back to 2010, an arduous year financially, when I enjoyed literary travels to San Francisco and a luxurious cruise on the Queen Mary 2.  I’m in the final draft of my novel.  I interviewed Joanne Harris, international bestselling author of Chocolat.  And I met Bill Bryson.

And I already expect much more for 2011.  My goals are set much higher, including my financial ones.  Coupland may have his points, but for me, it’s all about positivity.

~ Jennifer, Network Editorial Director

I read a travel book when I was in grad school.  It was about a young, Trinidadian man who traveled to India and wrote horrible things about his native country.  Now what was that book’s name?  Hmmm … Oh yeah.  An Area of Darkness by V.S. Naipaul.  Where can I get it?

Has this happened to you with travel books?  Searching for a long lost book happens to me a lot.  I remember a great travel book from long ago or even my childhood, but I can’t find it anywhere.  It can be a frustrating hunt.  However, Utne.com reports, the search has now come to an end.

Readers can search for long lost books at Abebooks.com, Bookfinder.com or even specialty rare bookstores with websites.  Utne even suggests interlibrary loan, which I used often as a grad student.  Interlibrary loan literally allows libraries to lend books to one another.  It’s pretty awesome, considering us readers now have limitless choices.  If the book exists, you can get it.

So go ahead and find that travel book you loved as a child or in your recent past.  It’s easy, fast and an opportunity to be nostalgic about travel.

When I read, in some travel blog or another, that Amsterdam has one of the most comfortable airports in the world — couches for napping during layovers, 2 Euro showers, stands selling Belgian waffles and peanut-butter-dipped fries — I stopped worrying about finding a hostel over Halloween weekend.  In fact, I wondered why people bothered to book hostels.  Some fellow literary nerds squeed over the possibility of staying overnight in Paris’s Shakespeare and Company Bookstore.  Despite the intensity of my Beauty-and-the-Beast-inspired library fantasies, dozing in a transportation hub took a close second.

So I was disappointed by the metal seats, the florescent lights, the loudspeaker announcements every five minutes, and, after 4:00 a.m., the airport guards who explained that, if I continued to occupy more than one seat, I could be charged with vagrancy.  In my youthful folly (ah, to be 19 again), I’d missed a crucial detail: the perks of air travel were limited to ticketholders.

This experience hasn’t diminished my dreams of airport occupation, though.  When there’s a weather emergency, or when I watch Independence Day for the millionth time, I remember Jeff, who confessed, during an Agnostic Club meeting in college, that he went to airports on Thanksgiving to people-watch, to imagine himself in their families, their communities.

Everyone traveling by airplane is in a state of transition in the terminal, separated from most of their possessions, acquaintances, and surroundings.  Unless they’re hiding out in the Red Carpet Club, they’re subject to the same sterilized, scrutinized, Starbucks-packed otherworld that I am.

Alain de Botton, a French philosophy student gone culture critic, knows what I’m talking about.  He chronicles the week he spent in London’s Heathrow Airport in his creatively-titled A Week At The Airport.  As the airport’s Writer-in-Residence, he had unfettered access to air traffic control towers, baggage handlers, and, yes, the first-class lounge.  Critics are calling it an essay collection, a meditation on a non-place.

I’m calling it the cheapest route to an extensive stay in one of my favorite places.

Literary Traveler always benefits from the addition of new voices.  Today, we are excited to welcome Elisha Adey to our community.  Elisha is an experienced traveler – she has backpacked all over Europe and Australia – currently living in Austin, Texas.  She is also the founder of the website SoulSpeakOut.org.  In our first post, Elisha takes us to the back roads of Australia, where she learns about pushing her boundaries and herself through adventurous travel and guided meditation.

After a 24 hour bus-ride to a foreign place, there’s nothing more comforting than being greeted by a smiling local in a mud-spattered jeep.

My traveling partner and I spent our first day in Hervey Bay, Australia driving around with our couch-surfing host, Jamie, visiting his favorite coffee shops and swamps. Earlier, he had described the swamps with such enthusiasm that now we didn’t feel like we could grimace at the smell of the green muck creeping into our flip-flops. He pointed out highly venomous spiders everywhere.  When we asked him if he checked his shoes before putting them on, Jamie laughed and said, “Of course not, you can’t live in fear.” So when a green ant bit my foot I desperately tried to hide my exaggerated, American fear of Australian wild-life and resisted the urge to fall down and grab my throbbing toe.

By the time evening came along, pretty much every word out of his mouth fascinated us. Sitting on his couch that night he told us about his experiences with Vipassana meditation. He learned about Vispassana meditation in a 10-day focused course, which he described as the most powerful and trying time of his life. The silent meditation connected him to his body and mind in a way he’d never experienced. On day 6, the meditation had brought up childhood trauma. He said it felt like his arms were being beaten with baseball bats while he sat there with his eyes and body closed.

Fascinated with the potential for a better understanding of ourselves, we signed up for the Vipassana course as soon as we got home, convinced that we’d tapped into something life-changing. Sitting in Jamie’s living room, we contemplated the unspoken formalities that come along with spending the night on someone’s couch for free (doing the dishes, cooking dinner, replacing food in the fridge) but they all seemed to fall short. He had given us a gift bigger than his space, more important than his time.  A couple of months later, after we’d both completed the meditation course, we sent him a message letting him know he’d introduced us to something life changing. He responded simply, “Pass it on.”

As I’m sure everyone has heard, Eat, Pray, Love hits theaters this Friday.  In case there is anyone unfamiliar with this cultural phenomenon, Eat, Pray, Love follows the protagonist, played by the always gorgeous Julia Roberts, as she travels around Italy, India, and Bali.  She starts a “no carb left behind” project, she consumes copious amounts of delicious pasta, she learns to pray and discover herself in India, and she finally finds love in Bali.  But here’s the thing: Julia Roberts isn’t playing some random character – she’s playing a real woman.

The woman in question is author Elizabeth Gilbert, who penned the 2006 memoir/travel narrative/food porn extravaganza that quickly became a best seller.  The book has inspired numerous readers to search within themselves for a deeper strength, and to reexamine their lives, looking closely at what makes them truly happy.

Gilbert starts the book – and the movie – unhappy.  She has just gone through a messy affair and a subsequent divorce.  She’s educated and wealthy, but she is just not satisfied.  Something, an elusive something, is missing from her life.  This realization prompts her to drop everything and begin traveling.  She is lucky enough to have the funds to undertake a project many of us can only dream of, but her story is still relatable.  Gilbert is lacking something, and through risking everything, she finds what she needed the most: herself.

In honor of the movie’s release, I’d like to suggest we all take a moment and think about what it is that makes us truly happy.  For some people, it’s the thrill of travel, or the calm of mediation.  For others, it’s creamy, indulgent pasta or freshly made sausage.  For me, it’s fresh basil, old cotton t-shirts, used books, and red wine.  What makes you feel blessed?

Our newest feature article takes us somewhere hot, somewhere new, somewhere a little bit dirty and a little bit dangerous: the back roads of Bolivia.

Author Stephen Eisenhammer decides to follow the trail of his personal hero, Che Guevara, who was captured and executed in the South American country.  Like Eisenhammer, Guevara was a man of letters, and took pleasure in documenting his journey.  With Che’s Bolivian Diaries in tow, Eisenhammer sets out on a pilgrimage to discover something new about the revolutionary figure.

It’s always a funny thing when we go chasing after heroes, and Eisenhammer’s trip is no exception.  In recent years, Che has become even more of an international figure, what with the films and books and preponderance of red screenprinted t-shirts.  Che has entered our consciousness as a man of uncompromising ideals and reckless bravery.  However, as it often happens, the myth has obscured the man.

The man was more than just a ruthless general: he was also a lover of poetry.  Che particularly enjoyed the works of Chilean writer Pablo Neruda.  While there are certain ideological similarities between the two men, I like to imagine that Guevara turned to Neruda for refuge from war.  I imagine him paging through the tender love poems, the odes to women loved and lost.  In my mind, this gives a softer edge to the Marxist hero.  Instead of seeing a general, a great fighter and a fearful opponent, I imagine a bearded figure, quietly drunk on words of love.  His appreciation for the written word adds another cast to Che – and it may be the reason he is so beloved by intellectuals everywhere, despite his bloody past.

If you, like me, are curious as to what Eisenhammer learns about his hero, you will have to check out the full article, On The Bolivian Trial of Che Guevara, A Literary Guerrilla.  And when you’re done, spend some time perusing our other articles on Che’s favorite poet: Pablo Neruda.

Back in the glory days, Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” I disagree, unless “we” are identified as that ultimately solipsistic portion of the population that cannot feel engaged in life without constructing narratives. “We” need stories in order to process experience, to cope, to understand, to consolidate stray stimuli into graspable themes and get on with our lives. You’re one of “us” if your psychologist tells you to get out of your head. I’m happy to be placed in almost any grouping that places me alongside ole Joan, but I don’t delude myself: “we” are not everyone.

The nice thing about living in your head is that is makes books an extremely low-budget form of escapist travel. You could go the route of travel narratives, but that’s taking it a bit literally, and we favor the abstract. Period pieces can do the trick – they construct a complete, comprehensible reality. Or we can read books that take you out of your own angsty head, and visit someone who occupies a similar psychological space.

With this in mind, I’ve cast my eye on Melissa Milgram’s Still Life, Zachary German’s Eat When You Feel Sad, and a collection of J.G. Ballard’s short stories.

The narrator of Still Life began investigating the phenomenon of taxidermy from a journalist’s perspective, and ultimately ends up with her subjective hand all up in a drowned squirrel. A narrator who struggles with boundaries, who cannot feign distance between self and subject, is just the kind of head I can crawl into.

Likewise, German’s Eat When You Feel Sad chronicles that habituated loneliness that characterizes the life of a twenty-something. (Cough). Never mind that I’m totally bitter that this author has co-opted his ennui into a book deal even before he’s experienced its ambition-eroding properties full-force. Still, a stray paragraph from him novel proves that there is a mind – an entire population of adultolescents minds, I imagine – going through the same aimless motions, hoping a friend will connect to gchat, tossing away poignant, but predictable, independent clauses.

One’s twenties, in my experience, are a period of disappointment. This sense of disappointment is, no doubt, tied to delusions of grandeur, just as depression can be linked to narcissism. Woe is me, me, me, and I am the entire world.

Science fiction has explored this trope of speck-like human subjectivity, counterposed to a sublime, immense universe. Not to get too meta or self-contradictory, but I’m not sure if this is a bad thing. If we can acknowledge our speck-like perspective and use it as a means of appropriating some universal narrative, then we’re getting somewhere, even if it’s just more psychological wilderness.

Ballard’s Enormous Room is about a man whose refusal to leave a suburban house limits his perspective until he believes it is the universe. But this delusion of grandeur, this bloated perception, transforms the banal topography of the living room into a strange, new world, and the reader is awestruck, and temporary expanded, by the narrator’s lunatic explorations of his kitchen.

To the kitchen, then. I’m feeling sad.

The relationship between book and the physical world is one of equal exchange and opportunity.  Often we take to the written world to better understand things in the physical world, but just as often we take to the outside world to better understand what we have read.  Though some books are enjoyed purely for entertainment, many others instruct us, broaden our horizons, and open our minds (much like travel).  To put it more simply: We learn to read, we read to learn.

Reading, like travel, can also occasionally be a confusing activity.  It challenges us to view different points of view, to absorb new ways of thinking.  In this week’s feature article, Sabil of Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo, Egypt, author Robin Graham engages in both kinds of learning.  In my (literature major-informed) opinion, Graham approaches the work of Mahfouz in the best possible way: he both reads to learn about Cairo, and visits Cairo to learn about what he has read.

It doesn’t help that Cairo is not a simple city.  Like much of the Middle East and Africa, Cairo is beset with conflict.  Understanding this conflict, and the complicated intersections of Islam, tourism, and terrorism that go on throughout the city, is no easy task.

Viewing Cairo through the lens of Naguib Mahfouz, author of the Cairo Trilogy, Graham remarks that the Islamic city is a “changed world.”  Coming to Cairo, he is able to see that Mahfouz’s works carried an underlying “dark prescience that eventually cast its shadow into real life.”  Cairo is, through all the political turmoil and social change, a city of uncertainties.

Yet uncertainties are what make for some of the best reading – and the best thinking.  We invite you to take a moment on this lazy Sunday to broaden your horizons by reading Sabil of Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo, Egypt.  It may require a moment of reflection (or two) but we promise you will learn something, because even an expert in foreign relations can glean something from stepping into another’s shoes and walking the busy streets.

When people talk about travel writers, many names come to mind, from Bill Bryson to Marco Polo. One name that does not often pop up is Michael Crichton, most famous for his science and medical fiction thrillers. Crichton’s fiction, though often grounded in technology or medical breakthroughs, involves reality-bending adventures such as dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, time travel in Timeline, and aliens in Sphere. But Crichton also wrote a non-fiction adventure story: his 1988 book Travels, which details his travel to Los Angeles after leaving Harvard Medical School.

The book recounts his early writing career and his subsequent travels across the globe. From the heights of Kilimanjaro and the Mayan pyramids, to the depths of the shark-filled waters of Tahiti, Crichton uses his copious talent for gripping narratives to recount the personal adventures of a man seeking new experiences. Crichton’s writing chronicles his inner travels as well, focusing on forays into mysticism, exorcism, channeling, and psychic events.

Though travel writing may seem like a unique and specialized genre, many authors well known in other genres have published their own travel accounts. At it’s core, travel writing is the art of communicating one’s experience of the world. Michael Crichton is just one of these “hidden travel writers,” who used his flair for the thrilling, dramatic, and other-worldly to translate his physical and mental journeys into engaging prose.

(Michael Crichton, Travels. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.)

Chuck Klosterman is an American humorist, best known for writing on rock music and pop culture. But did you know that he is also a travel writer? In his book, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story, Klosterman traces across the United States, visiting the sites where famous rock and roll artists died. Much of the book focuses on his relationship with three women in his life, and his writing is often in the same high-speed, ranting, colorful style as his earlier works such as Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low-Culture Manifesto. But at its heart, Killing Yourself to Live is a road story, following the classic American structure of a man with existential questions searching for answers on the open highway. And while Klosterman includes many fictional elements, the theme of music’s “death sites” lends itself well to travel writing. The impact of music, like the sense of a physical place, can be hard to translate into words. Klosterman’s writing isn’t explicitly interested in travel, but he clearly understands the link between place and sound, how a few details can stick in the mind and conjure up an entire experience. Klosterman uses the limitations of one to convey the other: listing off band names to convey the cooler-than-thou attitude of Manhattan, or capturing the hopeless boredom of a late night drive by describing the changing songs on the radio.