Some books I’ve written about in this series are expressly about travel. But others aren’t specifically about a journey, but nevertheless fueled my travel imagination. These are the books I read and responded with “I want to go there” or “I want to live like he does.”
By the way, if you’re interested in other books I’ve enjoyed, check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series.
Hammond World Atlas
When I was twelve, a friend of mine named Ed Dimendberg who lived in Queens, New York came to visit me in Ohio. He brought with him a Hammond World Atlas. It was a great gift. After a year or two, I ranked it as one of my most treasured possessions. I still do. I spent hundreds of hours pouring over the pastel colored maps, the strange names, the contours of countries and continents. My strongest reaction was to look at its maps, put my finger down on them, and say to myself, “When I am older, I will go there.”
It appears that Hammond is no longer coming out with new editions of this book. That’s a shame. So I have substituted a modern atlas by a different publisher.
Why, in the age of Google, would anyone want a heavy dead-tree atlas? Because it facilitates serendipity. It encourages curiosity. Its very heft and tactility inspired dreams. Sure, it’s easier to go online to find directions from A to B. But if you want to decide what and where B really is, there is no substitute for idly, randomly turning the pages of a big-ass book.
The Bad Girl
Mario Vargas Llosa
This book, like Love in the Time of Cholera, is about a South American man’s lifelong and substantially unrequited love for a woman. But while Love in the Time of Cholera takes place almost exclusively in Cartagena, Colombia, The Bad Girl takes place in Lima, Paris, London, and Toyko, with side trips to other countries. The protagonist is a UNESCO translator, a mild-mannered sort whose very job requires that he submerge his own thoughts and personality so that he can express the thoughts of others. He falls hard for a chameleonic woman, whom he first encounters as a teenager in Peru. She flits in and out of his life as the years pile up, always with a new name, a new station in life. She treats him badly and he knows it, but is has no desire to suppress his own heart’s yearning. In the background, the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s play out and evoke a strong sense of time and place in Vargas Llosa’s narrative. At the time I read this book, he protagonist’s status as a perpetual expat spoke to my own desire to observe the world from foreign shores.
Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time
Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
In this photo, I am reading Three Cups of Tea at my favorite restaurant in Yuxi, China.
As I devoured both it and the delicious jiaozi that kept me alive and happy during my time in China, I began to conceive my plan for taking my next teaching job in Tunisia. So it’s an important book to me.
The author, Mortenson, is a mountain climber who has devoted much of his life to building schools — especially schools for girls — in rural Pakistan. Reading about how he went from knowing nothing about international philanthropy to being one of the most admired Americans in South Asia was inspirational (which is another way of saying it made me feel like a slug in comparison). It was this passage, though, that set my mind on the Muslim/Arab world. Mortenson is quoting comments made by his first major financial benefactor, Jean Hoerni, in response to Mortenson’s request for funds:
Americans care about Buddhists, not Muslims. This guy’s not going to get any help. . . . [N]o one in the mountaineering world is going to lift a finger to help the Muslims. They have too many Sherpa and Tibetans, too many Buddhists, on the brain.
That rang true. So many of my countrymen, even those who are liberal and not overtly prejudiced, admire Buddhists and fear Muslims. Maybe I had some of that inside me. So I started applying to schools in the MENA region.
Mortenson discloses his failures and weaknesses as well as his successes and strengths. That made the good works he did seem achievable even by people as flawed as I am.
King Solomon’s Mines
H. Rider Haggard
This adventure yarn was published in 1885 and is full of Victorian-era constructs about colonialism and the supposed superiority of the lighter-skinned peoples. But look past the things that today we would find silly or offensive and you’ll find a rip-roaring adventure story that could well have served as the inspiration for Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider, and other modern movies. Many adventure tropes were invented here: the exotic locations, the noble and stalwart natives, the hostile and perfidious natives, the comedic culture-clash moments, strange lands representing both heaven and hell, the cliffhanger suspense, and of course the big final showdown.
Antarctica
Kim Stanley Robinson
This book is hard to slot into a genre — and that’s a good thing. It’s got elements of science fiction in its use of technology that’s probably about ten minutes into our future. Parts of it are a people-against-the-elements survival yarn. It could be read as a political potboiler or an eco-thriller. There are even utopian blueprints reminiscent of Walden II.
As hard as it is to classify this novel, it’s even harder to put down. Imagine a band of utopian dreamers living as much off the grid as possible in Antarctica. Mix in a virtual US Senator (from California, naturally) whose right-hand man heads south to get firsthand intelligence relevant to the renewal of the multinational Antarctic treaty. Add an unlikely romance between a tough-as-nails guide and one of the regular Joes who keep McMurdo Station up and running. After reading this, I was even more convinced that I have to make Antarctica one of my must-gos.
