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.

The authors of the books featured this week have distinctive voices, the kind you can identify from a single paragraph.

There’s the amphetamine-fueled Beat Generation prose of Jack Kerouac. The media-drenched flat affect of Alex Garland. The compassionate and erudite tut-tutting of Theodore Dalrymple. The dreamlike unreliable narration of James Salter. The sardonically twinned Thai and western perspectives of John Burdett’s Thai/American police detective. These voices speak to me still.

Yes, that’s me in the photo. I’ve been a reader since I was a kid.

Buying these books through the links here doesn’t increase your cost by a cent, but it does put a few cents into my bank account (which I will use to keep this blog going). Enjoy! And please let me know what you think of them.

By the way, if you’re interested in other books I’ve enjoyed, check out Part 1 or Part 2 of this series, or go to my buy page.

On the Road Jack Kerouac This classic beat novel never really grabbed me and shook me, but it has become something more like an casual friend -- the kind of guy you're never intimately close to, but who shows up in your life from time to time with stories of interesting adventures and then disappears again for months or years at a time. Kerouac's prose is as relentless as his characters' peregrinations across the US, their late-night bull sessions, and their thirst for the sensate. As his protagonist and stand-in, Sal Paradise, says, "[T]he only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
The Beach Alex Garland Comparing this book to, say, Michener's The Drifters, one can see how much youth culture has changed in fifty years. The Beach is a fusion of video games, movies, violence, dark politics, and -- oh yeah, travel. There are drugs, too, but whereas in earlier travel books drugs are seen as routes to spiritual bonding, here they lead generally to bad trips of both the figurative and literal type. Garland also offers a sharp critique of hipper-than-thou western travelers who glom onto a beautiful "undiscovered" spot somewhere in the developing world and ultimately wind up ruining the things that made it so special.
Zanzibar to Timbuktu: A Journey Across Africa Theodore Dalrymple (Available for Kindle only) Theodore Dalrymple's real name is Anthony Daniels. He has been quoted as saying he chose his nom de plume because he wanted "a name that sounded suitably dyspeptic, that of a gouty old man looking out of the window of his London club, port in hand, lamenting the degenerating state of the world." This is to say that he is a man of conservative mien and mind. But whereas many conservatives who travel (the awful P.J. O'Rourke comes to mind) put on a sneer and leave compassion at home, Dalrymple seems truly to care about the poor people of Africa he encounters in his overland journey from Zanzibar to Timbuktu. There is compassion for the impoverished, the criminal, and the crazy. And damn, the man can write.
A Sport and a Pastime James Salter By telling his tale of an affair between a ne'er-do-well American college kid and a rather ordinary French shopgirl through the voice of a man who knew them only peripherally, Salter was able to give his prose a shimmering, dream-like quality. Our narrator frankly admits he is embellishing, filling in details, adding things he couldn't possibly know. His descriptions of the couple's sweetly transgressive sodomy, for instance, tell us more about what's really going on in the narrator's head than what's going on in the couple's bed. The flashy, expensive, but decaying car the couple borrow and drive around France feels like something out of The Great Gatsby. As with Gatsby, the reader never doubts that Salter's couple is racing toward its demise, but we are only too glad to go along for the ride. One of the most neglected and underrated prose stylists of the mid-twentieth century, Salter has written a book that illuminates the almost inherently doomed nature of even the most torrid expatriate seductions.
The Royal Thai Detective Novels John Burdett Bangkok 8: A Royal Thai Detective Novel (1) Bangkok Tattoo: A Royal Thai Detective Novel (2) Bangkok Haunts: A Royal Thai Detective Novel (3) The Godfather of Kathmandu: A Royal Thai Detective Novel (4) Vulture Peak: A Royal Thai Detective Novel (5) I'm cheating with my counting here, since there are five books (to date) in this series about police detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a former gangster, former Buddhist monk, and current member of the Bangkok police force. The books (Bangkok 8, Bangkok Tattoo, Bangkok Haunts, The Godfather of Kathmandu, and Vulture Peak) hang together well, with story arcs that go from volume to volume. I first read Bangkok 8 on a trip to Thailand at Christmas time, 2013. I concluded then that it was a far better and deeper guide to the city than Lonely Planet. As a whole, the series is about corruption: of the flesh, of the political process, of law enforcement, of daily life. But these books are no jeremiads. Indeed, they go out of their way to explain how what we in the west view as corruption has a rational basis in the Thai mentality. Along the way, Burdett explores the conflicts between farang (foreign) and Thai culture, Thai attitudes toward sex, drugs, and popular culture, and between powerful factions in Thai society. The protagonist, Sonchai Jitpleecheep, narrates all five books in the first person and frequently breaks the fourth wall and addresses the reader directly, often in a way that challenges foreign assumptions about Thailand and its people.

This week’s entry in my series about books that made me a traveler is all over the map. Literally. Iran, the Caribbean, Congo, the road from Istanbul to India, and South America are all represented in these selections. What these books have in common are stories about overcoming fears and overcoming odds. I read some of these while I was dreaming of travel and others while I was on the road in China and Tunisia.

Buying these books through the links here doesn’t increase your cost by a cent, but it does put a few cents into my bank account (which I will use to keep this blog going). Enjoy! And please let me know what you think of them.

By the way, if you are interested in other books I’ve read recently, check out Part 1 of this series, or go to my buy page.

Iranian Rappers and Persian Porn: A Hitchhiker's Adventures in the New Iran Jamie Maslin One of the best things a travel book can do is to de-cartoonify a country and its people. Many of my countrymen have a cartoon image of Iran as a place of joyless religious fanatics moving in ignorant lockstep to the edicts of stern ayatollahs and their murderous henchmen. Maslin's book humanizes the Iranians, especially the young people of that country who delight in finding ways around the no-sex no-drugs no-fun mores of the Islamic Republic. The author of this raucous but informative book goes to private parties in people's homes that, in their touching awkwardness, reminded me of high school dances. He rides in fast cars. He listens to ridiculous European bands no one outside Iran has ever heard of. He and his newfound Iranian friends watch porn and do drugs. The very things that make Western culture so superficial and alluring become revolutionary aspirations for an oppressed people.
Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe If you can lay aside the heavy doses of Christian religiosity that sidetrack the narrative every twenty pages or so, what's left is a good story about self-reliance in an alien environment. Crusoe is a 17th century MacGyver, solving the practical problems of living on a deserted island with a series of clever improvisations. He meets and befriends both natives and other westerners. I read this classic while I lived in China and found it to be a pretty good metaphor for expat living.
Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo Vanessa Woods Bonobos are the primates whose genetic makeup is closest to that of homo sapiens, sharing 98.7% of our DNA. They live in matriarchal troupes, engage in frequent and imaginative sex as a way of defusing social tensions, and are generally more peaceful than other primate species. This makes them very interesting to primate scientists. Two such scientists (the author and her boyfriend) move to a bonobo preserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo to conduct primate research. There they discover much about the animals, the Congo, and themselves. Woods subtly and humorously compares her boyfriend's behavior to bonobo behavior, and it's not always clear who comes out better.
Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India Rory MacLean Back in the 1960s, there were these people called hippies who came from North America and West Europe. They grew their hair long and took drugs and traveled overland through western Asia all the way to the promised land, which turned out to be India. Along the way, they invented a whole genre of travel and had a significant impact on the economic and social lives of many of the south Asian communities they visited. This book does a neat job of showing how that generation's ideals and imagination helped to create modern travel -- and how the remnants of that generation are keeping those ideals alive today.
Two Wheels Through Terror: Diary of a South American Motorcycle Odyssey Glen Heggstad If I had to point to just one book that formed my ideas about travel, this would be it. It's an account of how the author, a former Hell's Angel and current martial arts instructor, decides to motorcycle from California to the southern tip of South America and back. He rides alone, but with a woman on his mind. He is disciplined, but takes risks. He's tough, but compassionate. He's got a code, but he's not an ideologue. All goes well until he is kidnapped by a guerrilla army in Colombia and held captive for five grueling weeks. Once released, he is forcefully told by the U.S. Embassy in Bogota that he should leave the country as soon as he recovers his strength. He refuses. Instead, friends back home ship him a new motorcycle and he continues his ride and completes it. Along the way he is robbed, almost frozen, and suffers mechanical and personal breakdowns. And yet he perseveres.

Literature and travel are tightly linked with me. Back when I graduated from college, bought a Eurail Pass, and backpacked through western Europe, I learned to love the racks of Penguin and Pelican paperbacks that seemed to be stationed in every convenience store. I read my way through train rides, solo meals, and rainy days. The books I bought added noticeably to the weight of my pack, until I finally, reluctantly, and for the first time in my life began leaving books behind after reading them.

Later in life, I was a founding member of a book group that reads only literature in translation. Our group traveled the world through literature. We also made a point to serve the food and spirits native to the country that produced whatever book we were reading. Through that, I learned to appreciate the literature of the non-English speaking world and added a number of must-sees to my travel list.

Still later, when I was going through a difficult emotional time, one fraught with many losses, I turned to travel books to enable my imagination to roam the world and to help me forget my woes. During one six-month period, I brought a book — usually a travel book — to a biker/bikini bar four or five nights a week, camped out on a barstool, and read while chaos roared behind me.

More recently, books have been an essential part of my expat life. As wonderful as living in another culture can be, it also has its share of lonely stretches. Reading gets me through those. After weeks and months of immersion in another language, it’s a delight to become reacquainted with English.

The books I enjoyed most were those about travel adventure. “Adventure,” though, is a much-overused word. Many folks apply it to some mildly exciting trip that goes according to plan. Not me. I think of adventure as what happens when things don’t go according to plan. Ziplining in Mexico? Not an adventure. Being interrogated by the police in Tunisia on suspicion of fornication? Definitely an adventure.

Then there are other books that aren’t specifically about travel, but take place in foreign locations and/or involve expatriates. Graham Greene is the gold standard here; I learned about much of the world through his stories of weary British expats living in the developing world.

Here, then, is the first installment of the forty books that made me a traveler. You can read Part 2 here or visit my buy page. I’ll put up a new installment every week or so. Each of these books is hyperlinked to Amazon. Buying a book through the links here doesn’t increase your cost by a cent, but it does put a few cents into my bank account (which I will use to keep this blog going). Enjoy exploring this literature — and please let me know what you think of my selections.

The Quiet American Graham Greene I had a prejudice against this book for a long time after I read it due to its title. The titular American isn't any quieter than any other character. At one point, Greene simply tells us that he was, as if that settles things. But that cavil aside, this is a fine -- perhaps definitive -- portrait of expat life during the 1950s. It warns against the hubris of ideologically-driven westerners who come to tropical lands full of theories to test on the natives. On a more powerfully emotional level, though, this is a book about the strange and unequal relationships between expats and their native lovers, the way they romanticize each other, and the grief they often come to.
The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas Paul Theroux Veteran travel writer Paul Theroux took a train trip from Boston to Patagonia. He loved putting his hand on the Red Line tracks in Boston and being connected to Argentina by a ribbon of steel. It wasn't literally true, of course, but the image stayed with me and made me a fan of train travel throughout the world. And the fact that I read substantial portions of it while actually riding the Red Line made adventure travel seem all the more possible. He took books with him as he traveled, like I do, and blended what he was reading at the time with what he was seeing as he rode the rails.
South: The Story of Shackleton's 1914-1917 Expedition Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton My favorite definition of "adventure" is what happens when things don't go according to plan. By that standard, Shackleton and his crew had adventures up the wazoo. Heading for Antarctica, they were shipwrecked and then made a daring, if not crazy, journey across the southern ocean in an open boat to reach an island where they might stand some hope of being rescued. There's a lot of technical, nautical and meteorological data to wade through, but Shackleton's leadership skills shine through the jargon. And the bravery and stalwartness of his crew convinced me that he couldn't have chosen a finer posse to accompany him to the ends of the earth. The fact that every last man survived the ordeal is an incredible testament to human strength and perseverance in the face of the most daunting odds.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values Robert Pirsig I first read this classic when I was in my teens and it didn't do much for me. Almost four decades later, though, I reread it and it made a great deal more sense. Pirsig was brilliant yet mentally ill and went to pieces in a way that destroyed his marriage and terrified his young son. The motorcycle trip he took from Minnesota to California was his attempt to reassemble his very self. It's also about his obsession with the metaphysics of quality, a theory he developed to connect the objective with the subjective. When I became a motorcyclist myself, I identified completely with the contemplative states Pirsig entered into while rolling through Montana. This is a book that satisfies dramatically, intellectually, and spiritually. I was surprised and gratified earlier this year when I spotted two twenty-something women reading it at a hostel in Sri Lanka. The book has stood the test of time.
The Royal Road to Romance Richard Halliburton This is a -- no, the -- classic wanderlust book. In the 1920s, Richard Halliburton, a small-town merchant's son from Tennessee, was more famous than Amelia Earhart. The Royal Road to Romance, an account of his travels from the Alps to Andorra to India to Panama, served as the basis for his profitable work on the American lecture circuit. He continued to travel and have adventures all over the world until he was lost at sea in 1939 while attempting to cross the Pacific in a Chinese junk. He traveled with a insouciant attitude toward money, convention, and officialdom. This led to him being jailed as a spy in Gibraltar, spending the night at the Taj Mahal, evading fares on various trains, and climbing the Matterhorn despite being utterly ignorant of mountain climbing and woefully under-equipped. Though they may not know it, every backpacker who has set off for a foreign land with a light wallet and no firm plans is following in Halliburton's footsteps.