100 Books Like Spinsters Abroad

How can travel help us find the good life? The Art of Travel asks this question of artists such as Edward Hopper and Vincent van Gogh, with profound and amusing results. Why can anticipating travel be more pleasant than actually going away? What is the lure of the Bahamas, of the ‘exotic’, of open deserts? Throughout, De Botton invites us to pay better attention to the world around us. I especially enjoy his musings on the profundities of travel—on waiting at Heathrow airport, circling ring-roads, and dried ketchup of motorway service stations.

This entertaining book treats travellers who were also liars - people who went abroad, but ‘embellished’ their journeys on returning home. It includes the tale of John Byron “Foul-Weather Jack”, who circumnavigated the globe and reported meeting nine-foot giants in 1776 Argentina. In the 1690s, traveller Louis Hennepin’s lies dramatically altered the topography of New Mexico, introducing false rivers and land masses that appeared on maps for 250 years. In the 1560s, sailor David Ingram claimed to have trekked America—describing giant cities, ruby-adorned kings, and rivers flowing the wrong way. Adams thoughtfully reflects on why these travellers lied, and why people at home believed them. The answers lie in the goods and powers associated with travel: prestige, fame, money, and the difficulty of assessing claims about the faraway.

I was gifted this book recently and it is the gift that keeps on giving.

I am an avid walker and the way the author interspersed poignant life stories with his own on walking was lovingly poetic. This quote “the walker is king, and the earth is his domain” is the one that defines the entire message of the book. I’ve been on many pilgrimages in life and witnessed many a transformation but none like the ones these philosophers uncover.

It was a joy to read the profound messages in staying present while walking as exercise. Grab a friend and enjoy walking together as you put one foot in front of the other and have meaningful conversation. 

Travel writer Parker’s obsession with maps glows through every page. This comical, easy-to-read book celebrates maps by enquiring into their history, and the rich ideas in their makeup. It considers the political power of maps: the placement of borders matters, as does topography in wartime. It also considers the relationship between maps and sex, illustrated by English place names such as ‘Balls Hill’ and ‘Aunt Mary’s Bottom’. Map Addict offers many amusing cartographic tales, recounting the military origins of the Ordnance Survey. And how Phyllis Pearsall came up with the idea for the London A-Z one night in 1935, after getting lost and soaked on her way home from a party.

South is a truly epic account of endurance and survival in the Antarctic. It describes how Shackleton and his crew stayed alive after their ship was crushed in pack ice, and how he and a handful of men crossed the wild Southern Ocean in mid-winter in a 20-foot sailing boat to bring help to those left behind. Not only did they have to cope with hurricanes and mountainous seas in freezing temperatures, but they also had to make an accurate landfall on a small island more than 800 miles away.

Even then their troubles weren't over, as they had to climb a range of high, unexplored mountains to reach help on the other side. As a sailor myself I'm awe-struck by Shackleton's voyage, and the extraordinary navigational feats it involved. If I ever think I'm having a bad day, I remember the terrible hardships that he and his men faced… show more.

The versatile Landon Jones is a former editor of People magazine and the author of Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation, but it is his biography of Clark that really thrills me. This book combines solid research with vibrant, engrossing prose that is always a pleasure to read. You get to know the intriguing—and sometimes enigmatic—William Clark before, during, and after the expedition.

If you want to understand how both South America and the New World were “discovered” by Europeans, which had nearly the same effect on Native Americans that a meteor did on the dinosaurs, there’s no better way to understand it than to journey along on Columbus’ four voyages and be there when he and his crew set ashore. Columbus set foot on the northern part of South America on his third voyage, visiting the coast of what is now Venezuela. Bergreen’s book does an admirable job of introducing you to the man whose voyages would ultimately affect millions of people. This is the closest anyone will ever get to being on board as an entirely New World first hove into sight.

This is a gripping account of expeditioner Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the South Pole. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, one of the youngest members of Scott's team, recorded the experience of this adventure gone disastrously wrong. Despite the horrors that Scott and his men faced along the way, Cherry's account is filled with stories of resilience, belief in the human spirit, and to persevere in the face of adversity, no matter the cost. Through frostbitten flesh, teeth chattering so hard they spontaneously shatter in the cold of the air, to sweat freezing the instant it emerges from the pores – this is not for the faint-hearted. Nonetheless it is certainly one of the most inspiring accounts of developing self-belief and pushing on in the face of brutal setbacks. 

Aside from the Colorado landmark, Pike’s Peak, most of us know little of Zebulon Pike. A relative passed along the tee-shirt, but that’s as close as I got before reading Jared Orsi’s account of Lieutenant Pike’s 1805-07 fascinating expeditions to the headwaters of the Mississippi and to the Rockies. Pike strives to establish friendly relations among the Ojibway and Dakotah and later among the Osage and Pawnee while introducing the tribes to their new landlords, the U.S. government under President Jefferson. In attempting to ascend the peak, Pike and his men suffer near starvation and death in bitter cold and waist-deep snow, only to be rescued and arrested by the forces of New Spain. Orsi approaches the expeditions from an environmental perspective.

My interest in the Himalaya has always extended from its physical presence to its significance for human spirituality. The author of this book simultaneously takes the reader on a harrowing adventure into both realms. His personal quest to discover the legendary falls of the Tsangpo River—thought to be one of Tibet’s mystical sanctuaries, leads him into one of the most remote places on the planet.