Books like Travelers & Travel Liars 1660-1800 — picked by fans

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.

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. 

Spinsters Abroad set out to celebrate Victorian women traveller such as Mary Kingsley, Amelia Edwards, and Isabella Bird. However, Birkett quickly discovered that these women were not straightforward role models. Yes, they travelled Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, braving hardship, and making all kinds of discoveries along the way. But it turns out, they managed that because their whiteness trumped their gender. Spinsters Abroad reveals the complexity of these women’s travels, and their lives and worlds. It reflects on their motivations for travel, as well as how Victorians conceived gender and race. The book is also jam-packed with anecdotes. Here is Edwards complaining about flies interrupting her watercolour painting of Egyptian ruins: ‘Nothing disagrees with them; nothing poisons them - not even olive-green’.

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.

This book has recently been published, so I have only known it as an adult. When I opened its pages, I got lost in the complexity of the illustrations, there was much minute detail in the images. I was mesmerized. I just know I would have adored this book as a child. There are no words, just pictures to take you on an adventure. I find this an absolute treasure of a book that inspires me to make my own story to fill in the narrative. I imagine looking at this book with a child and the fun of piecing the story together using our combined imaginations. 

I liked the concept of man being small and adrift in the darkness of the wide world. This book taught me to see through politics, grandstanding, and the grandiose nonsense of man. Swift is my kind of guy, brutally satirical and profound. This book is really not for children. We see Gulliver travel on many adventures and experience Swift's disappointment as he engages different cultures, small and large, rational and irrational. 

His adventures demolish Gulliver’s sense of humanity to the point that when he is about to be rescued, at first, he rejects the offer like a misanthrope before finally climbing aboard. Swift is very dark here. Why would anyone want to return to the same old life after having their eyes opened?

In the 20th and 21st centuries, science fiction has been a major force in defining our collective imagination of what spaceflight is and why it is significant. This book puts the history of space science fiction in the context of the American space program, charting the reality of spaceflight against expectations set in popular culture.

Telling these parallel stories of real space accomplishments and fictional space exploits allows Weitekamp to reveal stories of spaceflight as inseparable from broad cultural concerns such as American identity, the frontier, race, gender, and sexuality. Weitekamp has spent her career curating the social and cultural history of spaceflight collection at the National Air and Space Museum, and her argument is built upon her expert analysis of popular culture objects from the collection. 

You gotta give props to Flewelling, who wrote a fantasy series with queer male protags in 1996! Just imagine – before Will & Grace, before Queer as Folk, before gay marriage was even a thing, she had the courage to write this deeply moving spy espionage fantasy book and the relationship between the noble rogue Seregil and his mentee/lover Alec was basically what I used as a model for every romantic relationship in my life. Also, the protag in my first two books was named Alek. Coincidence? I think not.

I’ve included Ana, Jan, and María’s book on my list not because it is entirely about neutrality and war (although that theme plays a major part in the book) but because it pushed me to appreciate the effects of the First World War at a more global level. 

The modern name of the war, of course, includes the word ‘world’ in it, but the fighting was primarily European-focused. This book shows, however, that the war had a much wider reach–influencing China, Japan, South America, Mexico, and Africa, amongst other places. For example, the book shows that there was a clash of Empires in Africa–between neutral Portugal and belligerent Germany; and in neutral Argentina, Mexico, and Spain, societies were split down the middle between the rival camps supporting the Allies and the Germans.

I found the book to be a really important demonstration that we need to think differently about wars–the… show more.

Matilda moves to the small New Mexico town of Goodnight after inheriting a house, a small newspaper, and two dogs. She learns just how odd the town is when she starts investigating the murder of a reporter. The town of Goodnight is pretty bizarre, but speaking as someone who lives in a small town in New Mexico, Goodnight is more believable than it might seem to an outsider. I prefer books where weirdness is something to celebrate, and here the characters embrace their crazy with enthusiastic joy. This story is part screwball comedy and part mystery, and both work.