Books like Traveling with Pomegranates — picked by fans

Nearly every line of this memoir stopped me in my tracks.

I read most of it at a local café, teacup in hand, blinking back tears more times than I care to admit. Gilbert's precision and beauty on the page are simply breathtaking. She doesn't describe the world so much as conjure it, and she pulled me in until her cobbled Roman streets and dusty Indian pathways felt like my own. I tasted that whole pizza with her, felt the sun’s warmth on her shoulders, and ached through each layered heartbreak as though it were mine.

She doesn't merely tell her story. She throws open the door to her innermost self and refuses to let you look away. I wept. I laughed. And when the last page came, I sat quietly for a long moment, reluctant to leave her and her world behind.

If there ever lived a strong, persistent woman, it is Jaouad. This is Jaouad’s memoir of fighting and surviving leukemia at age 22. I came to love her as a person as she suffered the broken dreams of her youth and her future.

The insightful writing is from her unique perspective as a young woman who speaks multiple languages and is raised in several countries, including the United States. In her post-treatment year, she completes a road trip around the United States, which brings more revelations.

With this “traveloir,” Mary Morris showed me how to do it: How to travel alone as a single woman when you didn’t have a plan or an agenda; how to write about people and places that bring them alive; how to find your own story in your travels and in your writing.

Mary Morris published this book in 1989, the year before I set off on my own—a (much older) single woman traveling without a plan or agenda. As I opened the yellowed pages again, after many years, I read this line: “I settled into loneliness once again.” Next year I’ll be traveling to San Miguel de Allende, one of the settings in Nothing to Declare. I may take this book with me and read it again. 

While on a summer backpacking trip with her fiancé, twenty-eight-year-old Shannon Fowler’s life was suddenly and irreparably altered when her fiancé was stung and killed by a box jellyfish on the remote shore of an island in Thailand. In an effort to save her own life, to discover how to go on, she turned to traveling the world. 

In rich detail, heart-breakingly honest prose, and deeply intimate story-telling, Shannon takes us along as she journeys to some of the most grief-stricken and tragic sites in the world. It’s through her travels, her interactions with strangers, her explorations that she begins to heal. 

This story and Shannon’s unflinching telling gave me courage as I wrote my memoir—courage to open my heart not just to my own grief but to my personal connection to the ceaseless grief in our world.

In 1947, archaeologist Kevin Andrews went to the Peloponnese on a Fulbright fellowship to study the Crusader castles and found a country in the midst of a civil war. He was one of the few foreigners there at the time, which his book vividly brings to life.. after a first rather idyllic description of stomping on grapes with friends on Paros he enters another world. Yet he was so moved by the humanity of the villagers in a period of great poverty, suspicion, and turmoil that he made Greece his home, and wrote numerous other books about Greece, but this is his best… about a period I hope is never repeated.  

I came across this book while researching my guide to Northern Greece. Kapka Kassabova is a Bulgarian writer now living in the Scottish Highlands, who returned to the land she knew as a child: the once heavily militarized border between Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey. Her account of the places and people she meets in this forgotten corner of the world are uncanny, full of wonder, tragedy and horror, comedy and beauty, in a place where even in the 21st-century magic and the supernatural still live on.  

Katherine, a Greek immigrant to the US, took her American children to Greece in the late 1930s to live on her family’s farm and escape from the Great Depression. Unfortunately, the arrival of the Nazi invaders trapped the family in Greece during the Occupation and the end of World War II. Based on a true family story, American Kid movingly describes the experiences of the children in the remote mountain village of Katherine’s birth, and their efforts to survive the occupation of their home by Nazis. Would they ever see their beloved America again? An authentic glimpse of the devastating war’s impact on innocent youth and the value of hope.

I remember a scene early in the book describing the ongoing competition for grapes that went on between the author’s long-suffering dog, Roger, and a pet tortoise called (naturally) Achilles.

How could you not laugh? Gerard Durrell writes loving and generous descriptions of all the animals in his life (including, as the title implies, his mother and three older siblings) during his family’s five-year sojourn in Corfu in the 1930s.

I was taken with the lack of pretense in his account—presumably characteristic of the ten-year-old boy he was at the time—and yet his delightful vignettes display a self-awareness full of humor. The entire book is both charming and hilarious.

I was blown away by this book when I first read it. I felt like I was in Famagusta in 1972 with the families that Victoria Hislop focuses on. As the troubles begin, the country is torn apart, and the exclusion zone is created. The Sunrise Hotel, still under construction, has stayed in my mind ever since.

I still wonder if there remains a hotel safe full of all the villager’s valuables, untouched and abandoned though heavily guarded. It is a moving and compelling account that tore at my heartstrings. No side is painted as right or wrong, just people having their lives thrown into total chaos.

The forty years after Alexander the Great’s death are rarely studied in history class, yet key to understanding the Ptolemaic rule in Egypt that followed.

Few books have ever covered the warfare waged among his generals as they fought one another for his empire, each one hoping to be the next Alexander, and each falling short. Instead of creating an empire, Alexander’s generals created a world of war, using the native populations of Syria, Indo-Kush, Egypt, and more as fodder in their quest to become Emperor.

Dividing the Spoils is an action-packed read, even if it is nonfiction. I couldn’t put it down.