No money for travel? Take a "virtual literary" trip instead

[SoCalDem]

The 69 Greatest Fiction Travel Books of All Time
by Boris Kachka |
http://www.concierge.com/cntraveler/articles/500078?mbi...


First things first, you may be thinking: What is a fiction travel book, anyway? Well, here's what we think: It's a book in which a place is as important a character as the protagonist; it's a book so informed by the writer's culture that it's impossible to read it without uncovering the life of the author behind it; it's a book that has shaped the way we see a certain place; it's a book whose events and characters could be set nowhere else. So for everyone who, like Michael Ondaatje, got his first glimpse of Japan through Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country; or, like Nathan Englander, found India in Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance; or discovered the world through Homer's Odyssey—this is the list to have. Read on.

86 top travel fiction

Absurdistan
Gary Shteyngart (2006)
"It's probably the best contemporary travel novel," says Darin Strauss. "Certainly the most fun." The Russian immigrant's second book tops his first novel, The Russian Debutante's Handbook, in screwball inventiveness, with a gluttonous character in the slothful tradition of Oblomov who (sometimes literally) flies over the Bronx and hails from an autonomous ex-Soviet republic that could exist only in Shteyngart's mind. "The sweep," Strauss says, "is matched only by the humor and exuberance of the prose" (Random House, $14).

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain (1885)
Huck and Jim's "downstream education," as Jonathan Raban puts it, is important for numerous reasons, but alongside its lessons in the American vernacular and the history of race, there is the canonization of the Mississippi. "The idea of the river as America's first great interstate arterial highway, at once a place of magical solitude in nature and of fraught encounters with society, survives even now," says Raban (Bantam, $6).

The Alexandria Quartet
Lawrence Durrell (1957-1960)
These four novels come as a set, with different perspectives on essentially the same forlorn story. They "play with time and point of view like a Charlie Kaufman script," says Darin Strauss, but "are worth reading not for their gimmickry—supposedly based on the theories of Einstein and Freud—but for their lush descriptions of Egypt. Durell was more famous as a poet than a novelist, and his pointillist evocations of Alexandria are breathtaking" (Penguin; set, $45).

Arcadia
Jim Crace (1992)
Inspired by London, the unnamed city of the master novelist's morality tale about a self-made millionaire and his utopian dreams almost upstages the Dickensian struggles at its heart. "There is so much life and strife and detail," says Amy Bloom. "An entire world has been conjured up, street by street, an imagined city with every cobblestone and desire and character made real" (out-of-print).

The Baron in the Trees
Italo Calvino (1977)
Imagine John Cheever's swimmer traveling via tree instead of suburban pool—for his entire life—and you have Calvino's fairy tale of an eighteenth-century Italian boy who climbs a tree one day and never comes down. Michael Ondaatje calls this world "a thrilling, unforgettable universe, beautifully evoked, completely real and believable—a landscape where there are great adventures and love affairs and politics and wars" (Harvest, $14).

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler (1939)
This caper redefined the city that W. H. Auden called "the great wrong place" and which Phillip Lopate dubs "the city that didn't want to be a city." Lopate loves that, contrary to its bright reputation, Chandler's Los Angeles is "portrayed as a very occult, secretive place." "Don't expect sunshine and palm trees," seconds David Ebershoff. "His L.A. is a shadowland—damp with fog, dark with night, and peopled with killers and cons" (Vintage, $14).

Colomba
Prosper Mérimée (1841)
In the lamentably obscure French writer's most accomplished novel, a jaded colonel and his daughter journey to Corsica in search of untouched paradise, only to become immersed in international intrigue, culture clash, and a still-thriving ancient tradition of the vendetta. Fernanda Eberstadt calls it "a shrewd, dispassionate portrait of nineteenth-century Corsica" (Kessinger, $21).

Come to Africa and Save Your Marriage
Maria Thomas (1987)
This story collection is one of only three books by Thomas, who died in a 1989 plane crash en route to an Ethiopian refugee camp. Thomas wrote, "A language you don't understand reminds you how vulnerable you are," and it's through her writing and our own journeys, says Julia Alvarez, that "we discover that it is precisely this vulnerability which connects us with one another—a good enough reason to travel if nothing else" (Soho, $12).


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[fadedrose]

1. That's the beauty of fiction

Haven't gone to your link yet, but every book I read has information about the place where the story happens. I live in in the real Michigan, just got back from fictional Colorado and now when I leave the computer, am going to fictional New York and Washington, D. C.

Will definitely look up your 69 Top Travel Books..

R

[givemebackmycountry]

2. The list is incomplete without...

"Going to Extremes" by Joe McGinniss.
Joe has been to Alaska before he went there to take down the Grifter and her family.

Quote from the NYT book review: "Joe McGinniss did not set out to judge or explain, but only to find out what Alaska is. He has succeeded".

This book is is in my top ten desert island book list.
I will die with this book in my collection, and I will be proud of it.

[JitterbugPerfume]

3. the coolest all time travel book is

On The Road by Jack Kerouac and a close second is Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck

[pitohui]

4. a book is not about travel just because it has a setting -- this list is silly

some of the suggestions are just plain silly, too many of them are not about travel or the journey, apparently, if the person doing the recommend never visited the place himself it's a "travel" book

anyway if it doesn't have "water music" by t.c. boyle it ain't a list of world class novels about travel, christ on a cracker! some common sense here!

set in japan is not a "travel" novel, it's a novel set in japan, what's next? maybe "a time to kill" is a travel novel, it's set in mississippi! that makes as much sense as having the novel set in knoxville be called a travel novel, sheesh

can we acknowledge that a story is a fine novel but doesn't belong on this list? the detective novels set in california (two of them!) are particularly egregious examples of what i'm talking about

whoever compiled this list apparently thinks merely putting a book in california or japan makes it "travel"

i think delillo would still be shaking his head, trying to figure out how "the names" is a travel novel, it's more sort of an ex-pat novel if you ask me...but it's still better than some of these detective novels getting thrown into the mix to pad it out, that's just sad

all of the books are good books but a great many of them are NOT remotely about travel