Staff Picks Category: Travel

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. [Book]

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If you are looking for a vacation read that is thought provoking, beautifully written, and exciting, I recommend Flights by Olga Tokarczuk.

Olga Tokarczuk is the first Polish woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature, and perhaps the most internationally beloved living Polish writer. Her books are always full of eccentric characters and rich prose.

Flights takes the form of what Tokarczuk calls a “Constellation Novel” — a disciple of Jung, she strings together vignettes, short stories, and essays (some only one sentence long) loosely associated as she creates a psychological portrait of her narrator.

The book is a meditation on travel, and on the psychology of people in states of motion. (The original Polish title, Bieguni, [lit. “runners”] refers to a sect of the Old Believers who believe that constant motion is a way to avoid evil.)

The structure of the book itself is designed for a travelling reader — the small vignettes make it easy to pick up and put down, for example when going between a plane and an airport terminal, without sacrificing the literary quality. You will meet a 17th century Dutch Anatomist who discovers the Achilles tendon in an unexpected way, a woman returning to her native Poland to poison her childhood sweetheart, A wife and child who disappear from their husband to return weeks later with no explanation, and academics who give lectures at airline gates to captive audiences.
This is an extraordinary book, in an excellent translation, that I expect I will return to again in moments of travel through life.

I also enjoyed Tokarczuk’s mystery novel Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead, although that one is better read in winter, and I look forward to reading her recently translated magnum opus, The Book of Jacob, an epic novel of the Frankist movement in Poland, but at 912 pages it may be slightly too large to fit into your beach bag.

Let me know what you think of Flights, and happy summer reading everyone!

I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Flights:

“This is why tyrants of all stripes, infernal servants, have such deep-seated hatred for the nomads — this is why they persecute the Gypsies and the Jews, and why they force all free peoples to settle, assigning the addresses that serve as our sentences.

What they want is to create a frozen order, to falsify time’s passage. They want for the days to repeat themselves, unchanging, they want to build a big machine where every creature will be forced to take its place and carry out false actions. Institutions and offices, stamps, newsletters, a hierarchy, and ranks, degrees, applications and rejections, passports, numbers, cards, elections results, sales and amassing points, collecting, exchanging some things for others.

What they want is to pin down the world with the aid of barcodes, labeling all things, letting it be known that everything is a commodity, that this is how much it will cost you. Let this new foreign language be illegible to humans, let it be read exclusively by automatons, machines. That way by night, in their great underground shops, they can organize reading of their own barcoded poetry.

Move. Get going. Blessed is he who leaves.”

South Pole Station by Ashley Shelby [Book]

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Cooper Gosling has passed the rigorous physical and psychological tests required to spend a year in Antarctica in the National Science Foundation’s Artists and Writers program. A talented painter who, at 30, has not yet realized her potential, Cooper is recovering from a family tragedy and looking for escape. She finds herself integrating with a community that includes scientists, artists, builders, and support staff with wildly different personalities, all seeking or fleeing something. Drawn to Sal, a physicist intent on disproving the big bang theory, and assisting a climate change denier with his research, Cooper finds herself at the center of an incident with long range implications for the station and its inhabitants.

Journalist Ashley Shelby’s debut novel eschews easy choices and treats interpersonal relations, grief, science, art, and political controversy with the same deft, humorous hand. Readers will find characters to love, suspect, and identify with among Cooper’s fellow Polies, and won’t forget them easily.

A good match for readers whose interest in Antarctica was sparked by Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, those who enjoy stories about quirky individuals and made families, and extreme armchair travelers.

The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson [Book]

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Bill Bryson is at his sincerely sardonic best as he roams his adopted country in search of what he loves best: quaint villages, good hiking, exquisite views, mysterious ancient sites, and odd people to make fun of–including himself. It’s just as unputdownable as all his other travel memoirs.

The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner [Book]

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Eric Weiner is a grump with a mission — trying to discover the happiest places in the world, and what makes them that way. From the World Database of Happiness in Rotterdam, Netherlands, to the Gross National Happiness of Bhutan, from binge drinking and happiness in Iceland to binge drinking and unhappiness in Moldova, Weiner travels the world and discovers some of what makes different people happy, and the many paths one can take to get there.

Down the Nile: alone in a fisherman’s skiff by Rosemary Mahoney [Book]

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I liked this independent, determined woman. In the late 1990s, Mahoney, an American writer and experienced recreational rower, got the idea of rowing herself down the Nile.  This is not allowed and virtually never done — tourists always travel on cruise boats or feluccas (small sailboats piloted by their owners). When she set out to buy a small rowboat in Egypt, she was met with disbelief.  Women, even western women, did not travel alone. To a fisherman, rowing was work, so why would she want to do it herself?  Felucca captains and boat owners assumed a woman couldn’t know how to row. Eventually she succeeds in her adventure, and it’s both more and less than expected but always fascinating.

Mahoney is empathetic and eloquent. She engages in conversations with Egyptian men and women she meets, learning a great deal about cultural differences, rampant poverty, and the restricted status of women. She quotes extensively from 19th-century European travelers, notably Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert, and gives a selective history of tourism in the region (including colonialism and theft of artifacts) which puts the present-day in context.  So much has changed and so much is the same.  In particular, her descriptions of the river and its natural environment — the wildlife, vegetation, water and sky — are poetic and timeless.

The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux [Book]

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Have you ever considered traveling from England to Russia via Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, China, and Japan by train? Me either. Paul Theroux does just that and survives to tell about it in his 1975 travel narrative The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia. This long journey is broken up into chapters by train, starting with the 15:30 London to Paris and ending with the Trans-Siberian Express. Though Theroux embarks from London on his own, he meets a number of colorful characters and manages to have interesting interactions (usually over a drink) despite linguistic and cultural barriers.

Theroux’s writing style is at times so rich with description that you can practically smell the pungent passenger sitting across from him. In other instances, he is blunt and to the point, relaying only that he is in a particular place to catch a train.The writing style mimics the ups and downs of traveling alone in foreign country and truly makes the reader feel as if they were riding the train alongside the narrator. Though Theroux rarely spends more than a day or two off the train, he manages to convey a surprising amount about each of his destinations through descriptions of the train and characters.

I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After Twenty Years Away by Bill Bryson [Book]

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A collection of articles originally written for a weekly British magazine chronicles Bryson’s humorous reintroduction to life in America: “The intricacies of modern American life still often leave me muddled.” From dental floss hotlines, to cupholders, to the abundance of trees in New Hampshire, Bryson entertains us with his laugh-out-loud writing.

French Milk by Lucy Knisley [Graphic Novel]

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French Milk is a travelogue, photo journal and graphic novel rolled into one deliciously exciting book. Lucy Knisley illustrates and writes about six-week stay she and her mother had in Paris in 2007. Sightseeing, love interests, her parents and baguettes are all discussed with a great deal of candidness and humor.

Across Asia on a bicycle by Thomas Gaskell Allen, Jr. and William Lewis Sachtleben. [Book]

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After graduating from George Washington University in 1890, Thomas Allen and William Sachtleben, two American students wishing to expand upon their education with practical experience, decided to travel around the world. Wishing to meet the people along their route, instead of being insulated from them as they would have been had they traveled by more customary means, the two young men chose the newly invented “saftey bicycle” as their primary method of transport. This book tells the story of the most exciting portion of their travels, their journey across Asia, taking the seldom used northern route from Turkey, through Persia (now Iran) and through western China. (The safer and more used path would have led them south through India.)

This book is fascinating as much for what it reveals about the attitudes of these two Americans as it is for what it reveals about the people they met upon there way. It provides an interesting glimpse at the attitudes and politics of the time, and, of course, it is also a great adventure story.

Stephen Fry in America by Stephen Fry [Book]

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Join Stephen Fry, the English actor/writer/director/tweeter, as he visits each of the North America’s fifty states. This book is an interesting and humorous account of the American experience from a European perspective.