Table of Contents
GEOGRAPHICAL INDEX
INTRODUCTION
I am not an enthusiastic traveler. Let me lay my cards on the table, clear the air, call a spade a spade, and make something perfectly clear. I am barely a traveler at all. I would like to attribute this to The Unexplorer, a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay that I read when I was about thirteen and deeply into poetry. Its from her collection called A Few Figs from Thistles and is a whole novel in six short lines, all about a young girl enraptured by the road outside her house.When she asks her mother about it, shes told that the road led to the milkmans door. Millay concludes with the line: (Thats why I have not traveled more.)
And then Ive always feared that what Ralph Waldo Emerson said in
Self-Reliance is true:
Traveling is a fools paradise... I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.
But to blame that sort of literary disillusionment for my lack of travel would be romantic in the extreme, and also highly disingenuous. Heres why I dont travel: I am stymied by the very activities of planning a trip and figuring out an itinerary, choosing dates and what to pack. I am frustrated by my inability to speak any language except English. My high school French just wont cut it. You try finding a Laundromat in Tallinn without knowing Estonian and youll soon discover that although everyone has assured you that all Estonians speak at least a rudimentary form of English, that doesnt really seem to apply to most people over thirty. I dont blame them for not speaking English; I blame myself for not speaking Estonian so I could explain that I just wanted to wash my dirty clothes.
I am also made anxious by the seemingly simple act of leaving my house. I can manage meeting friends for coffee, going for walks in my familiar neighborhood, and geocaching. But even that last activity, as much as I enjoy being with my geocaching buddies, is more often than not nerve-wracking in the extreme as we drive to and disembark in unfamiliar locales all around the city.Thats about it, travelwise, for me.
In his book Between Terror and Tourism, Michael Mewshaw writes of arriving in a totally inhospitable desert locale: The pleasure of being where I had never been before, doing what I had never done, bound for who knew whatI found it all thrilling. I always have.
And I have not, alas.
So in one way of looking at it, I am totally the wrong person to write a book about travel; on the other hand, I am absolutely the perfect person. I am, in fact, a virtual traveler, via books. I have always loved reading armchair travel books and accounts of dashing and daring explorers. I adore bookswhether fiction or nonfictionthat give me a sense of being in another place and time. There are so many wonderful books that do exactly that; it was the impetus for Book Lust To Go. The first thing I did when I started working on this book was to purchase a large and up-to-date world map and put it up on the wall of the room where I write, so it was easy for me to get up from my desk, look at where a country or city was located, and understand its political and geographical context. Its probably one of the best purchases Ive ever made.
Now for some information about whats in this book (and whats not).
First, as with the other three books in the Book Lust series, Ive included titles that are both in print and out of print. Honestly, I wish they were all in print and easily available at libraries and bookstores. Were lucky in this age of the Internet that many out-of-print books are easy to locate and purchase online. And you can take advantage of the inter-library loan service most libraries offer their patrons.
Second, Ive included my favorite armchair travel narratives, as well as biographies of explorers, memoirs, novels set in various countries around the world, and a smattering of history. I hope theyll become your favorites as well, whether youre a virtual or actual traveler.
Third, Book Lust, published in 2003, and More Book Lust, which came out in 2005, featured lots of titles that would have fit wonderfully into Book Lust To Go. If I had ever imagined that I would write a Book Lust series, I might have saved them to include here, but I never saw that coming (nor, I think, did anyone else). I have generally chosen not to repeat titles here, except when one seemed especially well suited for Book Lust To Go. So before you email me about a title or an author that youre concerned Ive omitted from Book Lust To Go, be sure to check my other books first!
One of my favorite discoveries while I was doing all of the preliminary reading for
BLTG (as I affectionately refer to it) was reading Josie Dews memoir
A Ride in the Neon Sun. Heres what she says about traveling:
Some people travel with firm ideas for a journey, following in the footsteps of an intrepid ancestor whose exotic exploits were happened upon in a dusty, cobweb-laced attic containing immovable trunks full of sepia-curled daguerreotypes and age-discoloured letters redolent of bygone days. Others travel for anthropological, botanical, archaeological, geological, and other logical reasons. Some are smitten by a specific country brewed from childhood dreams. For others, travel is a challenge, a release, an escape, a shaking off of the shackles, and even if they dont know where they will end up they usually know where they will begin.
The very hardest part of writing this book was that I was unable to stop working on it. I kept reading even after the initial manuscript was turned in, discovering new titles and authors whose works I just couldnt bear to leave out. I even envisioned myself watching the book being printed and shouting periodically, Stop the presses! so that I could add yet another section or title. But of course the day actually came when I knew I had to stop or there would never be an end to the project.And here is the result, in your hands right now.
So, before your next tripeither virtual or actualgrab a pen and begin making notes about the titles that sound good to you. And enjoy the journeys.
Id love to hear from you. My email address is nancy@nancypearl .com.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people gave me great suggestions for books to include in Book Lust To Go. I want to give an especial shout-out to Martha Bayley, who actually kick-started the whole process of me really sitting down and writing up all my notes; in addition, she contributed both the Inside the Inside Passage section and Well Always Have Paris. She is herself both a virtual and actual traveler, and over the years has recommended many terrific books.And Anna Minard, who initially organized my reams of random bits of papersomething I never could have done on my owninto a coherent arrangement.
