Recommended Reading
From Catherine Watson

(The best are starred.)

Top Choice

“Thoughts of Home: Reflections on Families, Houses, and Homelands from the Pages of ‘House Beautiful’,” edited by Elaine Greene (Hearst Books, 1995, hardbound; ISBN 0-688-14383-0). An excellent collection of short “place” essays, these are good models for the kind of essays we'll be doing. Unfortunately, it's now hard to find. If you absolutely can't locate a copy, seek out one of these:

“Wanderlust: Real Life Tales of Adventure and Romance,” edited by Don George for Salon.com (Villard, 2001).

“The Best American Travel Writing,” one or more of these collections, starting with the one for 2000. (Paperbacks by Houghton Mifflin).

About Writing

“On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft,” by Stephen King (Pocket Books, 2000; ISBN 0-671-02425-6). Yes, this is the guy who writes those horror books, but much of his very sound advice applies to any narrative. The memoir sections that begin and end the book -- on how he became a writer and how writing returned him to himself after a near-fatal accident -- are especially good.

* “Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life,” by Anne Lamott (Anchor, 1995; ISBN 0385-48-0016). Simply a classic. See also her book, “Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith,” (Anchor, 2000; ISBN 0385-49-6095); the opening essay, “Lilypads,” is powerful piece of memoir.

“They Went: The Art and Craft of Travel Writing,” ed. William Zinsser (Houghton Mifflin, Boston) (look for this one used).

Travel Memoir

“Serpent in Paradise,” by Dea Birkett (Doubleday, New York, 1997; ISBN 0-385-48870-X). Well-written, highly detailed, on the oddest bit of real estate in the world: Pitcairn Island. It's also one of the few travel books that made me want to skip the journey. What (or who) is the serpent here?

“The Road to Oxiana,” by Robert Byron (Oxford Univ. Press, N.Y., paperback; first published 1937, new edition 1966, current one 1982, still in print). A classic “search” book (as in the quest for the Holy Grail). It took the writer about three years of painstaking work to achieve that off-hand tone.

* “The Emperor's Last Island: A Journey to St. Helena,” by Julia Blackburn (Vintage Departures, a division of Random House, New York; 1991, paperback ISBN 0-679-73937-8). One of my favorites, but some people hate it. An odd and haunting book, it alternates between telling the story of Napoleon's last years and the writer's trip to the island of his captivity.

“What Am I Doing Here?” by Bruce Chatwin (Penguin, 1989; ISBN 0-14-01.1577-3). Sooner or later, every travel writer asks that question; few answer it this well. You have to be a little careful with Chatwin, though: His writing's wonderful, but often, as he admits here, “the fictional process has been at work.”

* “This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland,” by Gretel Ehrlich (Vintage Books, 2001; ISBN 0-679-75852-6). Even though I read it in the midst of a Minnesota winter, this book made me want to go to Greenland. It's stunningly lyrical without being overdone.

* “The Great Plains,” by Ian Frazier. (Penguin paperback, June 1990, ISBN 0140131701.) As fine an interweaving of history, travel narrative and personal encounter as you can find.

* “Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood,” by Alexandra Fuller (Random House, 2001; ISBN 0-375-75899-2). A fascinating memoir of a dysfunctional family in dysfunctional landscapes. The author's parents farmed in Africa, and her childhood was laced with many fears, including death by terrorism. The title refers, not to dogs, but to her difficult mother.

* “The Royal Road to Romance,” by Richard Halliburton. (First published 1925; subsequent hardbounds by Bobbs Merrill, with many hardbound and paperback editions since then.) For middle-class Americans in the 1920s and '30s -- when mass travel was mainly emigration -- Halliburton's name meant travel and adventure. The tone of this, his first and most popular book, will tell you why he captured their imaginations.

“A Moveable Feast,” by Ernest Hemingway (many editions, still in print; most recent is probably Touchstone Books, ISBN 0-684-82499-X). Papa remembers Paris. Still a classic.

* “Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War,” by Tony Horwitz. (Vintage Departures/Random House; 1999 paperback, ISBN 067975833X.) A former war correspondent and a Civil War re-enactor collaborate on a journey through the new South. Impressive combination of history and first-person narrative.

“High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never,” by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial, 1995; ISBN 0-06-092756-9). Some of these are fairly standard travel articles dressed up as travel narrative, but the best of them are haunting.

“Blue Highways: A Journey into America,” by William Least Heat Moon (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1982; ISBN for hardbound edition 0-316-35395-7). A travel book of the “foreign legion” type, where the trip is undertaken to get over a personal disaster. In this case, the writer loses himself in other people's lives and stories on the nation's backroads.

“The Names of Things,” by Susan Brind Morrow (Riverhead Books, 1997; ISBN 1-57322-027-2). About the author's many sojourns in Egypt, why she loves it, the solace it gives her after grief, the strain it eventually puts on a brand-new marriage, and the tension between “home” and “away” that most long-haul travelers feel but seldom write about.

* “Sea Change,” by Peter Nichols (Penguin, 1997; ISBN 0-14-026413 2). Not all voyages are good ones. This single-handed one is very bad indeed. But the writing and pacing are splendid. Nichols even manages to be pull off sustained present tense, which is normally exhausting for a reader. This is also one of the rare sailing books that non-sailors can relish.

“The Road Within: True Stories of Transformation,” by James, Sean and Tim O'Reilly (Travelers' Tales Guides, 1997, paperback; ISBN 1-885211-19-8). The most spiritual of the essay collections in the Travelers' Tales series.

“Me Talk Pretty One Day,” by David Sedaris (Little, Brown; 2000 hardbound. ISBN 0-316-77772-2; paperback 2001, 0-316-77-6963). A collection of essays, mostly travel, mostly about France, mostly funny -- but also well-crafted, often with an edge.

“Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes,” Robert Louis Stevenson. (Many editions; try The Marlboro Press/Northwestern, Evanston, Ill., 1996; paperback, ISBN 0-8101-6006-4.) Stevenson's works include some of the best travel literature ever written. This one is still a gem.

Memoir

A good collection of very brief memoirs is “I Thought My Father Was God,” edited by Paul Auster (Picador/Henry Holt and Co., 2001; ISBN 0-312-42100-1). These were culled from NPR's National Story Project.

“The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier,” by Thad Carhart (Random House, N.Y., 2001; ISBN 0-375-75862-3). Don't be fooled by the Paris references. It's mainly a journey inside the writer, as he discovers how much piano music was part of his past. It's interesting even if you don't know a sharp from a flat.

“Miriam's Kitchen,” by Elizabeth Ehrlich (Penguin, 1991; ISBN 0-14-026759-X). As Proust famously noticed, taste is a great trigger for memory. This well-crafted memoir combines good writing with recipes.

“Home: American Writers Remember Rooms of their Own,” ed. Sharon Sloan Fiffer and Steve Fiffer (Pantheon Books, N.Y. -- 1995, hardbound; ISBN 0-679-44206-5). A well-done, often poignant collection of short memoirs, arranged in a sort of literary floor plan.

* “My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru,” by Tim Guest ( Harvest Original: Harcourt Books, 2005; ISBN 0-15-603106-X). One of the best and most unusual memoirs in a decade, this is a child's eye view of the cult that surrounded Indian religious leader, Bhagwan Shree Rajeesh in the 1970s and early '80s. The author's mother joined when he was three, and he spent all the childhood he remembers in one or another commune, feeling alone. However strange it looked to the world outside, it was far worse to grow up in.

“A Romantic Education,” by Patricia Hampl (Houghton Mifflin, paperback, first published 1981; ISBN 0395-602-009; new edition June 1999). A fine weave of past and present, of family history and personal discovery, of places as familiar as St. Paul and as distant as Prague.

“Bingo Night at the Fire Hall,” by Barbara Holland (Harvest Books/Harcourt Brace & Co., New York, 1997; 1999 paperback: ISBN 0-15-600665-0.) The writer moves into her late mother's cabin west of Washington, D.C., just as suburban sprawl collides with the traditional farming communities around her.

“Speak, Memory,” by Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage International, paperback, 1989, still in print; first published 1947; ISBN 0-679-72339-0). You don't have to be a Nabokov fan to be enthralled by this densely detailed memoir (particularly his pre-Russian Revolution childhood). It's often cited as a favorite by other memoirists.

“The Orchard: A Memoir,” by Adele Crockett Robertson (Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt & Co., NY; ISBN 0-8050-4092-7). Proof that you don't need to leave home to have a dramatic journey. Proof, too, that life's journeys don't all have happy endings.

“The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio,” by Terry Ryan (Touchstone books, Simon & Schuster, 2001; ISBN 0-7432-1123-5). A family story, engagingly told -- and why it can be written that way is part of the story. In other hands - and with another heroine - this could have been as grim as “Angela's Ashes.”

“Prairie Reunion,” by Barbara J. Scot (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, NY., 1995, hardbound; ISBN 0-374-23686-0). An uneven book, but there is great scene-setting in the early chapters; note the use of the child's voice and imagery. The trip here is through time, not place.

“Silvertown,” by Melanie McGrath (paperback published by Fourth Estate, London, 2003, ISBN 1-84115-143-2). Beautifully written but very peculiar, its subject is not the author's memories but the author's grandmother's: it takes place in the drab, impoverished East End of London in the half-century after World War II.

House Memoirs

These call for their own category, though the best usually involve travel as well. A good collection is “A House Somewhere: Tales of Life Abroad,” edited by Don George and Anthony Sattin (Lonely Planet, 2002, ISBN 1-74059). See also:

“At Home in France,” by Ann Barry (Ballantine, 1996; ISBN 0-345-40787-3). Its mild tone is different, more poignant, than Peter Mayle's breezy books on Provence or their better written kin, Frances Mayes's similar books about Tuscany.

“On Mexican Time,” by Tony Cohan (Broadway Books, 2000; ISBN 0-7679-0319-6). As much about the culture shock of moving to Mexico as it is about finding and restoring a home there. It's so well-written I didn't mind the normally aggravating present tense.

“On a Street Called Easy, in a Cottage Called Joye,” by Gregory White Smith and Steven Naifeh (Little, Brown, 1996; ISBN O-316-59705-8). A pair of New Yorkers restore a wooden palace in a small Southern town and in the process uncover long-buried scandal.

“Sixpence House,” by Paul Collins (Bloomsbury, ISBN 1-58234-284-9). More about the search for a house than the house itself, it's about a young family settling in Wales, where the father works in the famous used bookshops of Hay-on-Wye.

Victorina Lady Travelers

These intrepid women also call for a category of their own. Among the best-known is Mary Kingsley, whose “Travels in West Africa” is still in print (Everyman Press, paperback, most recent edition, 1998; ISBN 0-460-87394-6).

Try also “Between the Desert and the Sown -- The Syrian Adventures of the Female Lawrence of Arabia,” by Gertrude Bell (paperback, Cooper Square Press, reprinted 2001, ISBN 0-8154-1135-9). And anything by Isabella Bird or Freya Stark.

Travel Pairs

These books can stand on their own, but I've paired them because they involve either similar subjects or similar approaches. If you read one, try to at least skim its mate.

“A Time of Gifts,” by Patrick Leigh Fermor. (Viking, paperback; ISBN 014-004-9479). A vivid account of a young man's journey on foot from Holland to Istanbul, just before World War II. Beyond fine writing, what makes this amazing is that it was written a lifetime after it happened.

“On Foot to the Golden Horn,” by Jason Goodwin (Henry Holt paperback, 1995, 0-8050-6409-5). As the previous pair proves, it's never too late to do the same book. But 60 years makes a difference: This is a dreary journey, and the hikers, though young, lack the grace and talent of their predecessor.

* “The Great Railway Bazaar,” by Paul Theroux (There are many editions of this classic; any will do.) The author sets out to travel around the world by rail. (Or come close.) Theroux avers that he wrote the book while he lived the trip. Do you believe him?

“The Size of the World,” by Jeff Greenwald (Globe Pequot Press, 1995; ISBN 0-345-40551-X). This is Paul Theroux's “Great Railway Bazaar” 20 years later: A surface trip around the world in the age of the laptop. Check the beginning and end of this book against Theroux's. Greenwald must have enjoyed this stunt.