January: A book about travel
This month, we're reading books that take us on those childhood train journeys, the crazy road trips, those adventurous backpacking trails and that long haul flight flying you to promising distant lands
Recommendations:
Truck de India!: A Hitchhiker's Guide to Hindustan A journalist hitchikes his way in trucks across India, leading to delightful and profound insights.Think truck drivers, and movie scenes of them drunkenly crushing inconvenient people to their gravelly deaths come to mind. But what are their lives on the road actually like?
My Life in France Julia Child's memoir of her time spent in France and the beginnings of her career. The bestselling story of Julia's years in France--and the basis for Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams--in her own words.
All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes Angelou’s own version of settling in, exploring West African culture, and connecting her family’s history of enforced slavery in the American South to their roots in the Mother Continent.
Around The World in Seventy-Two Days Originally published in 1890 in book form, the text was based on Nellie Bly's newspaper articles for the New York World. In 1889, Bly went around the world as a journalism "stunt" to beat the fictional record of Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg -- and even made a stop in France to meet Verne.
How Not to Travel the World: Adventures of a Disaster-Prone Backpacker Lauren’s travels were full of bad luck and near-death experiences. Over the space of a year, she was scammed and assaulted; lost teeth and swallowed a cockroach. She fell into leech-infested rice paddies, was caught up in a tsunami, had the brakes of her motorbike fail and experienced a very unhappy ending during a massage in Thailand. It was just as she was about to give up on travel when she stumbled across a handsome New Zealander with a love of challenges...
Following Fish: Travels Around the Indian Coast A trip around coastal India exploring food, culture, commerce, sport, history and society. In a coastline as long and diverse as India's, fish inhabit the heart of many worlds—food of course, but also culture, commerce, sport, history and society. Journeying along the edge of the peninsula, Samanth Subramanian reports upon a kaleidoscope of extraordinary stories.
The Shooting Star A girl, her backpack and the world. The author Shivya Nath quit her corporate job at age twenty-three to travel the world. She gave up her home and the need for a permanent address, sold most of her possessions and embarked on a nomadic journey that has taken her everywhere from remote Himalayan villages to the Amazon rainforests of Ecuador.
Falling Off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World The author of Video Night in Kathmandu ups the ante on himself in this sublimely evocative and acerbically funny tour through the world's loneliest and most eccentric places.
Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture Food, Travel, Japan. It's a win! An innovative new take on the travel guide, Rice, Noodle, Fish decodes Japan's extraordinary food culture through a mix of in-depth narrative and insider advice, along with 195 color photographs.
Around the World in 80 Trains: A 45,000-Mile Adventure Traveling the world in trains, Monisha offers a wonderfully vivid account of life, history and culture in a book that will make you laugh out loud - and reflect on what it means to be a global citizen - as you whirl around the world in its pages.
In a Sunburned Country Despite the fact that Australia harbors more things that can kill you in extremely nasty ways than anywhere else, including sharks, crocodiles, snakes, even riptides and deserts, Bill Bryson adores the place, and he takes his readers on a rollicking ride far beyond that beaten tourist path.
Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle Dervla Murphy's account of her bicycle trip from Ireland to India, availble on Audible as well.Based on her daily diary, this is Dervla Murphy's account of her ride, in 1963, across frozen Europe and through Persia and Afghanistan, over the Himalayas to Pakistan and into India, during one of the worst winters in memory.
No Shitting In The Toilet A travel guide with a difference, this title introduces a world where you are more likely to find a cockroach on your pillow than a complimentary mint, where you take your life in your own hands every tim eyou get on a bus, where everything goes wrong, and you still end up loving every minute of it.
Travels in a Dervish Cloak The real story of a BBC journalist's time traveling around Pakistan. Spellbound by his grandmother's Anglo-Indian heritage and the exuberant annual visits of her friend the Begum, Isambard Wilkinson became enthralled by Pakistan as an intrepid teenager, eventually working there as a foreign correspondent during the War on Terror.
Mossad: the Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret service Mossad: The Greatest Missions of the Israeli Secret Service unveils the defi ning and most dangerous operations that have shaped Israel and the world at large from the agency's more than sixty-year history, among them: the capture of Adolf Eichmann, the eradication of Black September, the destruction of the Syrian nuclear facility, and the elimination of key Iranian nuclear scientists.