Reading Around in the Penguin Travel Library (and Other Travel Books)

[Extollager]

There's a thread here

Penguin Travel Library and other literary travel books

I might as well make available here some information that I've gathered. I will probably update it from time to time. Does anyone know if I have missed anything? Especially -- does anyone have comments on any of these? Penguin Travel Library -- Complete List (?) Here I will list books...

www.sffchronicles.com

with a lot of bibliographic information about the Penguin Travel Library of about 1984-1993. Some of them can be picked up used from online vendors at low price. The idea with this thread: a place to discuss travel book reads.

My plan is to read a title in the PTL series every six weeks or so, for an indefinite period. I've piled up a fair number of those over the years. I expect to post the list of my collection, alphabetical by author, soon. Quite a few I've never read, & others I'd like to reread. I ordered one today:

It might be fun to have links to instrumental music that we think could sort of get you in the mood for a travel book.

So how about it, fellow armchair travelers?

 

[hitmouse]

I’ll bite. Currently sitting in a hotel room in Hong Kong, about to crack this beauty:

It is a Picador, if that is OK.

 

[Extollager]

Herewith FWIW a list of the Penguin Travel Library books I own. I haven't tried to collect all of the books issued with the series title. I intend to post separately a short list containing books I own that were in the PTL series, but my copies aren't.

Ackerley, Hindoo Holiday

Andrews, The Flight of Ikaros

Barley, A Plague of Caterpillars

Barr, The Coming of the Barbarians ALSO The Deer Park Pavilion

Beagle, I See by My Outfit

Belloc, The Path to Rome

Bibby, Looking for Dilmun

Byron, First Russia, then Tibet

Conover, Rolling Nowhere

De Monfreid, Hashish

Doughty, Passages from Arabia Deserta

Farson, Caucasian Journey

Fermor, Mani ALSO Roumeli ALSO A Time of Gifts

Fleming, Brazilian Adventure

Gide, Travels in the Congo

Gorer, Africa Dances

Greene, Too Late to Turn Back

Hearn, Writings from Japan

Hoagland, African Calliope

James, A Little Tour in France

Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence in Italy (omnibus volume containing Twilight in Italy, The Sea and Sardinia, and Etruscan Places ALSO Mornings in Mexico

Levi, The Light Garden of the Angel King

Maxwell. A Reed Shaken by the Wind

Macaulay, They Went to Portugal

McCarthy, The Stones of Florence [and] Venice Observed

Newby. The Big Red Train Ride ALSO The Last Grain Race ALSO Love and War in the Apennines ALSO A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush ALSO Slowly Down the Ganges

Pern, Continental Divide

Pope-Hennessy, Aspects of Provence

Pye-Smith, The Other Nile ALSO Travels in Nepal

Smith, Blind White Fish in Persia

Thesiger, Arabian Sands

Thubron, Journey into Cyprus

Wright (Ronald), Cut Stone and Crossroads ALSO On Fiji Islands

That comes to 43 books, of which so far I have read 18 (42%); I've read quite a few travel books that I don't own or that I don't have in PTL editions even if they were issued in them. I have read about half of Cut Stones and Crossroads, about Peru. It isn't anything like as long as Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, but it strikes me as like that book a searching exploration of land, history, and travel observation that is a bit easy to bog down in. I've read around here and there in Writings from Japan, which is a collection of Hearn's writings edited by Francis King. I've been reading the series very intermittently for 38 years, beginning with Gide's Travels in the Congo. I keep my PTL books together except for Beagle's I See by My Outfit. Because of a few Tolkien references, I keep this book, originally published before the 1965 LotR paperback explosion, with Tolkienian materials.

 

[Extollager]

Six travel books that were in the Penguin Travel Library and that I own, but not in PTL editions:

Byron, The Road to Oxiana
Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World
Fleming, One's Company
Glazebrook, Journey to Kars
Newby, Round Ireland in Low Gear
Waugh, Ninety-Two Days

Matthiessen's The Cloud Forest was in PTL. I have it as serialized in The New Yorker, I believe.

 

[Extollager]

I’ll bite. Currently sitting in a hotel room in Hong Kong, about to crack this beauty:
View attachment 124045
It is a Picador, if that is OK.

How are you finding this book to be, Hitmouse?

I read it many years ago. It was certainly a better than average travel book. I wondered about the pagination of your copy. In mine, the first word on page 100 is "five" (other than the running head of AN AREA OF DARKNESS). It looks like I started writing comments inside the front cover etc. only after I was about 2/5 through the book. Here are some of the things I noted.

121: he gains illumination on the master-servant relationship in Oblomov and Dead Souls.
131: enjoyment of "childish" colors
156: "Holiness meant..." Strutting pilgrims
198: despair, leading to passivity, detachment, acceptance
212: It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly... it is well that they have no sense of history... It is better to retreat into fantasy and fatalism... there are lectures in astrology in some universities
213 ff: ruins
217: it was Europe that revealed India's past to India and made its veneration part of Indian nationalism
239: I required darkness
256: Out of all its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy
257: To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure

It's a self-discovery too (a theme perhaps too easy and ready-made in later travel books by other writers)

 

[Extollager]

Just finished Alan Booth's exemplary travelogue of a very long walk indeed. In The Roads to Sata (c) 1986 he narrates a 1977 walk from the northern tip of Hokkaido to the southern tip of Kyushu -- a walk across Japan of about 3,300 km in 128 days. He walked 43 km on his longest day. He turned down all the offers of a ride. My favorite travel books tend to involve just walking. I know I've quoted Werner Herzog before: "The volume and depth and intensity of the world is something that only those on foot will ever experience."

Booth was 30 and had lived in Japan for seven years, and was fluent in the language. He was often assumed at first to be American but is English. Whenever he can he stays in a ryokan, basically a small mom & pop lodging place for the night. He talks with people, drinks plenty of beer, tells us stories touching, disturbing, or funny. Beliefs about foxes remained. Some parts of the countryside were appealing, some gaspingly polluted. The three nicest things overall were bathing in the hot springs, beer, and having a dip in the sea.

It was in the Penguin Travel Library! I didn't know (or remember) that till just now when I went looking for an image to accompany this posting. Here are a couple of editions.

 

[hitmouse]

How are you finding this book to be, Hitmouse?

I read it many years ago. It was certainly a better than average travel book. I wondered about the pagination of your copy. In mine, the first word on page 100 is "five" (other than the running head of AN AREA OF DARKNESS). It looks like I started writing comments inside the front cover etc. only after I was about 2/5 through the book. Here are some of the things I noted.

121: he gains illumination on the master-servant relationship in Oblomov and Dead Souls.
131: enjoyment of "childish" colors
156: "Holiness meant..." Strutting pilgrims
198: despair, leading to passivity, detachment, acceptance
212: It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly... it is well that they have no sense of history... It is better to retreat into fantasy and fatalism... there are lectures in astrology in some universities
213 ff: ruins
217: it was Europe that revealed India's past to India and made its veneration part of Indian nationalism
239: I required darkness
256: Out of all its squalor and human decay, its eruptions of butchery, India produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy
257: To know Indians was to take a delight in people as people; every encounter was an adventure

It's a self-discovery too (a theme perhaps too easy and ready-made in later travel books by other writers)

I have just finished ths. I cannot comment on the pagination of my copy as I have given the book to my son.

I thought this was excellent. I do not always agree with Naipaul’s analysis, which is sometimes overblown, but he is always interesting and often insightful. Context is important. The book was written in 1962-64 when independent India was leas than 20 years old, and had issues that made Naipaul feel hopeless. His comments are still relevant, but the problems themselves have evolved.


The book is strongest, and most relevant in its meditation on identity, particularly national identity. Naipaul is a 3rd generation Indian immigrant from Trinidad, and his family remain part of a dwindling Hindu community, distinct within the Trinidadian melange, upholding their culture whilst the idea of the Indian motherland becomes more and more abstract. He visits India from this perspective, and makes interesting observations on differences in the post-colonial experience between India and Trinidad.

I enjoyed the comic stories of his sojourn in Kashmir and his trip to South India where he accidentally hooks up with a drunken bigot.