Packing the right book for your travels

Travel books

When choosing what book to pack in your backpack you should "read a novel that had no relation to the place you're in." So says Paul Theroux in his book The Tao of Travel. According to Theroux we should throw out those Eric Newby books before we set off for the Hindu Kush and equally dispense with those far-fetched novels telling of random romps in colonial Africa when packing for our safari trips.

This got me thinking about the types of books that we do take on our travels. Take a look at any bookshelf in a hostel or guest house and among the usual dog-eared travel guides of neighbouring countries you'll find a very diversity of titles and topics, from gritty criminal novels to surgical textbooks (yes I really have seen these!). How do you choose the books you take on your travels?

Fiction

A novel offers us a chance to get lost in a world of dangerous intrigue or fantasy romance set in the place we happen to be visiting. Despite Theroux's words such a choice will have the reader seeing their temporary surroundings in a very different way to their travel companions. Quite likely we will imagine masked gangsters or a femme fatale waiting around street corner.

An author can even influence how we expect the weather to be (since reading Shadow of the Wind I imagine that Barcelona should be perpetually shrouded in mist). Taking a particular Agatha Christie book on the Orient Express may be ultimate cliché in this genre and we shouldn’t underrate the influence of Don Quixote on a trip through Spanish La Mancha.

Non-fiction

This is certainly my favourite choice of reading material, again in total defiance of Theroux’s bon mots. Reading The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk really put into context the historical sights I was visiting in Uzbekistan, while I have already got myself a well-recommended travelogue for our upcoming trip to Japan. A well written book can serve a similar function to a knowledgeable local guide, with interesting stories and quirky facts that help the reader to better understand why things are the way they are in a particular place.

I might find it hard to read twenty interpretative boards at a castle or a temple and leave with anything more than a morsel of memorable information about how life was life in the 9th century. An audio-guide can provide a little more detail that I might recall weeks or months later. But give me a novel or a historical reference book that paints a complex, multi-layered picture of a particular place and the people who lived there and years later my memory of whatever it was that I was visiting is that much stronger.

What are we missing?

The question then returns to the real meaning behind Theroux’s advice. I have no doubt that he would agree that a good book can serve the purpose of adding colour to a destination as described above. Perhaps however he would question whether using another person’s experiences, emotions and interpretations helps us gain the most from our travel experience, or whether in fact it is up to us to paint our own pictures and live our own experiences in any place without an author's influence, whether real or fictional.

Decisions...

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