Good travel or expat writing

July 13, 2009 12:15 PM

What are your favorite essays about traveling or living abroad?

I am putting together a book as a gift for a friend who is going abroad. What are your favorite essays about traveling or living abroad? Particularly essays with a philosophical or intellectual component. Bonus points if they can be found online. Here is the piece I'm using for the intro.

posted by AceRock to writing & language (21 comments total)

A Moveable Feast is classic.
posted by milarepa at 12:18 PM on July 13

Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon is a fantastic book, and it's worth searching the New Yorker website for some of his essays about being an expat.

Here's a short interview with him about living in Paris.
posted by KokuRyu at 12:28 PM on July 13

How To Travel With A Salmon by Umberto Eco
posted by The World Famous at 12:44 PM on July 13

Umm, maybe this?
posted by leigh1 at 12:45 PM on July 13 [1 favorite]

David Sedaris often writes and speaks about living in France. There's Daisy Miller among many other Henry James novels about Americans abroad, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood and her short stories are good meditations on exile and expatriotism, and the book Prague is actually about Americans who live in Budapest and secretly wonder if they made the wrong decision to not work in the Czech Republic.
posted by zoomorphic at 12:52 PM on July 13

Seconding both Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon and David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day. I loved both, but Paris to the Moon is probably my favourite travel book of all time.
posted by evadery at 12:55 PM on July 13

Travels by Michael Crichton, is a great (non-fiction) read. Each chapter is basically an anecdote from his travels abroad.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 1:03 PM on July 13

one of my favourite passages from "Wanderer" by Sterling Hayden:


To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea-"cruising," it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

"I’ve always wanted to sail the South Seas, but I can’t afford it." What these men can’t afford is not to go. They are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of "security." And in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the routine of routine – and before we know it our lives are gone.

What does a man need – really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in – and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all – in the material sense. And we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up in a tomb beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade.

The years thunder by. The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.

Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?
posted by gursky at 1:25 PM on July 13 [1 favorite]

Any of Bill Bryson's travel writing.
posted by scratch at 1:52 PM on July 13 [1 favorite]

Martha Gellhorn: Travels with Myself and Another
Her favorite hardship trips. "She remembes best the 'horror journeys,' those which seem funny and lovable in retrospect but were endurance contests at the time." A great read.
posted by TWinbrook8 at 1:55 PM on July 13

David Sedaris again. In When You Are Engulfed In Flames, he writes about living in France and living in Japan.
posted by KoobieKitten at 2:10 PM on July 13

Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad is a classic. I just read and enjoyed Timothy Garton Ash's The File in which he revisits his time living in East Germany by reviewing his Stasi file. And Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back is interesting reading on one very opinionated person's trip to Israel in the 1970s. It's also interesting reading on the (probably vanished) life of public intellectuals like Bellow.

If you're looking for non-guidebook books on a specific country, a good start is sometimes a guidebook. I know Lonely Planet always has book rec's in the culture section at the front.
posted by Xalf at 2:35 PM on July 13

Robert Luis Stevenson wrote some great travel literature. For example he wrote in Virginibus Puerisque

Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.

He also did Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes.
posted by rongorongo at 3:21 PM on July 13

George Saunders' piece on Dubai, "The New Mecca," is outstaaaanding. Saunders contemplates the pre-recession Dubai (even the darker side) as a microcosm for the globalized, capitalist future.

But on a shallower, simpler level, he's mostly just hilariously awestruck and confused by the bizarreness of Dubai and its obscene opulence.

(looked for a copy online, but couldn't find one. sorry -- it's the first essay in The Braindead Megaphone.)
posted by the NATURAL at 4:20 PM on July 13

This is a self-link, but an essay I wrote about visiting Hong Kong got into Best American Essays.
posted by kensanway at 4:32 PM on July 13

Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down by Rosecrans Baldwin

I asked him to suggest a French game instead that we could play. “OK, OK, here is a French game,” he said. “We will talk about something for a little while. It will be about nothing. We will talk and talk and talk about it. Sometimes I will take the other side of the conversation, just to say you are wrong. And then we will stop.”
posted by martens at 4:49 PM on July 13

Any of Bill Bryson's travel writing.

Notes from a Small Island was the first Bryson book I read, and still my favorite.
posted by sriracha at 5:11 PM on July 13

The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton
posted by Colonel_Chappy at 5:47 PM on July 13

Maciej Cegłowski's Idle Words: his Attacked by Thugs is hilarious, and Argentina on Two Steaks a Day is excellent.
posted by Jorus at 5:31 AM on July 14

Astonished that no one mentioned Why We Travel by Pico Iyer.
posted by nitsuj at 5:59 AM on July 14

Stevenson wrote some great travel literature.

I entered the thread to say the exact same thing. My own favorite from Virginibus is "A Walking Tour," which locates a sort of enlightenment in the exhaustion that follows a day's travel:

If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing better in life than to lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or lean over the parapet of the bridge, to watch the weeds and the quick fishes. It is then, if ever, that you taste Joviality to the full significance of that audacious word. Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean and so strong and so idle, that whether you move or sit still, whatever you do is done with pride and a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in talk with any one, wise or foolish, drunk or sober. And it seems as if a hot walk purged you, more than of anything else, of all narrowness and pride, and left curiosity to play its part freely, as in a child or a man of science.

And some excerpts from this array of the best of outdoor literature might suit:

Then too, there are books that have nothing to do with camping, and less to do with the western mountains, that are valuable preparations for a camping trip. Walton’s Compleat Angler is full of misinformation about fish, Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selbourne is primitive by modern standards, Bunyan’s Pilgrim traveled only in his own soul, but I suspect that these are the three best manuals for camping and woodcraft that will ever be written. If you can, read them in the winter as you plan your trip. The works of R.B Cunningham-Graham and W.H. Hudson are more modern and more eventful, but they have something of the same spirit. Tyndall’s Glaciers of the Alps, Whymper’s Scrambles Amongst the Alps are classics of the golden age of mountaineering. Tyndall sometimes calls a spade a geotome, but, I suspect, with his tongue in his cheek. Whymper’s book, now in a new, complete edition, is one of the world’s great tragic dramas.

(From Kenneth Rexroth's Camping in the Western Mountain, itself an outdated but evocative examination of a particular mode of travel.)
posted by Iridic at 9:24 AM on July 14