This week’s Top Ten Tuesday theme is Books for Armchair Travelers, and since Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl gave me credit for suggesting the theme, I thought I’d better get a post up today!
Here are books I would recommend that might transport you to another time and place from the comfort of your favorite reading spot. I thought of many novels to include, but decided to narrow my list down to (mostly) nonfiction. My nonfiction reading leans heavily on memoir, so that’s mostly what you’ll see here, in order by the author’s last name.
Some of these books are included in a previous post, from ten years ago, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly: Memoirs of Traveling with Family.
- Tastes Like War: A Memoir by Grace M. Cho
Growing up, professor and author Grace Cho had known her parents met when her father was stationed in Korea, and that her mother, a “war bride”, an exotic outsider in her father’s economically depressed hometown in Washington State, but it wasn’t until her mother’s sudden change from vibrant, sexy suburban mother to reclusive and paranoid, that she started researching the condition of Korean women during the war and the long-buried trauma that was her mother’s lifelong burden.
2. Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr
Before Anthony Doerr became famous for the novel All the Light We Cannot See, he had to write the book. He writes about working on it (and about not working on it) in Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World, a memoir about the author’s year in Rome with a studio to write in and an apartment to live in, covered by a stipend.
3. Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Journeys by Caroline Eden
From late night baking as a route back to Ukraine to capturing the beauty of Uzbek porcelain, and from the troublesome nature of food and art in Poland to the magic of cloudberries, Cold Kitchen celebrates the importance of curiosity and of feeling at home in the world. – From the Publisher
For each chapter, the author selects a recipe or picks up an ingredient from her pantry, opening up a trove of memories from her extensive travels throughout Central Asia, Turkey, Ukraine, the South Caucasus, Russia, the Baltics and Poland. I received Cold Kitchen (Bloomsbury, 2024) as a review copy (e-book) but I didn’t finish it. I think it was more me and my frame of mind at the time than the book, so I wanted to share it here.
4. The Passenger: How a Travel Writer Learned to Love Cruises & Other Lies from a Sinking Ship by Chaney Kwak
Here’s what I wrote in a 2022 post:
The Passenger by Chaney Kwak is the only serious reading I brought with me on vacation. It’s a brief memoir about the author’s experience as a freelance travel writer on a Viking cruise ship when it lost engine power during a bomb cyclone off a dangerous stretch of Norwegian coast. More than a riveting account of a marine disaster, it’s the story of a life-changing 36 hours, covering so much personal, historical, and philosophical territory that it’s hard to believe it’s not even 150 pages long. For anyone who likes to follow up a memoir by reading other nonfiction accounts, the author includes an extensive list of footnotes.
Highly recommended! I hope to see a novel by this author published before long.
5. Winter: The Story of a Season by Val McDermid
Experience winter in Scotland with this short collection of essays by the Queen of Tartan Noir, Val McDermid.
6. Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. by Jeremy Mercer
Wandering through Paris’s Left Bank one day, poor and unemployed, Canadian reporter Jeremy Mercer ducked into a little bookstore called Shakespeare & Co. Mercer bought a book, and the staff invited him up for tea. Within weeks, he was living above the store, working for the proprietor, George Whitman, patron saint of the city’s down-and-out writers, and immersing himself in the love affairs and low-down watering holes of the shop’s makeshift staff. – From the Publisher
7. Taking the Kids to Italy by Roland Merullo
Originally published in serial form, Taking the Kids to Italy is the author’s account of a disastrous family vacation with his wife, two very young daughters, and his mother (who has the patience of a saint, and is a tremendously good sport). The humor that the adults can see in retrospect doesn’t always manage to cover the despair that seeps into the narrative, but I found myself laughing despite myself.
I wrote about this book in my travel memoirs post, but author Roland Merullo is also a foodie, so I wrote about the foodie part of this book, as well, in this Weekend Cooking post: https://baystatera.com/dining-out-in-rome-with-author-roland-merullo-weekendcooking-bethfishreads/
8. Eating Rome : living the good life in the Eternal City by Elizabeth Minchilli
Another foodie travel book about Rome and Roman cuisine!
9. Until I Say Good-Bye: My Year of Living with Joy by Susan Spencer-Wendel with Bret Witter
I wrote about this in the Travel with Family post:
When the author, a journalist, is diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), she has been in denial for some time, so her physical decline is steep and sharp after the diagnosis. If you choose to read this memoir, which she typed out first on an iPad and then on a phone, which was all she had the physical ability to manage, you will probably cry your way through it as I did, but you will also marvel at the emotional strength she holds onto for the sake of her husband and three children. She decides to fill the year she has left with trips with family members – going with each child to a place of his/her choosing, and taking trips with her sister, her best friend, her husband.
While every page may not be beautifully written, the language she uses to tell the story of her final months spent making joyful memories for those she’ll be leaving behind is never sugarcoated and is very moving.
10. Novels I originally was going to include, that got bumped out by nonfiction:
I’m sharing this with Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, so you’ll find many other Top Ten book lists there!
