Friday, March 30, 2007
Rip van Winkle's got Nothing on Me
Ah, Spring! Newness abounds, including a return to (hopefully) regular posting here. I wish I could lie here and say that the last month of life at this end has been a hissing-tires-on-a-Mobius Strip-of-a-highway kind of experience and have that serve as justification for not posting. But, I’ve got one of those lie-detector keys set up on the keyboard that would immediately shock me with a surge of honesty, so I begged off driving down that road of mis-direction. It was just a really bad combo-case of tushery and agraphia that did me in. Bits of words strung together evoked large yawns. A blogging sin!
With Spring, comes thoughts of longer trips and imagined forays to places not explored before. Don’t think I’m the only one thumbing through travelogues and poking around Travelocity or Expedia in search of cheapness and destinations. Hillbilly, Please, a blogger who defines the phrase voracious reader, makes some comments about Bill Bryson, a well-favoured travel writer who gets my lather up after only a page or two of his navel-gazing. Her suggestion of this book is one I’ll gladly pass on to you. Thick with humour, history, and misery. Sits quite well alongside Shipping News,The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, and An Innocent in Newfoundland: Even More Curious Rambles and Singular Encounters. What could be better?
I tend more to Tony Horwitz, Tim Cahill, or Pico Iyer, or the ever-dependable and always indispensable Mark Twain.
This site, Rolf Potts’ Vagabonding, offers an excellent intro to travel writers. Embarrassingly, I recognized only a handful of these folks. Another book list to start!
Thanks to all my faithful who poked and prodded the blog-corpse until I was shamed into punching the keys again. If there were a cozy shack on the edge of a wave-crashing cliff serving ice-cold draughts, I’d be buying you all a round.
With Spring, comes thoughts of longer trips and imagined forays to places not explored before. Don’t think I’m the only one thumbing through travelogues and poking around Travelocity or Expedia in search of cheapness and destinations. Hillbilly, Please, a blogger who defines the phrase voracious reader, makes some comments about Bill Bryson, a well-favoured travel writer who gets my lather up after only a page or two of his navel-gazing. Her suggestion of this book is one I’ll gladly pass on to you. Thick with humour, history, and misery. Sits quite well alongside Shipping News,The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, and An Innocent in Newfoundland: Even More Curious Rambles and Singular Encounters. What could be better?
I tend more to Tony Horwitz, Tim Cahill, or Pico Iyer, or the ever-dependable and always indispensable Mark Twain.
This site, Rolf Potts’ Vagabonding, offers an excellent intro to travel writers. Embarrassingly, I recognized only a handful of these folks. Another book list to start!
Thanks to all my faithful who poked and prodded the blog-corpse until I was shamed into punching the keys again. If there were a cozy shack on the edge of a wave-crashing cliff serving ice-cold draughts, I’d be buying you all a round.
Labels: Trips
Comments:
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Okay, we may differ on Bryson, but I love Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, and Horwitz, and Annie Proulx. I've read most of Cahill's books but still prefer Bryson. 8-} Granta publishes some great travel writing collections, but I rarely read the same author twice that way. Vagabonding looks like a good link to save for future reference.
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