Do you have a book addiction? Well I’m here to make it worse.
I love a good reading list like a hobo loves Aqua Velva.
Writer, Explorer and Travel Philosopher
Do you have a book addiction? Well I’m here to make it worse.
I love a good reading list like a hobo loves Aqua Velva.
Ronald Wright traveled Peru in the 1970’s and 80’s, fresh from university with a degree in archaeology, feeding an obsession with the Inca Empire sparked by a random adventure novel he’d read in his teens.
How did I live for 47 years without reading Martha Gellhorn?
She’s best known in some circles for her brief wartime marriage to the writer Ernest Hemingway, much to her chagrin. But she is better known as a brilliant war correspondent and travel writer, though she wanted to be remembered as a novelist.
Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989?
I was sitting in the back room of our old house watching music videos on TV.
We didn’t have the specialty channels back then, but the cable company was running a free promo all week, and we could watch the movie channel and the music channel for free.
“So it goes” recurs like a refrain throughout this collection of essays, and I found myself wishing it would go on and on.
Nicolas Bouvier is one of those legendary writers whose name circulates among travelers, but few of my North American road friends had ever heard of him. It was European friends who told me about his classic road trip book, The Way of the World.
Not a Hazardous Sport brings to a close Nigel Barley’s series of anthropological journeys that began with The Innocent Anthropologist and continued in A Plague of Caterpillars.
Nigel Barley returns to Cameroon in this hilarious follow up to The Innocent Anthropologist.
“Returns” is a bit of a misnomer. In truth, he’d only just left.
I’d only been in London for a few hours, and I was already thinking I’d have to scrap a year’s work.
Nigel Barley was a rather unhappy “desk anthropologist” at a British university.
His fieldwork-hardened older colleagues never stopped reminding him of this, because back in their day, it wasn’t enough to camp out in a library cordoned off by stacks of journals. You had to get out and live with the natives.
It’s that time again.
I typically read about 100 books a year. Everything from travel literature to poetry, history, psychology, fiction and memoir.
I love reading lists and recommendations, and I bet a few of you do, too. So at year’s end, I like to take a moment to share my top reads of the past twelve months.
Copyright © 2021 Ryan Murdock
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