Booklist magazine recently released its 2015 list of Top 10 Literary Travel Books, and among them is Nick Hunt's, Walking the Woods and the Water: In Patrick Leigh Fermor's Footsteps from the Hook of Holland to the Golden Horn. Fermor was the great British travel writer who set off across Europe in 1933 at age eighteen "like a tramp, a pilgrim or a wandering scholar." His books about that journey are: A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road (published posthumously in the U.S. in 2014). Another title from the Top 10 list was also inspired by Patrick Leigh Fermor: Drink Time! In the Company of Patrick Leigh Fermor by Dolores Payas. As translator of his books into Spanish, Paya knew Fermor in his later years and writes of their friendship. In addition to the books pictured here, other books on Fermor can be found in our collection at this link: Fermor books.
Keeping with Nick Hunt's writing of a famous journey retraveled is Rinker Buck's Oregon Trail: A New American Journey (Simon & Schuster, 2015) about his and his brother's 2000 mile journey from St. Joseph, Missouri to Baker City, Oregon in a mule-drawn covered wagon.
Chasing Schackleton by Tim Jarvis (William Morrow, 2013) is another telling of a risky recreation of a historic journey, Ernest Schackleton's Antarctic expedition. The library also has the Chasing Schackleton DVD (PBS 2014).
Whether you want to travel a great historic route or experience it through literature, here are two titles that may help you identify journeys that interest you: 100 Great Journeys: Exciting Voyages through History and Literature (Hammond, 2008) and The Seventy Great Journeys in History (Thames & Hudson, 2006).
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