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Anyone read it?
I read it years ago – it was probably the first book that really hooked me into the travel narrative genre.
I am not even sure if it’s just me having rose coloured glasses, but I don’t know if it stands up to a re-reading.
What’s your favourite travel narrative? I am looking for a new one to read.
Must be third world. Must be adventure.
Years ago, when I worked in Egypt (1993), I read a book called Malaria Dreams, by Stuart Stevens; a book about the author’s travels through central Africa in a beaten up land rover.
Not a big book, but highly entertaining.http://www.amazon.com/Malaria-Dreams-An-African-Adventure/dp/087113361X
I’m not suggesting you read it, but the great adventurer and writer who first whetted my interest in Iran was Freya Stark with her book The Valleys of the Assassins. I subsequently read her East is West, a couple of her books on Turkey and I think one of the Arabian peninsula ones (along with Thesiger, of course).
The best writer in the genre I’ve come across is Norman Lewis. Last summer I read Voices of the Old Sea, which chronicles the dying way of life of a Spanish fishing village in the 1940s and 50s at the cusp of arrival of tourism. It’s a masterpiece. I’ve got a couple of his other books lined up for this summer.
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