Jacob Szymanski

Books that have a steady traveling aspect to them have a built-in forward momentum mechanism that pushes a plot forward just as much as it literally pushes the characters forward.

The Lord of the Rings is over 60 hours long if you combine the three audiobooks, where most characters are traveling at any given time.

And throughout the whole thing, as the reader, you often have a good idea of what the next destination is.

If you don't know what the next destination is, you're desperately curious to know what it's going to be.

Traveling is a forward momentum machine that makes books that utilize it well such page turners.

Today, Red Sale and I are talking travel and adventure books.

This is Audiobook Cafe.

I'm Jacob Szymanski.

Let's travel across the Atlantic and connect with Red Sale, the host of My Life in Books on AMI-audio.

He's connecting from London, UK.

Red, today we're talking travel and adventure.

There's a sort of sub-genre called armchair travel literature, which is literature that's explicitly made for the reader to vicariously experience travel and adventure.

And this is something that was popular in the infancy of the publishing industry.

I'm talking like the 1700s and 1800s.

like starting with the three editions of the voyages of james cook where as he was doing his his exploration of the pacific ocean he was writing these journal logs and he would send those down back to england and they would be turned into these these big tomes with maps and drawings and detailed descriptions of the flora and the people

And they were hits.

They were extremely expensive, but they were very popular amongst like the upper middle class and the upper class of England at the time.

But the whole point was to sort of experience this new frontier of adventure and travel vicariously through a book.

And let's remember that explorers at the time were like the astronauts of the 1960s, you know.

And so James Cook would have been a fascinating person to follow, especially that these books were coming out, you know, not even five years after he'd returned from these journeys.