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Chapter 1: What makes travel and adventure books compelling?
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.
Indeed, aren't we just? Yes, I have long been an armchair adventurer as far as books are concerned. They can take you all over the world. without you actually having to leave the comfort of your own home or pack that pesky suitcase.
But also, and I'm sure we'll come on to discuss this, every so often they can just act as a spur to you to get your walking boots on and take the rucksack and just go out and explore the world and broaden your horizons.
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.
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Chapter 2: What is armchair travel literature?
Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, that goes for everything that you would be reading in those days. You know, you only had the Delhi correspondence word that, you know, you were what you were reading in The Times was actually a true reflection of what was going on. So everything you trusted what you wrote. And I think that's what makes.
Jules Verne is such a fascinating author because he does write as if, as you say, this is a true account. H.G. Wells does exactly the same. And the reader is... The reader probably knows that it's fiction, but how much of it is based on fact? Yeah, no, fascinating, because they have nothing else to refer to.
You know, there's no television, there's no radio, there's no next-door neighbour who went to Goa last year to tell you that actually India's nothing like that. So it's... I rather admire... and feel slightly jealous, actually, of those less enlightened ages. It's certainly something that I was talking about with the latest guest on My Life in Books, which comes out this week, R.C.
Shaw, who's a Canadian surfer and educator.
Chapter 3: How did James Cook influence travel literature?
and adventurer. And he was inspired by Joshua Slocum, the Canadian who was the first man to circumnavigate the world single-handed. in 1898 and his account of this circumnavigation which took three years and was something like 48 000 miles his account of it sailing around the world has actually never been out of print since And it's the foundation text for R.C.
Shaw to retrace some of the formative steps of Joshua Slocum in Nova Scotia. And as such, he takes a very heavily laden cargo bike. his surfboard and a tent, a hammock tent, and embarks on his own epic journey. And in this clip, we can hear exactly why he wanted to do that.
I was looking to re-evaluate my life and everything that I should feel fortunate about and sometimes forget. And I think stepping away from it and also leaving the technology behind so that I could really meditate on those things on the road and meeting all these new, kind, generous people in the province that I call home.
All of these things I was hoping would then, when I got back, make me ideally a better person, but definitely more grateful for what I had.
And I think, you know, you can hear from that, travel does make you a better person. Putting your phone aside and actually interacting with other people, putting yourself at the mercy of their hospitality, which is exactly what Joshua Slocum did in his single-handed sailing around the world. He had no money. He... He had to put himself at the mercy of the elements and his fellow human beings.
And he was truly having an adventure. And if we can use these old texts that you and I have been talking about to inspire our own adventure, our own adventures, Even if it's just getting a little bit out of our comfort zone during the school holidays with the kids, then, you know, that can be very, very enlightening and remind us that we are all adventurers at the end of the day.
If a man can circumnavigate the globe by himself, then I can go down the street and have a coffee with my friend. A little bit of inspiration. But, you know, in his case, it seems the way he phrased it, it seemed like it was an exercise in self-reflection and meditation. That, in other words, is an adventure. An adventure is the unknown things to come.
He didn't know what he was going to get out of it. But we need to put ourselves in adventures to grow as people. And I'm sure James Cook grew as a person. Maybe not for the best throughout his experience. One more book I want to shout out. This is also a book from the 1800s that really falls into this category. Excellent book. The Count of Monte Cristo.
The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas. I never shut up about it, so I won't say too much about it. Amazing tale of revenge, but a good amount of travel. And sometimes it feels like some chapters are just written specifically just so you can sort of experience the space and the place and time. Amazingly written too.
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