Must-reads for Travel & Adventure
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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.
Absolutely. I mean, it's that old truism. We go there so that you don't have to. And, you know, the attrition rate for some of those early explores was immense. Spoiler alert, James Cook died on his third voyage around the world. And he... But he broadened the horizons of of the whole human race. He discovered places that arguably had never been recorded in written literature beforehand. And yes, he I mean, he arguably inspired the British Empire to push out to the four corners of the world. Was that a good thing? Well, for good or for bad. Yeah, I guess if he hadn't done it, somebody else would have. Got to remember the Portuguese and the Spanish and rather notoriously, the Belgians were doing the same, roughly the same time.
So and the Dutch, of course. So, yes, everybody was at it. But certainly those early journals were fascinating. And actually, it was the journals of James Cook. And a book about Ferdinand Magellan that really inspired me to want to start adventuring. Really? Oh, God. Yeah, absolutely. I was given a wonderful compendium, a book of discovery that was basically the choice cuts from all these great adventurers journals. And when I was, what, about nine or ten years old, it had wonderful maps of how the world was expanding because of these adventurers. All the way up to Shackleton and Scott in the Antarctic. And you can see it was a very short jump for me to go from Scott and Shackleton to actually picking up The White Spider by Heinrich Haare, who was one of the first men to climb Shackleton.
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