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Greetings!
Most of our summer clientele are seasonal residents, visitors, and travelers. Virtually all are away from home. That is a condition that most of us experience from time to time either by choice or happenstance. Travel can be exhilarating. It can be inspiring. It can be romantic. It can be unsettling. It can be frightening. It can be boring. That sounds like the stuff of literature. And, not surprisingly, it is. Travel writing is a genre that dates at least from the time of Herodotus (c. 440 BCE) and is prominent in the stories and books of every culture.
Best known to us are 20th century and contemporary travel writers like Robert Byron (The Road to Oxiana); Bruce Chatwin (In Patagonia); Jan Morris (The World of Venice); Paul Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar); and, Pico Iyer (Video Night in Kathmandu); or stay a bit closer to home with Julie Buckles (Paddling to Winter). Their work has triggered a wanderlust that has lasted our lifetime. In our own case, it is hard for any other genre to match the pure and simple joy of a good travel book or allows us to experience places we cannot or will not ever go..
Interestingly, some of the best travel writing is not by so-called “travel writers” at all, but by writers best known for other work. Take, for example, Mark Twain’s (Innocents Abroad); D. H. Lawrence’s (Sea and Sardinia); Lawrence Durrell’s (Bitter Lemons); Woody Guthrie’s (Bound for Glory) and, Oliver Sacks’ (Oaxaca Journal).
Our favorite travel writing makes us feel as if we are right there with the writer – the landscapes, the aromas of the market, the sounds of the train, the exotic flavors and the bracing feel of glacial waters. We experience the Taj Mahal, Pont Neuf, Venice, the Great Wall, the Serengeti, Patagonia, Uluru (Ayer’s Rock), the Arctic Canadian North, and the Apostle Islands. We encounter the people.
Remember, if you’ve lost yours,
we are your local bookstore!
All of us at AIB
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 June 29th, 2:00-4:00pm
Travel back in time with local author Michael Herrick!
This is a true story of one family's ancestral line spanning over 26 generations and over 10 centuries. It is a story of success, failure, joy and sorrow. It is a story of individuals experiencing life's ups and downs within their vastly different environments.
Michael Herrick will be on hand to chat about his book and likely inspire you to learn more about where your family came from as well! We all have a story to tell… what’s yours?
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 The Road to Oxiana
by Robert Byron
In the early 1930’s Byron set off on a trip through the Middle East ostensibly to explore the origins of Islamic architecture. He reached Oxiana (the northern borderland of Afghanistan along the Amu Darya River) via Beirut, Jerusalem, Damascus and Baghdad. Naturally, there is a reasonable dose of architecture in the book, but its real appeal lies in Byron’s account of the journey. He recounts the day-to-day events and travails of his trip – the landscapes, the people, the sites – with brilliant, evocative description. One has to swallow a dose of the colonialist chauvinism of his day, but it’s good medicine.
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 Oaxaca Journal
by Oliver Sacks
From the neurologist who wrote The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat comes this slim account of Sacks’ brief visit to Oaxaca in southern Mexico. The occasion was his participation in a field trip of the New York Botanical Garden made up largely of serious pteridologists (look it up!). They were there to study the unparalleled proliferation of ferns in the region. While there are certainly a lot of ferns in the book, it really is not about ferns. It is rather about Sacks' enormous range of openness to human experience in all its forms. What a delight!
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