Travel books. Effei suggests

“People don’t take trips. Trips take people.” (John Steinbeck)

Trying to make a list of the best books about travel would be enormously reductive, so we would like to limit ourselves to suggesting three (just for now) that have certainly contributed significantly to giving a good dose of freedom and adventure to thousands of readers. 

Into the wild. (Jon Krakauer)

It is the spring of the 1990s when Chris McCandless sets off alone into the Alaskan wilderness. Abandoning all his possessions and without adequate equipment, he embarks on the most extreme journey, in which the only home is the road.

The story tells not only Chris’ journey, but more than anything else that journey towards a state of absolute purity, of abandoning civilisation to seek absolute contact with uncontaminated nature. A two-year journey around the world to reach the great white of the North.

“(…) I wished to acquire the simplicity, pure feelings and virtues of wild life, to strip myself of the artificial habits, prejudices and imperfections of the civilised world(…)”

A fortune-teller told me. (Tiziano Terzani)

It all starts with a prophecy, which turns a trip to South East Asia into an opportunity to look at the world with new eyes. 

‘Watch out! In 1993 you run a great risk of dying. In that year do not fly. Never fly’.

This is how 1993 became the year to discover the deepest and most authentic Asian culture, travelling only by train, boat, car or on foot. 

A book of journeys and encounters, of accurate and detailed descriptions of places so much so that they come alive, almost making us feel we are there.  

On the road. (Jack Kerouac)

The quintessential travel book, about the United States in the 1950s and the Beat Generation. 

The journey becomes the tool for breaking away from the rules of the bourgeois masses and chasing the values typical of a free and nomadic lifestyle.

From Paterson to Marin City, from Rocky Mount to San Francisco, from Denver to Long Island and, finally, from New York to Mexico City. Sal Paradise, a young New York student and autobiographical transposition of the author, decides to embark on an on-the-road journey through boundless landscapes and the extreme diversity of the American country.

The book that makes incurable travellers dream.

“We had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life”.

Effei
The Editors