Other Sources for Books for Travelers

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As much as the Traveler’s Library would like to think it is unique in the world…it isn’t. Get over yourself, Library–there are others doing good work with travel literature.

Biblio Travel is a site presided over by a couple of librarians with contributions from a wide variety of people.  You type in a country, region, or state in the United States and a recommendation list of books for travelers pops up.  These books follow the same kind of rules we follow here–anything goes as long as it helps with the travel experience. Sense of place is very important.

Wandering Educators provides a lot of information for teachers who travel with or without students, but of particular interest to the Traveler’s Library, they have a compendium of book reviews. Our contributor R. Todd Felton is the Literary Editor of Wandering Educators, and I am proud to say that I am now their Traveler’s Library Editor.

The Hieroglyphic Streets has a lot in common with A Traveler’s Library. Here are the differences. They give you more links to book reviews. They list one book per post. They invite others to post (well we kind of do that). They have read Thomas Pynchon, and apparently, they even understand him. That’s where the title comes from. I am so NOT a Pynchon reader that I could not even get through the entire explanation (?) of the name Hieroglyphic  Streets.

However, here’s what I do love about this site. They say “We recommends books for places — fiction and non-fiction that explain or evoke a neighborhood, city, or country. You could call it literary tourism.” And “The question we ask is, would we recommend a book to a person traveling to or reading about a given place? When we travel, we like to read books about or set in wherever we’re going. This includes fiction from a local author, or that happens in that locale. It also includes non-fiction like memoir, travel writing, and history. We don’t think we will include guide books, which are easy enough to find somewhere else.”

Now that’s something that we all agree on, don’t we? Bravo!

That explains three of the links in the Library’s  BlogRoll.  I intend to tell you more about the others in the future. And I encourage you to visit these sites and see what you can find of value there.  Please check back here and share your thoughts. You might also leave a comment at their site and mention who sent you.  Thanks.

Tags: Blogs, Books, Travel, travel literature