Summer vacation is almost here, and with it comes the itch to travel. Whether you’re looking forward to a fabulous vacation or plan on spending the next three months on your couch, reading can be a great way to experience a new place without ever having to leave your house. Here’s a list of highly engaging reading recommendations that transport you all over the globe without the cost of a plane ticket.
“Less” by Andrew Sean Greer ($4.85)
In order to escape attending his ex-boyfriend’s wedding, failed novelist Arthur Less books a whirlwind tour of the world taking him to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India and Japan. This fast-paced satire of the American abroad offers a heartfelt and captivating experience that will have you searching for your passport.
“A Movable Feast” by Ernest Hemingway ($11.79)
Ernest Hemingway once said, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” His memoir, “A Movable Feast”, vividly describes the artistic and literary scene that emerged in Paris in the early 1920s. Read as Hemingway rubs shoulders with Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald all while becoming immersed in Parisian culture.
“My Life on the Road” by Gloria Steinem ($14.24)
“Taking to the road—by which I mean letting the road take you—changed who I thought I was. The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.”
Gloria Steinem’s autobiography will take you up and down the highways of America, to rural India, and just about everywhere in between. Covering her early life and activism, Steinem literally puts her readers in the backseat. Steinem’s discussion of her life is so honest and intimate, that you could almost imagine that she’s telling her story over the course of a long car ride.
“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” by Joan Didion ($13.99)
Joan Didion’s seminal work “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” will transport you to 1960s California. With a distinctively journalistic writing style, Didion is a master at capturing the energy of the times that juxtaposes the picturesque setting of California with the turbulent events of the 1960s in this essay collection. Starkly written, the opening line is “This is a story about love and death in the golden land and begins with the country.” While “Slouching” may not be terribly escapist, it still transports its audiences into a highly realistic world.