The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton

The Art of Travel (2002) by Alain de Botton is an education in itself.  If you are thinking it is all about how to pack your suitcase, how to breeze through customs, or how to take a cruise and not get seasick, you would be wrong. 

Instead, the book is filled with art, literature, personal experience, poetry, architecture, and adventure. 

I love a book like this.

Pleasing to read, full of information, and just the right size to carry with you on your travels - whether real or armchair.

Mr. de Botton opens each of the five sections of the book with a personal experience about a place he has visited. Thereby we swoop from Barbados to which he escapes from a dreary British winter to England's Lake District and on to Madrid, Provence, and Amsterdam. Our trip also includes musings on the banality and the sterility of airports and motorway rest stops. 

His travel guides, though, are not Baedecker or Fodor but instead the lives and works of, among others, poets William Wordsworth and Charles Baudelaire, artists Edward Hopper and Vincent Van Gogh, author Gustave Flaubert, explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, and art critic John Ruskin. 

Oh, this book, that takes a look at how we travel and why we travel and how perhaps we could get more out of our travels, is a delight. The author examines the disconnect between the promises of the glossy travel brochure and our actual experiences upon arrival at our destination. And how we let someone or something - tour guide or researched tour book - take us to sites that we really have no interest in whereas we might do better to follow our own curiosity. Or how a certain fictional character, Joris-Karl Huysmans' Des Esseintes, found that sitting in a British pub in Paris offers the same atmosphere and experience as a rowdy pub in London without ever having to pack a trunk. 

Yes, I can highly recommend The Art of Travel whether you are preparing for a trip around the world or simply settling in to your armchair. 

Look Homeward, Asheville

Thomas Wolfe home in Asheville, North Carolina.

Circa 1908

I am going on a little trip to Asheville, North Carolina. It is a cozy town in the Blue Ridge Mountains full of arts and food and shops and a castle. Or what passes for a castle in America: The Biltmore Estate, the enormous home built in the late 1800s by George Vanderbilt II, grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt. It has something like 250 rooms and acres upon acres of farms, gardens and vineyards.

But I am not going there this time. 

I am just going to poke around the shops and galleries and, you know me, a couple of bookstores. It will be nice to be in the cool mountains for a couple of days.

Also on my agenda is a visit to the home of Thomas Wolfe which is located just a few blocks from my hotel. I have visited it before. At that time it stood as the original boarding house (oddly enough named Old Kentucky Home) that Mr. Wolfe lived in when he was a young man and used for the setting of his novel Look Homeward, Angel. The structure standing today is pretty much a replica as the actual house and many of its original artifacts were extensively damaged by fire (arson) in the late 1990s. 

I know I should be taking a copy of Mr. Wolfe's book but I am not. Instead I will pack my Kindle (I am currently reading Agatha Christie's A Body in the Library) and one hardcover book: The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton. I bought and read this book when it first came out in 2002. It not only takes on travel - why we go places and yet are likely to be disappointed once we arrive - but art, biography, history, architecture, and philosophy. Heady stuff. I look forward to reading it again. I like that it has pictures of many of the paintings and places that Mr. de Botton discusses. 

I do believe it will be the perfect traveling companion.

Neither a Borrower nor a Lender Be

This is Jonathan Letham - he with the neat bookshelves in yesterday's entry - quoted in Unpacking My Library:

I hate lending, or borrowing -- if you want me to read a book, tell me about it, or buy me a copy outright. Your loaned edition sits in my house like a real grievance. And in lieu of lending books, I buy extra copies of those I want to give away, which gives me the added pleasure of buying books I love again and again.

I surely understand the idea of a borrowed book sitting as a grievance. I have one I borrowed from a neighbor, The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, that rests on my bedside table that, honestly, I do want to read, but have just not gotten around to beginning it. I really must give it back.

As for lending books, even though I now have a library lending kit of my own (see it here), I may have learned my lesson. Oddly enough, of all the books that people have borrowed - and never returned - there are two that I wish I still had. I lent Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Fariña to a college dorm mate. Never saw it again. I doubt if I would even want to read it now, but still its loss rankles. Talk about keeping a resentment!

The other book was an early edition of Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan. I have since replaced it with a later edition, but I would like to have my first purchase back on my shelves. Well, just because...

I have one book that I read as a library book, The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton. I loved it and bought a copy of to give to a relative. I don't know if she ever read it or not - she said she did but she was prone to saying the nice thing which is different from the true thing. She eventually gave it back to me. I am glad to have it.

Is there a book you have borrowed and never returned that 'sits like a real grievance'? Or are your grieving the loss of a book that you lent to a someone?