Travels with My Donkey
(2004), is yet another nonfiction work by Tim Moore. It is a humorous
nonfiction account of the author’s attempt to follow the five hundred-mile
pilgrimage road to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, with a donkey.
Having no knowledge of Spanish and even
less about the care and feeding of donkeys, Tim Moore, Britain's indefatigable
traveling Everyman, sets out on a pilgrimage to the cathedral at Santiago de
Compostela with a donkey named Shinto as his companion. Armed only with a
twelfth-century handbook to the route and expert advice on donkey management
from Robert Louis Stevenson, Moore and his four-legged companion travel the
ancient five-hundred-mile route from St. Jean Pied-de-Port, on the French side
of the Pyrenees, to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela which houses the
remains of Spain's patron saint, St. James.
The Amber Spyglass
(2000), is a novel by Philip Pullman. In this last book of the His
Dark Materials fantasy trilogy, the young heroine Lyra (seemingly named
after the lyre, the musical instrument Orpheus played) travels to an underworld
drawn from Greek myth and leads its inhabitants out. His Dark Materials is an
epic trilogy of fantasy novels by Philip Pullman which follows the coming of age
of two children, Lyra Belacqua and Will Parry, as they wander through a series
of parallel universes.
Jack Kerouac is rightfully called a ‘road
novelist.’ One of the leading lights of the Beat generation, Kerouac wrote On
the Road in the year 1957, a stream of consciousness travelogue of America in the early 1950s. On
The Road is considered to be a seminal post-war work, and its setting
and theme make for an engaging read. The novel captures the author Jack Kerouac
and his friends’ travels across North America. The author is the main
protagonist in the story, and it is set against the backdrop of music, poetic
literature, and drug abuse.
Jules Verne was a French writer who
helped pioneer the genre of science fiction; novels such as Twenty
Thousand Leagues under the Sea explored underwater and space travel
before either was technologically possible. Along with writers like Mark Twain,
Conrad was able to incorporate traditional story forms—such as travelogues or
journey stories—into novels with a more contemporary sensibility.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea also
known under its longer title, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An
Underwater Tour of the World, is a classic science fiction novel In the
story, Captain Nemo pilots his vessel, the Nautilus, on an adventure in search
of a sea monster that was sighted by a number of ships in 1866. The American
government sponsors the mission. This great adventure story is notable for
being more scientifically accurate than some of Verne's other novels. In
particular, the description of the Nautilus is rather prophetic and a fitting
description for modern submarines. While there were submarines in existence
when the book was written, they were primitive affairs and it took a feat of
imagination for the writer to produce his vision of what an underwater craft
would look like in the future.
James and the Giant Peach,
by Roald Dahl, recounts the fantastic tale of a young boy who travels thousands
of miles in a house-sized peach with as bizarre an assemblage of companions as
can be found in a children’s book. The plot centres on a young English orphan
boy who enters a gigantic, magical peach, and has a wild and surreal
cross-world adventure with seven magically-altered garden bugs he meets. They
set off on a journey to escape from James' two mean and cruel aunts.
Daniel Defoe, in his Robinson Crusoe employs
the form of a travel biography. The work tells the story of a man marooned on a
Caribbean island.
Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, Joseph Andrews,
and Tom
Jones are influenced by the ‘‘picaresque’’—a Spanish genre about the adventures
of a trickster or rogue hero, traveling from place to place, getting into
trouble with authority figures, and escaping by use of his cleverness and
charm.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1884), is a novel by Mark Twain. In this picaresque novel about a trip on a raft
down the Mississippi River, Twain shows what is great and enduring about life
in the South, but Huck also encounters all the forces of racism, corruption,
and greed that mark a turn of the corner in Southern life on the eve of the
Civil War.
Maurice Gee Gee’s ‘‘most ambitious
fantasy work for young adults’’ is the ‘‘O’’ trilogy—composed of The Halfmen
of O (1982), The Priests of Ferris (1984), and Motherstone
(1985). The trilogy involves young protagonists who travel to a fantasy
world to help restore the balance between good and evil. The character
development and the treatment of the morality theme have prompted some
reviewers to compare the trilogy to C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.
Oliver Goldsmith's wanderings provided
the inspiration for several later works, including The Traveller and the
adventures of George Primrose in The Vicar of Wakefield.
Journey Without Maps,
is Graham Greene's nonfiction travelogue recounting his audacious 1935 trip
through Liberia, on the western coast of Africa. World travel was an integral
part of Greene’s life and .work.
The Good Soldier Svejk,
by Jaroslav Haลกek is above all else an adventure novel—a novel about the travels
and travails of its protagonist. It literally translated as, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier
ล vejk During the World War. Svejk
has become a byword in the Czech Republic. The book is also the most translated
novel of Czech literature, having been translated into over 50 languages.
to be contd...
Image courtesy: goodreads.com
Text Source(s): Britannica, goodreads, Amazon Book Store, Gale, & Routledge
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