Travel Books

Most travel books are dull, with the dullness only a mélange of facts and figures, dates and timetables can produce. But there is a better way. The Portuguese café-philosopher Fernando Pessoa says that “Travel books are worth only as much as the imagination of the one who writes them, and that if the writer has imagination he can enchant the reader with the detailed, photographic description of landscape’s he’s imagined as well as with the necessarily less detailed description of the landscapes he thought he saw.”