Jack Kerouac’s On the Road | A Penguin Books Amplified Edition for iPad
I don’t have an iPad, but if I did this would probably be the first ebook I’d buy. Not because I’m some Jack Kerouac freak. I like his work well enough and loved On the Road, but I hardly consider him one of America’s great writers. This just seems like everything a book for the iPad should be.
It includes the original book, of course, but also tons of supplementary material including audio clips of the author reading a few chapters, pages from the actual travel journal he kept, “side-by-side comparisons of Kerouac’s famous original scroll draft and the published text,” and “pages from the journals Kerouac kept while on the road.” And much more, too much to mention.
But I will note the “Fully interactive map of the now legendary trips from 1947, 1949, and 1950 taken by Dean and Sal in the book.” Now that’s the kind of thing an ebook of this legendary novel should include.
Summer Reading: Travel Books | The New York Times
Failed relationships, broken marriages and dead-end careers are among the catalysts that lead this season’s travel writers to hit the road. The escapees range from a middle-aged journalist seeking high-altitude transcendence in the Himalayas to a frustrated poetry scholar in search of beauty among the holy spots of Iran. And then there’s the global nomad torn between a longing for domestic tranquility and a masochistic impulse to throw himself into the world’s “messy heart.” This summer’s selection also includes authors driven by simple journalistic curiosity and academic inquiry, but it’s the more tortured souls whose journeys resonate the most.
—Joshua Hammer | The New York Times
I believe in and advocate monogamy. Adultery is hitting below the belt. If I ever married the very fact that the woman was my wife would be sufficient to convince me that she was superior to all other women. My vanity is excessive. Wherever I sit is the head of the table. This fact makes me careless of ordinary politeness. I don’t like to be made much of. Such things please only persons who are doubtful about their position. I was sure of mine, such as it is, at the age of 12.
Esquire: The 75 Books Every Man Should Read
An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published. How many have you read?
Not as many as I would like to say, but I did break into the teens.
Source: libraryland
Paul Theroux is back with must-have read for any tumbleweed. The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road offers words of wisdom from well-traveled authors, thinkers and celebrities in a cool moleskin-inspired package.
Paul Theroux celebrates fifty years of wandering the globe by collecting the best writing on travel from the books that shaped him, as a reader and a traveler. Part philosophical guide, part miscellany, part reminiscence, The Tao of Travel enumerates “The Contents of Some Travelers’ Bags” and exposes “Writers Who Wrote about Places They Never Visited”; tracks extreme journeys in “Travel as an Ordeal” and highlights some of “Travelers’ Favorite Places.” Excerpts from the best of Theroux’s own work are interspersed with selections from travelers both familiar and unexpected:
Vladimir Nabokov J.R.R. Tolkien
Samuel Johnson Eudora Welty
Evelyn Waugh Isak Dinesen
Charles Dickens James Baldwin
Henry David Thoreau Pico Iyer
Mark Twain Anton Chekhov
Bruce Chatwin John McPhee
Freya Stark Peter Matthiessen
Graham Greene Ernest Hemingway
The Tao of Travel is a unique tribute to the pleasures and pains of travel in its golden age.
Source: hmhbooks
Top 20 Travel Photography Books of All | Tripbase
Travel guides inspire you to get off the couch and explore the world, whilst looking at beautiful photographs instills a deeper sense of what a place is truly like.
To help stimulate your spirit of adventure, here are 20 of the very best travel photography books available.
—Christine, Tripbaseblog
via Swann Galleries
ENCOURAGEMENT FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT SALINGER, J.D. Typed Letter Signed, to Elizabeth Cordova, declining to speak at her high school graduation, explaining that this is because he must attend his son’s eighth-grade graduation, stating that talking writers are a scourge, and offering a two-sentence graduation speech intended for her alone. 1 page, 4to, folds. With the original envelope. Windsor, 14 May 1974
He was sick, yes, and in a sense the story of my friendship with him is simply that I loved a person who was mentally ill. The depressed person then killed himself, in a way calculated to inflict maximum pain on those he loved most, and we who loved him were left feeling angry and betrayed. Betrayed not merely by the failure of our investment of love but by the way in which his suicide took the person away from us and made him into a very public legend … If you happened to know that his actual character was more complex and dubious than he was getting credit for, and if you also knew that he was more loveable — funnier, sillier, needier, more poignantly at war with his demons, more lost, more childishly transparent in his lies and inconsistencies — than the benignant and morally clairvoyant artist/saint that had been made of him, it was still hard not to feel wounded by the part of him that had chose the adulation of strangers over the love of the people closest to him.
Jonathan Franzen | On David Foster Wallace | Farther Away, The New Yorker, April 18, 2011
via Vulture
The Record Books | by Christophe Gowans
Okay, first off. Gold star for the title. The Record Books for a series in which rock albums are reimagined as book covers? Perfect.
What about the designs? As Mother Jones writes:
The results are as idiosyncratic as the albums themselves. Prince’s Purple Rain is transformed into a sci-fi fantasy by one P. Rogers Nelson. The Beatles’ Abbey Road feels like a well-mannered Penguin Classic. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs looks like a Book of the Month Club hardcover selection circa 1955. Patti Smith’s Horses trades its famous Mapplethorpe portrait for the look of a popular series of kids’ reference books. And the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks looks like something you’d stuff under your mattress (and then wash your hands).
Personally I prefer the titles where the “author” corresponds to an individual artist rather than a band (using their real names rather than adopted names — as in the above take on Purple Rain — is an especially nice touch). There’s no confusion between the title and the byline, which I feel is a shortcoming of the band-oriented ones. Take Abbey Road. This may in fact be my favorite design of the bunch, but it’s not clear whether The Beatles is the author or the title. But such a quibble, I hate to even bring it up. Check out all the designs. Very creative and thoughtful work, and whole lotta fun.
via Mother Jones
American Hotel Stories | by Francisca Matteoli
Follow in the footsteps of Jim Morrison, Marilyn Monroe, Tennessee Williams, Al Capone, Clint Eastwood, Jack Kerouac, and some of America’s most famous hotel guests. The myths, the mysteries, and the affairs unravel city by city in this captivating book.
Looks like I’ve lined up my next travel read.
