Books are the best way to move to another reality for a while. Books are those inciters to change our world, to enter into other realities, better or worse, to which we are living.
There are as many books as there are people: big, small, practical, intelligent, useless… But whatever they may be, they always have something to teach us. Today we want to dedicate this post to those who teach us to travel, those who just open them move us to other places.
1. Seven years in Tibet – Heinrich Harrer
Heinrich Harrer, known as a mountaineer and Olympic ski champion was surprised by World War II on an expedition through the Himalayas. Being an Austrian, the British detained him in a concentration camp in India where he had several attempts to escape until he manages to flee to Tibet and reach the forbidden city of Lhasa. Here he remained for seven years, living with an unknown people at that time, becoming the tutor of the young Dalai Lama.
A classic of travelling literature also brought to the cinema
2. Into the Wild – Jon Krakauer
Into the wild is the homage of Jon Krakauer to the life of Christopher McCandless, a young man who decided to change his life, breaking with everything he had known so far to return to the essence of the human being, forgetting everything material and any kind of ties. An overwhelming book that takes us to relive the four months that Christopher McCandless was living in Alaska. This book inspired the film of the same name, written and directed by Sean Penn.
3. The Tao of Travel – Paul Theroux
“Leave your house, go alone, travel light, take a nap, go by land, cross the border on foot, write a diary, read a novel with no relation to the place you are in. Avoid using your mobile phone”. The American writer Paul Theroux (1941) celebrated his 50 years as a writer and traveller by gathering in a single book, The Tao of Travel, selected extracts from his works along with passages from those globetrotting authors that he has most enjoyed as a reader.
4. The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
The book The Alchemist was written by the Brazilian Paulo Coelho and published in 1988. The alchemist is a symbolic work that, according to Coelho, is the only language that can help us reach the ‘soul of the world’, or as the psychologist, Carl Jung called the ‘collective unconscious’. The alchemist tells of the trip of Santiago, a shepherd in search of a treasure that had been revealed to him through a repetitive dream that showed him a treasure near the pyramids of Egypt. Santiago sells everything and begins his journey from Andalusia, Spain to the pyramids of Egypt, following a caravan where he meets an Englishman who was looking for the alchemist and asks for help in this task while stopping in an oasis in the middle of the Sahara desert. The alchemist was the knight who defended the oasis and accompanies him on his journey to the treasure. On the way, Santiago is instructed on alchemy. Several events take place, including kidnapping and the arrival at a monastery where Santiago begins his way again only to his ‘personal legend’ where his heart told him that when he arrived at the place he would cry and where the tears fell was where the treasure lies.
5. Wild – Cheryl Strayed
Wild is about an inner journey, the journey of one thousand eight hundred kilometres that the author made alone and on foot through the Pacific ridge of the US to escape their own demons. A different book, touching, entertaining and at times hard, which will please fans of walking and lovers of good literature.
6. The Scorpion Fish – Nicolas Bouvier
In June 1953, the Swiss writer Nicolas Bouvier (1929-1998) left Geneva on a road trip through the Balkans, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan to reach Kabul. He tells it in the roads of the world (Peninsula). In 1955, after two years on the road, he spent seven months in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) waiting for permits that would allow him to continue his journey. Housed in a crappy hotel, sick, almost penniless and with an entomology manual as his only travel companion, his stay in the Indian Ocean turned into a hallucinatory and febrile experience that Bouvier took decades to write down. The result is The Scorpion Fish, a cult book that was published for the first time in 1982.
