This month’s #6Degrees, hosted by Kate from Books are my Favourite and Best starts with our own bookshelves. We start with a travel book.
Travel books are ubiquitous now, but most of them are anonymous in the Lonely Planet/DK sense because we don’t know who the author is. Of those that are authored, few have a distinctive style and a huge catalogue of titles like H V Morton (1892-1979). He was a pioneering travel writer from Britain, and after I discovered In Search of London (1951) before my first ever trip back to the UK in 2001, I also read A Traveller in Italy (1964) before a trip to Italy and A Stranger in Spain (1955) before a trip to Spain. You might be wondering why travel books written more than half a century ago were the catalyst for me to collect a shelf of Morton titles, and the answer is that he wrote in captivating ways about sites now labelled Places of Interest and beset by selfie-taking mass tourism. The places haven’t changed but the experience of visiting them has.
Morton was not a deep thinker, and his interests didn’t include Bookish Moments. My travel blog features Bookish Moments from my travels. Some of these are planned, as in my pilgrimage to the birthplaces of Tolstoy and Chekhov and others are unexpected, as in the display of artwork from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery at the Fullerton Hotel in Singapore. But my jottings are Homage Lite, compared to the exquisite essays to be found in Spinoza’s Overcoat, Travels with Writers and Poets, (2020) by Subhash Jaireth. (Subhash, who is one of my favourite writers, has a new book out BTW, called George Orwell’s Elephant and other essays, one to look forward to.)
What I like about Subhash’s travel writing, is that he is unabashed about his love of literature and how that informs where he goes and what he does there. We can see the same thing in Antoni Jach’s recent novel Travelling Companions (2021). His narrator is like me, he likes art galleries and museums, historic sites and remarkable buildings; and he likes to loiter in cafés and restaurants and soak up the ambience while enjoying a variety of European cuisines. Where we part company is that he seeks company in the evenings. No thankyou, I’ve had enough of people by then!
How did an introvert like me become a teacher, with wall-to-wall people all day long? I can’t explain it adequately, but I can tell you that I survived with a simple strategy. When I got home (after greeting The Spouse who was usually contentedly cooking dinner) I would escape to the quiet and read a book for about half an hour to restore my sanity. Which is why I like books about the reading life and how it sustains us: Debra Adelaide’s 2019 The Innocent Reader and Carmel Bird’s (2022) Tell Tale, Reading, Writing, Remembering.
I really don’t understand people who don’t read. I mean, I really don’t understand them.
Of course I try to, by reading about them. One that comes to mind is a book by Steven Carroll, called The Gift of Speed. It’s No 2 in the Glenroy Series, and I read it when it was published, back in 2004. It’s about an adolescent who’s obsessed by cricket and for the first time, I got an inkling of the kind of emotion that being interested in cricket might arouse. Thinking of this book now, twenty years after I read it, I remember this boy toiling endlessly at practising his bowling. That’s obsession, eh?
Books about obsession are always interesting. Auto-da-Fé (1935), by Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti (1905-1994) and translated by C.V. Wedgewood, has the usual cautionary message about keeping an obsession under control, with a professor who dissociates from the real world and hears no voice other than his own. To quote from my review:
The professor goes for walks early in the morning before the bookshops open so that he won’t be tempted to buy any more – he already has a library of 25,000 books and anyway, the books in the bookshops are inferior and not worthy of him.
He himself was the owner of the most important private library in the whole of this great city. He carried a minute portion of it with him wherever he went. His passion for it, the only one which he had permitted himself during a life of austere and exacting study, moved him to take special precautions. Books, even bad ones, tempted him easily into making a purchase. Fortunately, the great number of the book shops did not open until after eight o’clock. (p11)
Something to bear in mind if the TBR is escaping its boundaries…
Sez she, who has no self-control whatsoever when it comes to the TBR. A recent purchase which enticed me is Chloé, by Katrina Kell. Appealing to my love of art and Paris, this novel reimagines the life of Chloé the person, the model for the iconic painting at Young and Jackson’s hotel where it has been on display since 1909. Kell’s MS won the Australian Society of Authors Award Mentorship for an unpublished novel, and she was mentored by Linda Jaivin who wrote The Empress Lover (2014) so I’m expecting it to be interesting.
So, that’s my #6Degrees for this month!
Next month (May 2024), starts with The Anniversary by Stephanie Bishop.
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
I’m glad you chose some distinctive travel writing to begin your chain – I had similar plans when I set the prompt but time got away from me after returning from Tasmania on Thursday, so I used what was in immediate reach (a book I had just reviewed!).
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By: Kate W on April 6, 2024
at 3:24 pm
LOL At least you were doing real travel! I haven’t really been anywhere since Covid, just local LitFests and a week on Phillip Island while our floors were being done.
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By: Lisa Hill on April 6, 2024
at 3:50 pm
Intriguing post Lisa … I’ve never read Morton though often meant to partly because I know your love. Is his more a travel book than a travel guide? I think there’s a difference, one being about travel to a certain place and one being pure guide … where to stay and eat, what to see, how to get there. The former can make great reading while the latter, which is where I started my chain are really pure reference books aren’t they.
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By: whisperinggums on April 6, 2024
at 3:51 pm
Ah, if you make that distinction, Morton’s books are certainly not guides. Everything would be hopelessly out of date. While what to see, and why to see it, is most cases is still relevant, his books about the Middle East, written in the 30s are about a different world, long gone.
But that’s what makes them fascinating to me. In the Steps of St Paul, written in 1936, is one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read.
(See https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/12/31/in-the-steps-of-st-paul-1936-by-h-v-morton/)
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By: Lisa Hill on April 6, 2024
at 4:01 pm
Yes I do make that distinction! I love travel writing which as you say can still be relevant about what to see even if they are old. And can offer a richness that straight guides usually can’t.
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By: whisperinggums on April 6, 2024
at 8:27 pm
We gave up using travel guides. They rarely gave us the information we needed, and The Rough Guides in particular were only ever any good for backpackers, which we never were.
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By: Lisa Hill on April 6, 2024
at 9:10 pm
I think by the time we got to the 2010s travel guides were losing their value because of the internet. The Japanese one was the last we bought. We certainly were never backpackers – even when we went Europe in our 20s. Why I chose the Rough Guide as I recollect was because we like going to small towns. We want to experience the culture and cities, in the end are cities. The Rough Guide seemed to me to do regions better than some of the guides, though I think Lonely Planet tended to be good for that too. Anyhow, now it’s the internet, and online sources specific to particular countries, like Japan-guide, that we are more likely to use.
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By: whisperinggums on April 6, 2024
at 10:11 pm
Actually, I have no idea how The Spouse organises it, online I suppose, maybe with Trip Advisor. I just tell him the things I want to see and he does everything else.
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By: Lisa Hill on April 6, 2024
at 11:49 pm
That’s the way! For us, I quite enjoy finding new things to see so I do a lot of the planning while we share doing the bookings … he does all the transport and we share the accommodation.
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By: whisperinggums on April 7, 2024
at 8:37 am
I forgot: I also ‘do’ the languages. I learn whatever it is for six months before we go. Then when we’re there, I do the talking and he does the navigating.
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By: Lisa Hill on April 7, 2024
at 10:13 am
Mr Gums usually does the languages! I can read French and we both also learnt Italian (for a year). He is fluent in German, also did French at school, and did some Japanese before our first trip. Overall he has a better ear than I have and is more confident speaking in other languages.
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By: whisperinggums on April 7, 2024
at 11:14 am
The opposite to us…
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By: Lisa Hill on April 7, 2024
at 11:24 am
Like your choices Lisa and piqued my interest. I too have not done much travelling since the dreaded Covid. One of the great travel books and my bias obvious is James Boswell and Samual Johnsons journey from the Lowlands to the Western Isles of Scotland.
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By: Fay K on April 6, 2024
at 4:17 pm
Hi Fay,
I think we just got out of the habit of it. Covid taught us that we could do without some things that had been part of our lives…
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By: Lisa Hill on April 6, 2024
at 7:18 pm
wow, so many great references!
Here is my chain:
https://wordsandpeace.com/2024/04/06/six-degrees-of-separation-from-france-to-america
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By: WordsAndPeace on April 7, 2024
at 11:05 am
I don’t understand people who don’t read either! My chain was very simple this month, but just thinking about it gave me joy at the idea of planning another trip to the destination! It isn’t on the cards for the next couple of years as we have other plans, but maybe after that!
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By: Marg on April 7, 2024
at 4:24 pm
Where are you off to next time?
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By: Lisa Hill on April 7, 2024
at 4:59 pm
I’ve given up on travel guides – they always just tell you about the most obvious places which will be crowded, over-priced, full of people taking selfies…….. Though I’ve never read, or heard of,Morton, his approach sounds much more to my taste especially for countries and regions that I don’t know at all. Not that I have plans to go anywhere adventurous this year.
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By: BookerTalk on April 7, 2024
at 8:19 pm
Yes, I think travel guides have had their use-by date.
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By: Lisa Hill on April 7, 2024
at 8:31 pm
An interesting chain, and I wish I still have my Mortons, but I think they have gone by-the-by. And thanks for the reminder about the Canetti, which is still lurking on mount TBR…
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By: kaggsysbookishramblings on April 8, 2024
at 12:34 am
AH well, that’s the thing about Mortons, someone else can be enjoying them, because although they’re dated, they never date, not really.
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By: Lisa Hill on April 8, 2024
at 9:54 am
Some good travelling there. Nice chain.
My <a href=”https://momobookblog.blogspot.com/2024/04/six-degrees-of-separation-from-brussels.html”>Six Degrees of Separation</a> started with <a href=”https://momobookblog.blogspot.com/2024/03/hewetson-zoe-brussels.html”>Brussels</a> and ended with <a href=”https://momobookblog.blogspot.com/2021/03/elliot-jason-unexpected-light.html”>An Unexpected Light</a> in Afghanistan.
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By: Marianne @ Let's Read on April 9, 2024
at 9:48 pm