It doesn't require much thought for one to realise that any travel book worthy of the name has to be a departure from the standard idea of the form.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It's kind of amazing that people will travel because of a book. I admire that.
The travel book is a convenient metaphor for life, with its optimistic beginning or departure, its determined striving, and its reflective conclusion. Journeys change travellers just as a good travel book can change readers.
The appeal of travel books is also the sense that you are different, an outsider, almost like the Robinson Crusoe or Christopher Columbus notion of being the first person in a new place.
I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader.
A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.
Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography.
I don't like to travel. Yet all my books seem to involve a journey.
A travel book is a book that puts you in the shoes of the traveler, and it's usually a book about having a very bad time; having a miserable time, even better.
I actually really suck at naming books, so lots of years ago, readers were sending in their ideas for titles, and what we realized is that they were smarter than us. So we thought, Hey, go for it. So now we have a contest every year.
The truth is I'm not really interested in travel writing as it's generally conceived, and even less so in female travel writing.
No opposing quotes found.