Course Reading List

Required and suggested weekly readings for the Travel Writing & Travel Memoir course.

Week	Theme	Title	Author	What to read	Why / What to notice	Link
1	The Traveler, the Witness, and the Story	The Travel Writer’s Way	Jonathan Lorie	Read the introduction and Chapter 1.	Use this as the course’s practical foundation. Pay attention to how travel writing begins with curiosity, attention, selection, and a writer’s reason for telling the story.	Open link
1	The Traveler, the Witness, and the Story	The Art of Travel	Alain de Botton	Read “On Anticipation.”	Watch how travel begins before arrival. Notice how expectation, imagination, disappointment, and desire shape the journey before the writer even reaches the destination.	Open link
1	The Traveler, the Witness, and the Story	Travels with Charley	John Steinbeck	Read Part One.	Study how a narrator establishes motive, persona, route, and national inquiry. Look for the difference between “I went somewhere” and “I went somewhere because I was trying to understand something.”	Open link
1	The Traveler, the Witness, and the Story	Writing True Stories	Patti Miller	Read the opening chapter on life writing / true stories.	This gives students a nonfiction framework for turning lived experience into shaped narrative. Pay attention to memory, truth, selection, and the difference between experience and story.	Open link
2	Observation, Field Notes, and the Local Journey	My First Summer in the Sierra	John Muir	Read the first 25 pages.	Study field-note intensity: weather, movement, plants, animals, light, and physical surroundings. Look for how close observation creates wonder without needing a dramatic plot.	Open link
2	Observation, Field Notes, and the Local Journey	A Year in Provence	Peter Mayle	Read “January” and “February.”	Watch how the local, ordinary, seasonal, domestic, and social become travel material. Pay attention to rhythm, food, weather, neighbors, and recurring place-based rituals.	Open link
2	Observation, Field Notes, and the Local Journey	The Art of Travel	Alain de Botton	Read “On Travelling Places.”	Use this to think about ordinary places as travel texts. Pay attention to how the mind changes when the writer slows down and looks deliberately.	Open link
2	Observation, Field Notes, and the Local Journey	Travel Writing: How to Write About People, Places, and Experiences	Val Andrews	Read Chapters 1–2.	Use this as a practical guide to observing places and experiences. Look for concrete strategies students can apply during their local field-note exercise.	Open link
3	Scene, Structure, and the Shape of a Journey	Wild	Cheryl Strayed	Read the Prologue and Chapter 1.	Study how an external journey carries inner pressure. Pay attention to how the trail, body, grief, fear, and memory begin working together.	Open link
3	Scene, Structure, and the Shape of a Journey	A Walk in the Woods	Bill Bryson	Read Chapter 1.	Look at pacing, comic setup, persona, exposition, and how a journey can begin with practical preparation while still building narrative energy.	Open link
3	Scene, Structure, and the Shape of a Journey	The Great Railway Bazaar	Paul Theroux	Read the first 30 pages.	Study route as structure. Pay attention to how trains, stations, encounters, and forward motion organize the prose.	Open link
3	Scene, Structure, and the Shape of a Journey	The Snow Leopard	Peter Matthiessen	Read the first 30 pages.	Watch how a quest structure begins. Pay attention to how the visible search and the deeper spiritual/emotional search operate at the same time.	Open link
4	Voice, Persona, and Narrative Distance	In Patagonia	Bruce Chatwin	Read the first 30 pages.	Study compression, fragmentation, tone, and narrative distance. Look for how Chatwin creates authority through selection rather than full explanation.	Open link
4	Voice, Persona, and Narrative Distance	Down and Out in Paris and London	George Orwell	Read Chapters 1–3.	Study plain style, social observation, narrator position, and the ethics of writing about poverty, labor, and class. Pay attention to restraint and precision.	Open link
4	Voice, Persona, and Narrative Distance	A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush	Eric Newby	Read Chapter 1.	Use this for comic persona and self-deprecating travel voice. Watch how humor can build trust when the narrator is willing to look foolish.	Open link
4	Voice, Persona, and Narrative Distance	Writing True Stories	Patti Miller	Read the chapter or section on voice, viewpoint, or narrative position.	Use this as the craft anchor for point of view. Pay attention to who is telling the story, from what distance, with what authority, and with what limits.	Open link
5	Character, Encounter, and the Ethics of Writing Others	The Places in Between	Rory Stewart	Read Chapter 1.	Study encounters with strangers, hosts, guides, officials, and people whose lives cannot be reduced to atmosphere. Pay attention to restraint, uncertainty, power, and what the narrator does not know.	Open link
5	Character, Encounter, and the Ethics of Writing Others	The Songlines	Bruce Chatwin	Read the first 30 pages.	Use this to discuss fascination, cultural explanation, and the risks of writing across knowledge gaps. Pay attention to what feels vivid and what requires ethical caution.	Open link
5	Character, Encounter, and the Ethics of Writing Others	Black Lamb and Grey Falcon	Rebecca West	Read the opening 25–30 pages.	Study a large, intellectually ambitious travel voice. Pay attention to how the narrator enters history, politics, landscape, and encounter without pretending neutrality.	Open link
5	Character, Encounter, and the Ethics of Writing Others	The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing	Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, eds.	Read the Introduction.	Use this as the scholarly ethics/context reading. Pay attention to travel writing’s relationship to empire, tourism, representation, authority, and cultural encounter.	Open link
6	Integrating Context: Research and Ethics	The Road to Oxiana	Robert Byron	Read the first 30 pages.	Study how architecture, history, route, and personal observation can share the page. Pay attention to how researched context enters without stopping narrative motion.	Open link
6	Integrating Context: Research and Ethics	Blue Latitudes	Tony Horwitz	Read Chapter 1.	Use this as a model for blending travel, history, archival curiosity, humor, and present-day movement. Look for how research becomes scene rather than lecture.	Open link
6	Integrating Context: Research and Ethics	In Siberia	Colin Thubron	Read the first 30 pages.	Study atmosphere, history, politics, landscape, and compression. Pay attention to how Thubron gives context without flattening the human presence of the place.	Open link
6	Integrating Context: Research and Ethics	Travel Writing: A Guide to Research, Writing and Selling	Louisa Peat O’Neil	Read the chapter on research and preparation.	Use this as the practical research guide. Pay attention to how writers verify facts, prepare for a place, and avoid shallow cultural claims.	Open link
7	Travel Memoir vs. Travel Essay	Eat, Pray, Love	Elizabeth Gilbert	Read the opening 30 pages.	Study memoir-led travel writing. Pay attention to narrator desire, crisis, vulnerability, voice, and how the journey is framed as personal transformation.	Open link
7	Travel Memoir vs. Travel Essay	The Art of Travel	Alain de Botton	Read “On the Exotic” and “On Curiosity.”	Study essay-led travel writing. Pay attention to how ideas, examples, and reflective questions can organize a piece even when plot is secondary.	Open link
7	Travel Memoir vs. Travel Essay	The Motorcycle Diaries	Ernesto Che Guevara	Read the first 30 pages.	Use this as a young traveler’s account of movement, awakening, and changing social perception. Pay attention to the difference between immediate experience and later significance.	Open link
7	Travel Memoir vs. Travel Essay	Student’s Week 6 Outline	Student’s own work	Reread the full outline from beginning to end.	Treat the outline as source material. Look for whether the final piece wants to become memoir-led, essay-led, or hybrid. Mark the strongest opening, central turn, researched context moment, and possible ending image.	N/A
8	Revision, Polish, and Portfolio	Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life	William Finnegan	Read the opening 30 pages.	Study polished memoir voice, technical detail, pacing, obsession, and reflective intelligence. Pay attention to how expertise becomes readable without becoming an information dump.	Open link
8	Revision, Polish, and Portfolio	A Walk in the Woods	Bill Bryson	Read Chapter 3.	Use this for final polish: comic timing, paragraph movement, sentence rhythm, and the relationship between persona and pacing.	Open link
8	Revision, Polish, and Portfolio	Writing True Stories	Patti Miller	Read the chapter or section on revision, editing, shaping, or completing a nonfiction piece.	Use this as the revision craft anchor. Pay attention to global revision, structure, truth, memory, cutting, expansion, and final shaping.	Open link
8	Revision, Polish, and Portfolio	The Travel Writer’s Way	Jonathan Lorie	Read the section on editing, finishing, pitching, or preparing travel writing for readers.	Use this to shift from private draft to public-facing piece. Pay attention to audience, clarity, title, opening, ending, and what a reader needs from the final version.	Open link
8	Revision, Polish, and Portfolio	Student’s Week 7 Draft	Student’s own work	Read the full draft three times: once as a reader, once as a structural editor, and once aloud for sound.	This is the central reading of the final week. Look for the true opening, central pressure, strongest image, weakest transition, generic language, factual claims needing verification, and the ending that wants to emerge.	N/A