Jaunted

Literary Travel / Armchair Travel / Stephen King / Sarah Palin / → All Tags

Get Your Travel Read On Thanks To The Controversial $9 Book Sale

The book world is shaken this week by a massive price war in which two major retailers and an online behemoth battle it out to prove that avid readers love them best. After Wal-Mart announced it would be knocking the price of 10 recently released and pre-order-ready hardcovers to $10, Amazon stepped up and did the same—so Wal-Mart dropped the price to $9, and Jeff Bezos' baby did the same. Target has since followed suit, and indie bookstores are crying foul; sadly, $8.98 is still $8.96 too many to be paying for Sarah Palin's new "memoir," which is included in the sale at all three outlets.

Just the words "book" and "sale" together tend to raise our blood pressure, but the money you save on these blockbusters can go directly into your travel fund. Here are some of the places the anointed bestsellers will take you this fall:

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Literary Travel / Travel Bookstores / Armchair Travel / → All Tags

Literary Travel: Where Is Your Favorite Travel Bookstore?

Don't go until you're well-read: The L.A. Times' travel blog recently rounded up its favorite travel bookstores in the world, for those of us who still prefer the ability to doodle in the margins of a guide to pulling it up on a smartphone. We definitely want to check out their picks, but why so Eurocentric?

The Times singles out London's venerable Stanfords (even mentioned in a Sherlock Holmes story!), Paris' Librarie Ulysse and Rome's Libreria del Viaggiatore—and they all sound like the kind of dusty nooks in which to while away several happy hours planning our next adventure. But three just aren't enough!

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Literary Travel / Pat Conroy / Richard Russo / Armchair Travel / → All Tags

Bestseller Travel: Escape With A Few Good Books This Weekend

Maybe you're already off gallivanting for this Labor Day weekend, and maybe you're only dreaming about it. Hey, we sympathize! But either way, you can always do a little armchair traveling. With the help of the current New York Times bestseller list, we suggest one of the following cities for some end of summer reading:

Charleston, South Carolina
South of Broad, blockbuster author Pat Conroy's first novel in 14 years, follows a group of high school friends reuniting in 1989 for their 20th reunion.
Pack it: If you're also off to see old friends at home. Celebrate the people who made you you!
Skip it: If you're heading for storm territory—much of the book's back half is dedicated (spoiler!) to the ravages of Category 5 Hurricane Hugo.

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Literary Travel / David Foster Wallace / Armchair Travel / → All Tags

Reading One Heck Of a Huge Book For One 'Infinite' Summer

Pick a long enough book to take on your next trip and you'll have fodder for every pit stop and flight delay. This week marked the launch of Infinite Summer, a group reading project designed to get people to tackle one of those major doorstops of a book which might be sitting on your shelf this very moment. The choice book is David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.

At 75 pages a week, infinite summer-ers [Ed note: count us among them] who start this best known novel from the late author will finish the week of September 21, fitting it thus to the solar definition of summer. Set in a dystopic future America, the book nevertheless adopts some locales from Wallace's life, from suburban Boston to Tucson, where he studied philosophy and fiction writing respectively. This great photo set points Boston visitors to the locales that inspired Wallace for the book's scenes there.

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Books / What We're Reading / Armchair Travel / Travel Books / Recommended Travel Books / → All Tags

The Best American Travel Writing 2008: Armchair Travel at its Finest

Writing about the differences between in-flight magazines got me to thinking about how often I really do read long-form travel writing, compared with the staccato bursts of stylized news briefs one might find on, say, a travel blog. The truth is, I don't often read all the great feature stories published every month, even in magazines I subscribe to. But when I finally make the time to read a lush and descriptive feature by one of today's best travel writers, I'm always glad I did. That's why anthologies like the Best American Travel Writing series are so great. I recently finished reading this year's edition - which has stories originally published in 2008 - and enjoyed it immensely.

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Armchair Travel / Recommended Travel Books / Travel Books / Books / → All Tags

Armchair Travel: Sating Your Office Wanderlust

Stuck in front of your computer today? Take a mini-break with Field-Tested Books, an essay collection in which writers talk about where they were when they read a very memorable book.

Some of our favorite folks are represented in this e-anthology, but what we love the most is that the pieces are short. You can easily pack a year's worth of long weekends into an hour or two--just make sure your boss isn't peaking over your shoulder.

Our Picks:
· Stalking an Actor in Perugia, Italy [Steven Heller]
· Forgoing Sodom and Gomorrah for Ayn Rand [Ben Karlin]
· Shocking the Other Passengers on a Cross-Country Flight [Annie Logue]
· Getting Drunk in Mexico [Andrei Codrescu]
· Armchair Travel coverage [Jaunted]

[Photo: ddsiple]

Recommended Travel Books / Travel Books / Antarctica Travel / Armchair Travel / → All Tags

Antarctic Penguins Want You To Visit

We admit our experience of Antarctica is limited to the kinds of cruise-ship-hits-island stories that we like to chuckle about. But we'd really love to check out the great southern continent and just haven't yet because nobody's offered to pay our way there.

Second best might be reading the latest offering from Travelers' Tales: It's a collection of travel essays called Antarctica: Life on the Ice. Featuring plenty of penguins, a few dinosaur bones, hefty blizzards and places where your footprints will outlive you, it'll surely whet your appetite for more freezing experiences. Just be sure to invite us along when you go, k?

Related Stories:
· Antarctica: Life on the Ice [Travelers' Tales]
· Antarctic Cruise Gets Stranded, Turns Notsofun [Jaunted]
· Armchair Travel [Jaunted]

[Photo: towse]

Recommended Travel Books / Armchair Travel / → All Tags

Jaunted Learns to Read: Three Dead Presidents, Coming Up!

Let's face it, there are times when you just can't travel -- or don't want to. Vicarious web travel can be a great supplement to boots-on-the-ground journeys, and we should know, right? However, our wise elders keep talking about these things called "books", so we decided to check out these paper dinosaurs a bit, and guess what, they aren't all a waste of time. Some of them are quite good.

We decided that if our members, editors or both deem a travel book worthy we will give it our own little seal of Oprahooval and tell you about it here.

Our recommended travel books series won't name a jet after you, but it may point you in the direction of a worthy travel book or two.

Have a travel book you want our editors to check out? Send it our way.

THIS WEEK'S TRAVEL BOOK

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Recommended Travel Books / Armchair Travel / Mecca / → All Tags

Learning to Read Books: The Modern Marco Polo

Let's face it, there are times when you just can't travel -- or don't want to. Vicarious web travel can be a great supplement to boots-on-the-ground journeys, and we should know, right? However, our wise elders keep talking about these things called "books", so we decided to check out these paper dinosaurs a bit, and guess what, they aren't all a waste of time. Some of them are quite good.

We decided that if our members, editors, or both deem a travel book worthy we will give it our own little seal of Oprahooval and tell you about it here.

Our recommended travel books series won't put you in first class with Posh and Becks, but it may point you in the direction of a worthy travel book or two.

Have a travel book you want our editors to check out? Send it our way.

THIS WEEK'S TRAVEL BOOK

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Recommended Travel Books / Armchair Travel / → All Tags

Learning to Read Books: George Orwell, Rolf Potts of the 1930s

Let's face it, there are times when you just can't travel -- or don't want to. Vicarious web travel can be a great supplement to boots-on-the-ground journeys, and we should know, right? However, our wise elders keep talking about these things called "books", so we decided to check out these paper dinosaurs a bit, and guess what, they aren't all a waste of time. Some of them are quite good.

We decided that if our members, editors, or both deem a travel book worthy we will give it our own little seal of Oprahooval and tell you about it here.

Our recommended travel books series won't buy you a suspect mile high mojito, but it may point you in the direction of worthy travel book, or two.

Have a travel book you want our editors to check out? Send it our way.

THIS WEEK'S TRAVEL BOOK

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Armchair Travel / Recommended Travel Books / → All Tags

Learning to Read Books: But She Still Hasn't Found What She's Looking For

Let's face it, there are times when you just can't travel -- or don't want to. Vicarious web travel can be a great supplement to boots-on-the-ground journeys, and we should know, right? However, our wise elders keep talking about these things called "books", so we decided to check out these paper dinosaurs a bit, and guess what, they aren't all a waste of time. Some of them are quite good.

We decided that if our members, editors, or both deem a travel book worthy we will give it our own little seal of Oprahooval and tell you about it here.

Our recommended travel books series may only take you on a virtual roller-coaster ride, but it may point you in the direction of a worthy travel book, or two.

Have a travel book you want our editors to check out? Send it our way.

THIS WEEK'S TRAVEL BOOK

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Armchair Travel / Recommended Travel Books / → All Tags

Learning to Read Books: Andres Martinez Blows $50,000 So You Don't Have To

Let's face it, there are times when you just can't travel -- or don't want to. Vicarious web travel can be a great supplement to boots-on-the-ground journeys, and we should know, right? However, our wise elders keep talking about these things called "books", so we decided to check out these paper dinosaurs a bit, and guess what, they aren't all a waste of time. Some of them are quite good.

We decided that if our members, editors, or both deem a travel book worthy we will give it our own little seal of Oprahooval and tell you about it here.

Our recommended travel books series won't buy you a suspect mile high mojito, but it may point you in the direction of worthy travel book, or two.

Have a travel book you want our editors to check out? Send it our way.

THIS WEEK'S TRAVEL BOOK

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