Next time you're in San Francisco or London, keep your eyes peeled for a small group of books stacked neatly near a park bench, news stand or on your bike seat. You can't miss them, as they have a bright yellow cover with huge block letters that read FREE BOOK.
Don't fret, it's not some Krishna BS that you'll pick up, suddenly confronted by a little man dressed in orange robes holding a bell and flowers. The book is titled Potential Energy, and it's a self-published novel by a writer named Schist.
Travel writer and holy foreskin expertDavid Farley is fed up with these wandering scribes and their jet-setting ways. So he's put together the Restless Legs Reading Series to get everyone in the same room.
Kicking off the bi-monthy event will be Tony Perrottet (author of "Napoleons's Privates: 2,500 Years of History Unzipped") and Cullen Thomas (who wrote "Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons").
The first Restless Legs reading will be July 23 at Lolita on the Lower East Side. Farley says he'd love for it to turn into a monthly thing; we'd love that too.
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.
After all the sniping, faux shock and criticism, Thomas Kohnstamm's book Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? is out today. Instead of rehashing old interviews and getting up on our high horse about ethics, we decided to, you know, actually read it.
We didn't get very far before stumbling across something we wish were included in that now-notorious "embassy chick" interview that upset so many people:
Author's note: For better or for worse, this book recounts true experiences. In order to distill the chaos of life down to a clear narrative, it was necessary to omit certain events, rearrange and compress chronology and combine a few of the characters.
So, yes, what you're about to read is true. Sort of.
When all the airlines of the world have gone bust (which should be in, like, a few more days), we'll all be able to slow down, relax and travel the world by train. One British man has already got the hang of that, and he's a quite amazing train geek usually referred to as the Man in Seat 61, after his seating preference on Eurostar trains.
We've been following his website for years, whenever we've needed in depth train travel advice, and he's also good at giving tips on making train travel on some famous routes a lot cheaper than taking the tourist train. For example, in a recent article he gave the example of South Africa's Blue Train from Cape Town to Pretoria, explaining a local route that cost less than a tenth of the fancy tourist route.
The current big news is that the Man in Seat 61 (who also has a real name, Mark Smith) has got a book deal and his official train travel bible is coming out in a couple of months. It's going to focus on European rail travel so you'll be able to get tips on that speedy Barcelona to Madrid route or perhaps more importantly to us, find out where we can get a beer along the way.
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?
Pop quiz time: How many countries are there in Africa? According to the new Lonely Planet publication, The Africa Book, the answer 54.
If you didn't know this, you probably need The Africa Book, ready to be released at the end of September to coincide with the 30th anniversary of Lonely Planet's first guide to Africa. Rather than being a handy travel guide, this is more of a study shelf or coffee table book, a 256-page hardback full of photos, facts and figures. We recommend swotting up on the facts from this book if you can't afford to get to Africa but want to impress your friends with tales from the desert or encounters with man-eating lions.
Deny it all you want, federal government, Jaunted's on to you. Area 51, the military site whose secrecy has inspired alien and weapons theories for years, is gaining mainstream acceptance as a travel destination, we hear.
In Harry Helms' book Secret Tourism (Feral House Press), he makes traveling to forbidden places sound like a rewarding trek -- and not something reserved for guys with Scully posters hanging on their bedroom walls.
On the Feral House blog, Helms chronicles his journey through the desert of southeast Nevada, offering helpful advice along the way. Fill up on gas whenever possible, he warns, and prepare for oppressing loneliness on the stretches of road in between.
Along Route 375, dubbed Extraterrestrial Highway, warning signs line the road leading to the test site. At the border, threats dissuade curious travelers from driving onward.
These signs are no joke-you will be arrested if you go past them, and the Area 51 guards are authorized to use deadly force against intruders. Be like me, and be content with photographing a "No Photography Allowed" sign.
Man. And we thought it was tough getting into Lotus.
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by DanielR
