However, too often they are no more than notes or a log. There has been no limit to the number of travel books written. Comparisons too make life richer, as a metaphor enriches a poem. I like to travel but I also like to read about the places I’ve been both before and after. I’m not as absolute as Thoreau but I understand his point. Perhaps that is why I like to read travel books because they are a pot pourri of everything. Thoreau had another view in that he said he traveled all around the world but by book. Because of this general confusion, it has always been a favorite haunt of writers, just as critics, with some justification, have usually regarded it as a resort of easy virtue.”

Much of the factual material, in the way of bills, menus, ticket-stubs, names and addresses, dates and destinations, is there to authenticate what is really fiction while its wildest fictions have the status of possible facts. It freely mixes narrative and discursive writing. Jonathan Raban attempts to categorize travel writing in his book For Love and Money: “It accommodates the private diary, the essay, the short story, the prose poem, the rough note and polished table talk with indiscriminate hospitality.

Life in its grandest sense.’” That is how a traveler can suddenly realize why he or she loves to travel. In that moment, the world expanded, and I found the path I’m still walking. We arrived on the island of Kos at night, found a hotel, and in the morning awoke to a mauve and lavender sunrise over the Turkish coast. ‘Wendy and I got off our flight in Athens, and in the domestic terminal we picked the first plane leaving for the Greek islands. ‘I remember my first trip abroad,’ she had said. In their new book Anatolian Days & Nights, Joy Stocke and Angie Brenner write in Chapter 14: “ Joy had summed it up during one of our talks on the Sun Pension balcony.

Raban peking opera