You generate a lot of free time on the road. To observe, to create images, to think. Often it’s nice to simply empty your head entirely and think of nothing at all. But I have been able to do a ton of reading in my tent at night, during lazy lunch-breaks, while waiting for friends to finish packing.
This is a list of some of the books I read on the road. I don’t doubt for a second that I learned as much from them as from my travels themselves, nor that some of the styles I learned to like will rub off on the shape my own book takes:
- The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman
- A Brief History Of Time by Steven Hawking
- Life Of Pi by Yann Martel
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Soil & Soul by Alastair McIntosh
- Republic by Plato
- The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
- Misadventure In The Middle-East by Henry Hemming
- Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson
- The Fellowship Of The Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
- The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Moods Of Future Joys by Alastair Humphreys
- Thunder & Sunshine by Alastair Humphreys
- The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
- The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond
- Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond
- Strangely Like War by Derek Jenson
- The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
- Six Not-So-Easy Pieces by Richard Feynmann
- The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
- Down & Out In Paris & London by George Orwell
- Nineteen-eighty-four by George Orwell
- The Double by José Saramago
- Spycatcher by Peter White
- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
- A Short History Of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
- The Impassé Of Modernity by Christian Comeliau
- Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
- The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
- The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time by Mark Haddon
- Six Easy Pieces by Richard Feynmann
- Mad, Bad & Dangerous To Know by Sir Ranulph Fiennes
- Icons Of England by Bill Bryson (Ed)
- Why Do People Hate America? by Ziauddin Sardar
- The Crossing Place by Philip Marsden
- The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Guevara
- Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm
- Enough by John Naish
- The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
- It’s Not About The Bike by Lance Armstrong
- Cycling Home From Siberia by Rob Lilwall
- Cosmos by Carl Sagan
- The Greatest Show On Earth by Richard Dawkins
- One Thousand And One Arabian Nights by Sir Richard Burton (trans.)
- Life Ascending by Nick Lane
- Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feymann! by Richard Feynmann
- Why Does E=mc²? by Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- The Undercover Economist by Tim Harford
- SAS Survival Guide by John Wiseman
- Hell & High Water by Alastair McIntosh
- No Logo by Naomi Klein
- QED — The Strange Theory Of Light & Matter by Richard Feynmann
- Media Control by Noam Chomsky
- What Is The What by Dave Eggers
- The Travels Of Ibn Battutah by Tim Mackintosh-Smith (trans.)
- Bread & Ashes by Tony Anderson
- The Spirit-Wrestlers by Philip Marsden
- Touching The Void by Joe Simpson
I rarely finish a book if it doesn’t grab me pretty quickly, but I read all of these from cover to cover. I realise that my inner geek is well and truly exposed by this list. There’s a lot of pop-science, some travelogues, a few bits of escapist fiction and several odds and ends that don’t really fit anywhere else. Some are ground-breaking, some most definitely aren’t, but I found all of them worth reading.
My reason for posting this list is to give you the chance to help me with my own book. I’ll get a few pennies if you buy any of these books using the links in the list above. These pennies will hopefully turn into coffees in the quiet Yerevanian cafes I frequent while writing. So if there’s something here which you’ve been thinking about reading, now is a good time to buy a copy!
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