Three Mini Book Reviews
The folks at Lonely Planet kindly sent me a couple of new books to read and review. Additionally, I recently bought one of my one that’s worth mentioning. Here are some quick and dirty reviews:
Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America – I first read about this book on Boing Boing. We’re considering moving somewhere tropical next year, and we needed an overview of destinations for Westerners. There are few on or offline resources that I could fine, and this book came close. We’re not American, and the move isn’t permanent, but the book has plenty to recommend it. It’s got overviews of 50 destinations, and most have first-hand accounts by ex-pats living in those regions. There’s also a bunch of material on foreign citizenship, taxes, work permits and so forth. It definitely helped us narrow down our list of possible destinations.
Micro Nations – This is a Lonely Planet book about ‘home-made nations’, the most famous of which is Sealand. The book features those corners of the world where people (mostly eccentric or just plain nuts) have claimed land as their own. In some cases that land is a flat in London, in other cases it’s a corner of Australia or Antarctica.
There are many interesting stories here, but the book doesn’t tell them the right way. It’s structured like most travel guides, with each destination broken down into ‘facts for the visitor’, ‘things to do and see’ and so forth. This formalized structure can’t respond very well to the peculiarities of the faux nations. And besides, we can’t visit it’d be very difficult to visit most of them anyway. I’d have much preferred a book of essays or stories instead.
Experimental Travel – Unlike Micronations, this book doesn’t look like your average Lonely Planet travel guide. In fact, it’s beautifully designed, with a hard cover, nice form factor and great illustration.
In a charming, psuedo-scientific tone, the book outlines a alternative series of ways to travel and explore.
For example, they suggest identifying the first and last entries in a city’s street index, and travelling between them. Another good one is visiting your own town as a backpacker. Get somebody to drop you at your city’s airport, then bus it into town, stay in a hostel explore the city as a low-budget traveller.
There are 40 such experiments, and though I’d seen a few before (the idea of confluences, for example), most were thought-provoking and original. If you don’t work at it, travel can feel rote and banal sometimes. Experimental Travel is a great tool for revisiting how you visit.
Bonus Links
- An old, great Wired article on Sealand
- The Lonely Planet books smell great
- An interview with Micronations author Simon Sellars
- LP’s experimental travel site
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