Friday, January 3, 2020

The best books about the will to travel

Rob Doyle is a writer from Dublin. His first novel, Here are the Young Men, was published in 2014 by Bloomsbury and the Lilliput Press. It was selected as one of Hot Press magazine’s ‘20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916-2016’, and has been made into a film. His second book, This is the Ritual, was published in 2016 to widespread acclaim. Doyle’s new novel, Threshold, is soon fothcoming from Bloomsbury. He teaches on the MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick, and lives the rest of the year in Berlin.

At the Guardian Doyle shared some of his favorite books to inspire wanderlust, including:
One lustful and wandering writer who did get out of bed was Henry Miller. For those in need of literary vitamin D to counter the winter gloom, I recommend his sun-blessed The Colossus of Maroussi. At the onset of the second world war, Miller found himself in Greece – a period of his life that left him spiritually transformed. Reading his account of those few months is like bathing in supernal light. Everything resplends. He doesn’t even bother to chuck in the sex scenes that made his other books notorious – there’s too much going on in the Aegean sky, the wine-dark sea and the Homeric landscapes.
Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue