From the stunning architecture of India to unusual museums in Iceland, these armchair travel reads let you explore the world from the comfort of your own home.
Looking for more books to take you to faraway places? Click for Beach Reads That Will Take You Away.
Dame Traveler: Live the Spirit of Adventure by Natasia Yakoub
A breathtaking celebration of Instagram’s premier solo female travel community, featuring 200 striking photographs—most of them all-new—plus empowering messages and practical tips for solo travelers.
From backpackers in Peru to artists in Berlin to storytellers in Morocco, Dame Traveler celebrates the diversity and bravery of women from around the world who are not afraid to think (and live) outside the box.
The revolutionary Dame Traveler Instagram account was founded by Nastasia Yakoub, who was born into a strict Chaldean-Middle Eastern community where women are expected to marry young and put aside other personal ambitions. But at the age of twenty, Nastasia embarked on a solo trip to South Africa to volunteer at an orphanage in Cape Town, which sparked a love of world travel. Recognizing a void in the travel industry, she founded Dame Traveler, the first female travel community on Instagram, now more than half a million strong. Nastasia herself has traveled to sixty-three countries on solo adventures, sharing colorful photos of her tantalizing travels along the way.
Dame Traveler celebrates these women with a photographic collection of 200 stunning images paired with inspiring captions, 80% of which have never been seen on the Instagram account. Organized into sections on architecture, culture, nature, and water, each entry features travel information, plus tips, advice, unique solo-travel experiences, and wisdom from contributing globe-trotters to embolden the next generation of Dame Travelers.
Available in Hardcover and eBook Editions.
Click to Read an Excerpt.
Follow @dametraveler on Instagram.
Paris in Love: A Memoir by Eloisa James
From the author of Wilde in Love, a joyful chronicle of a year in one of the most beautiful cities in the world: Paris.
When bestselling romance author Eloisa James took a sabbatical from her day job as a Shakespeare professor, she also took a leap that many people dream about: She sold her house and moved her family to Paris.
With no classes to teach, no committee meetings to attend, no lawn to mow or cars to park, Eloisa revels in the ordinary pleasures of life—discovering corner museums that tourists overlook, chronicling Frenchwomen’s sartorial triumphs, walking from one end of Paris to another. She copes with her Italian husband’s notions of quality time; her two hilarious children, ages eleven and fifteen, as they navigate schools—not to mention puberty—in a foreign language; and her mother-in-law Marina’s raised eyebrow in the kitchen (even as Marina overfeeds Milo, the family dog).
Paris in Love invites the reader into the life of a New York Times bestselling author and her spirited, enchanting family, framed by la ville de l’amour.
Available in Trade Paperback, eBook, and Audio Editions.
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A Month in Sienna by Hisham Matar
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return comes a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and life.
After finishing his powerful memoir The Return, Hisham Matar, seeking solace and pleasure, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Artists he had admired throughout his life, including Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he’d had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments.
Including beautiful full-color reproductions of the artworks, A Month in Siena is about what occurred between Matar, those paintings, and the city. That month would be an extraordinary period in the writer’s life: an exploration of how art can console and disturb in equal measure, as well as an intimate encounter with a city and its inhabitants. This is a gorgeous meditation on how centuries-old art can illuminate our own inner landscape—current relationships, long-lasting love, grief, intimacy, and solitude—and shed further light on the present world around us.
Available in Hardcover, eBook, and Audio Editions.
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Listen to a Clip from the Audiobook.
In the Land of Good Living: A Journey to the Heart of Florida by Kent Russell
A wickedly smart, funny, and irresistibly off-kilter account of an improbable thousand-mile journey on foot into the heart of modern Florida, the state that Russell calls “America Concentrate.”
In the summer of 2016, Kent Russell—broke, at loose ends, hungry for adventure—set off to walk across Florida. Mythic, superficial, soaked in contradictions, maligned by cultural elites, segregated from the South, and literally vanishing into the sea, Florida (or, as he calls it: “America Concentrate”) seemed to Russell to embody America’s divided soul. The journey, with two friends intent on filming the ensuing mayhem, quickly reduces the trio to filthy drifters pushing a shopping cart of camera equipment. They get waylaid by a concerned citizen bearing a rifle; buy cocaine from an ex-wrestler; visit a spiritual medium; attend a cuckold party. The narrative overflows with historical detail about how modern Florida came into being after World War II, and how it came to be a petri dish for life in a suddenly, increasingly diverse new land of minority-majority cities and of unrivaled ethnic and religious variety. Russell has taken it all in with his incomparably focused lens and delivered a book that is both an inspired travelogue and a profound rumination on the nation’s soul—and his own. It is a book that is wildly vivid, encyclopedic, erudite, and ferociously irreverent—a deeply ambivalent love letter to his sprawling, brazenly varied home state.
Available in Hardcover, eBook, and Audio Editions.
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The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland’s Most Unusual Museums by A. Kendra Greene
Mythic creatures, natural wonders, and the mysterious human impulse to collect are on beguiling display in this poetic tribute to the museums of an otherworldly island nation.
Iceland is home to only 330,000 people (roughly the population of Lexington, Kentucky) but more than 265 museums and public collections—nearly one for every ten people. They range from the intensely physical, like the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which collects the penises of every mammal known to exist in Iceland, to the vaporously metaphysical, like the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, which poses a particularly Icelandic problem: How to display what can’t be seen? In The Museum of Whales You Will Never See, A. Kendra Greene is our wise and whimsical guide through this cabinet of curiosities, showing us, in dreamlike anecdotes and more than thirty charming illustrations, how a seemingly random assortment of objects—a stuffed whooper swan, a rubber boot, a shard of obsidian, a chastity belt for rams—can map a people’s past and future, their fears and obsessions. “The world is chockablock with untold wonders,” she writes, “there for the taking, ready to be uncovered at any moment, if only we keep our eyes open.”
Available in Hardcover, eBook, and Audio Editions.
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Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park by Conor Knighton
From CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Conor Knighton, a behind-the-scenery look at his year traveling to each of America’s National Parks, discovering the most beautiful places and most interesting people our country has to offer
When Conor Knighton set off to explore America’s “best idea,” he worried the whole thing could end up being his worst idea. A broken engagement and a broken heart had left him longing for a change of scenery, but the plan he’d cooked up in response had gone a bit overboard in that department: Over the course of a single year, Knighton would visit every national park in the country, from Acadia to Zion.
In Leave Only Footprints, Knighton shares informative and entertaining dispatches from what turned out to be the road trip of a lifetime. Whether he’s waking up early for a naked scrub in a historic bathhouse in Arkansas or staying up late to stargaze along our loneliest highway in Nevada, Knighton weaves together the type of stories you’re not likely to find in any guidebook. Through his unique lens, America the Beautiful becomes America the Captivating, the Hilarious, and the Inspiring. Along the way, he identifies the threads that tie these wildly different places together—and that tie us to nature—and reveals how his trip ended up changing his views on everything from God and love to politics and technology.
Available in Hardcover, eBook, and Audio Editions.
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Listen to a Clip from the Audiobook.
City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined by Peter Lunenfeld
An engaging account of the uniquely creative spirit and bustling cultural ecology of contemporary Los Angeles.
How did Los Angeles start the 20th century as a dusty frontier town and end up a century later as one of the globe’s supercities—with unparalleled cultural, economic, and technological reach? In City at the Edge of Forever, Peter Lunenfeld constructs an urban portrait, layer by layer, from serendipitous affinities, historical anomalies, and uncanny correspondences. In its pages, modernist architecture and lifestyle capitalism come together via a surfer girl named Gidget; Joan Didion’s yellow Corvette is the brainchild of a car-crazy Japanese-American kid interned at Manzanar; and the music of the Manson Family segues into the birth of sci-fi fandom.
One of the book’s innovations is to brand Los Angeles as the alchemical city. Earth became real estate when the Yankees took control in the nineteenth century. Fire fueled the city’s early explosive growth as the Southland’s oil fields supplied the inexhaustible demands of drivers and their cars. Air defined the area from WWII to the end of the Cold War, with aeronautics and aerospace dominating the region’s industries. Water is now the key element, and Southern California’s ports are the largest in the western hemisphere. What alchemists identify as the ethereal fifth element, or quintessence, this book positions as the glamour of Hollywood, a spell that sustains the city but also needs to be broken in order to understand Los Angeles now.
Lunenfeld weaves together the city’s art, architecture, and design, juxtaposes its entertainment and literary histories, and moves from restaurant kitchens to recording studios to ultra-secret research and development labs. In the process, he reimagines Los Angeles as simultaneously an exemplar and cautionary tale for the 21st century.
Available in Hardcover, eBook, and Audio Editions.
Click to Read an Excerpt.
Patterns of India: A Journey Through Colors, Textiles, and the Vibrancy of Rajasthan by Christine Chitnis
It’s the trip of a lifetime—a textile-based tour of colorful Rajasthan, India featuring more than 200 lush photographs depicting everyday life in one of the most vibrant regions in the world.
Patterns of India is a visual experience that offers intimate insights into the diverse and richly hued Western Indian culture. Color is the thread that binds the vast country together, defining every aspect of life from religion and politics to food and dress. Organized by the five dominant colors royal blue, sandstone, marigold, ivory, and rose, this book explores how deeply color and pattern exist in a symbiotic relationship and are woven into every part of the culture. For instance, the fuchsia found in the draping fabric of a sari is matched by the vibrant chains of roses offered at temple, and the burnt orange spices in the marketplaces are reflected in the henna tattoos given to brides and wedding guests. While every color is imbued with meaning, it is often within the details of patterns that the full story comes to light.
Photographer and writer Christine Chitnis spent over a decade traveling through, getting to know, and falling in love with the intricate patterns of everyday Rajasthani life. With history and culture—based essays woven throughout the more than 200 stunning photographs of architecture, markets, cuisine, art, textiles, and everyday goings—on, Patterns of India captures the beauty and essence of this unique part of the world.
Available in Hardcover and eBook Editions.
Click to Read an Excerpt.
Eyes over the World: The Most Spectacular Drone Photography by Dirk Dallas; Foreword by Benjamin Grant and Chris Burkard
A stunning collection of images offering an unexpected look at our Earth from the wildly popular “From Where I Drone” Instagram account.
A vertiginous overhead view of a Tokyo city street grid, set aglow with nighttime lights. Aerial shots of whales in the turquoise-blue waters of the Indian Ocean. Sunbathers languidly lounging on a tropical beach’s pearly-white sand. These are just a few of the inspiring images showcased in this stunning compilation of the world’s best drone photography. One of this era’s fastest-growing technologies, drones have transformed the world of photography, allowing a new class of creatives to capture images that shift our point of view and redefine how we see the world.
Paying homage to the breathtaking beauty of our planet, Eyes over the World features an eclectic range of natural wonders and man-made oddities captured by both luminaries and amateurs alike in the burgeoning drone-photography community. Edited by drone-photography expert and the creator of the “From Where I Drone” Instagram account Dirk Dallas, this fantastic, fearless volume offers a new sense of perspective and awe gained by this fascinating new technology. Organized geographically, it can also be used as a bucket list of sorts—a catalog of all the wonders the Earth has to offer.
Available in Hardcover.
Follow @fromwhereidrone on Instagram.
Minimal New York City: Graphic, Gritty, and Witty by Michael Arndt
Make your way from the Flatiron to Flatbush as an award-winning designer expertly captures New York City with minimalist art and unexpected wit.
Minimal New York City playfully captures the essence of New York with clever pairs of sharp illustrations and cheeky commentary about the city. Historic context for each illustration is revealed in the back of the book, making it an informative experience for anyone who has ever walked through the bright lights of Times Square, paid $13 for an avocado toast, or indulged in Junior’s Cheesecake on Flatbush. Minimal New York City is a celebration of what makes New York New York.
As a lifelong resident of New York State who has spent nearly twenty-five years living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Michael Arndt has poured his wealth of insider knowledge into Minimal New York City, a graphic love letter dedicated to the place he calls home. His references run the gamut from visual similarities between Central Park and Brooklyn’s parks to the ways in which Times Square has evolved from the ’70s to today. His visual and verbal wit make the graphics of New York approachable for New Yorkers and Big Apple fanatics alike.
Available in Trade Paperback and eBook Editions.
