Tales from Nowhere (Travel Literature)

Published June 10, 2010 | By admin

Tales from Nowhere (Travel Literature) Review

A low flying four stars here for a book I picked up 2nd hand in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, when looking for something to read on those long travel days we all know and love….

Compiled by Don George who also put together the Lonely Planet short story collections Kindness of Strangers and By the Seat of My Pants this selection of tales takes as its inspiration the idea of finding yourself nowhere. And as noted in the introduction there were a mountain of entrants and the competition to get your piece in this book was pretty fierce and I can well imagine that as so many travellers have some quirky tale of getting somewhere and realising that it is, in many ways, nowhere.

The pieces range from humorous to touching and at least one is downright unreadable due to the painful format chosen by the author. As noted in my title some of these stories won’t resonate with you but when you have a range of tales from such a range of authors set in a variety of locations you are always going to get that. One point in favour of this release is that only a few of the stories overtly scream of the holier than thou `I’m a traveller not a tourist’ mantra, you know, the sneering sometimes indulged in by people who are cruising about the world freely while others have to take package tours to cram in as many sights as possible (yeah, cos their parents are rich and they have fabulous degrees meaning they can wander the planet for a few years AND still have a better house than you by the age of 35).

To me I find the whole Lonely Planet story pretty inspiring so find pretty much anything released under its name to have some value and certainly this serviceable collection of disparate travellers reminisces was a good companion for me on one of my own travels. Snapping this up cheap has probably sealed the deal for me to now go and buy other LP short story collections and I’d recommend this one for real and armchair travellers as part of the own travel library but note that almost all the writers who had pieces selected for inclusion were already published authors, so the likelihood of you finding a personal `diamond in the rough’ is somewhat slim due to the slick nature of most of the stories.

Like I said, a low flying four stars.