The best books for journeys of transformation, truthfully told

This was the book that, more than any other, enticed me to adventure. Robyn, her camels, and Diggity the dog felt like my people—yes, the animals, too. Robyn was many things I hoped I could be: brave, tenacious, and integrous.

This book gave me the confidence to forge on with planning my journey long before I knew why I was drawn to making it. For me, Robyn’s approach exemplifies why we should follow our hearts’ irresistible pull, however unreasonable. If we cannot, at first, explain what motivates us, then so much the better—more to discover along the way.

Crossing the Australian desert in the most essential way possible, borne out of a desire to be alone, has a purity and vitalness to it that is more than enough of an explanation for me.

This book produces a feeling of longing in me that I might someday handle the world with the voracity and veracity of Annie Dillard. Assuming that the enormity of wonder she provokes in me as a reader is just a fraction of what she, the originator of her experiences and descriptions, feels, then oh, the enviable richness of her life! Is anyone as astute and lucid as Annie Dillard?

Astounding language, never, ever straying into cliché, every word wondrous and holy and fresh. For me, she blows everyone else out of the water, not with an epic Odyssey or a feat of physicality but with these reverential and beautiful accounts of her frequent journeys to her local creek.

A major part of why I read is to feel. Few books have moved me as strongly as this one. I deeply loved John Grady, and reading this book as he fought for love, his life, and the lives of his friends was a terribly painful experience.

Of course, it was worth it for the redemption, the passion and fidelity, the horses, the rivers, and the open plains. The emotions of McCarthy’s characters blaze through their sparse and natural dialogue.

When I emerged, heart wrung out and now strangely energised and peaceful, I felt differently about the world and for a while found it easier to belong to. My sense that beauty could emerge from adversity had been bolstered. 

I never found much to like in motorcycles, not until I understood how Pirsig’s attitude to motorcycles was also applicable to a fulfilled life. The full-hearted involvement of its narrator makes this an immensely beguiling and attractive book. It is challenging sometimes but very direct and convivial; in a surprising way, perhaps for a work of philosophy, it left me with a sense that navigating the 20th century (and beyond) really needn’t be so complicated.

This book, to me, increases in relevance as I hone the kind of person I am creatively. This is the honesty of Pirsig’s journey I think; no ducking, no swerving, just head-on commitment, physical and mental. The book reminds me that the road has a knack for haunting us, for resolving past lives, and for freeing us if we’re available for that. I was occasionally a little spooked by the undercurrent of the book, which I liked, found ‘real’, relatable. 

This book cannot be consumed quickly or immediately; it is a book like the desert. I am reading it for the third time, because what I do not yet understand of it I find I believe in anyway, maybe even know already.

I read it to go deeper and further, to clear, to still, to strengthen my mind with clues that it might be possible to reconcile and change the human condition through being intentional in nature and the stories we keep. It is infinitely more mysterious and beautiful than I can say. I am caught between a desire to return to this book endlessly and a fear of committing any part of it to memory.