100 books like As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning

This is the bible for the Beat generation and a glimpse into the jazz poetry road trip art world of 1950s America.

I read it before travelling to the US on a scholarship to help give me a sense of the Americana and youth culture I hope I would find.

I travelled all around the States excited by motels and road signs and railroad stations and telegraph poles laden with cables running off to disappear over the horizon. And those big old cars…

It’s such a physical story, so full of vigour and sweat.

The book, set in the early 1930s, is from a fleeting period when the liberal pleasures of the German capital made it the European place to be. An English teacher of reserved social origins, Isherwood writes of the Berlin characters who enlivened his life, against the forbidding backdrop of Hitler's rise to power. Cabaret, the film adapted from the book, led Isherwood to insist his version of events was far nearer to how things were.

I loved how this book reads like a thriller—a David and Goliath thriller—in which a lowly clockmaker competed against the foremost scientists of his era and won—and even after he had won, he had to fight dastardly efforts by the elites of his day to deprive him of his prize and hard-earned fame.

The book spoke to my fascination with how things get made and why craftsmanship is important. But it also spoke to my concern with class and how those in power can rig things to their benefit, with, in this case, the happy result that good triumphed over evil.

Out of all the war fiction and nonfiction I have read, this is the one book I wish I had read before deploying to Iraq as a soldier.

Lewis captures the post-invasion chaos, as the war-fighting military struggles to define its new mission as an occupying force, the farcical situations that arise through deep cultural misunderstandings between occupier and occupied, and the suffering and resourcefulness of the local population.

He is also an elegant writer who, like many of the best war writers, finds humour and intense tragedy in the extremes between the absurd and the sublime he encounters.

I was born in my parent’s house which, like all in our area, had no central heating. That was the reality of giving birth in the forties and fifties in England. Jennifer’s memoir of midwifery in working-class Poplar, in the docklands of London, gave rise to one of the most popular TV series. The BBC has taken the story beyond Jennifer’s memoir but the tone is the same. The TV series, like the book, tackles difficult social, cultural, and economic issues, with insight, compassion, and humour. I aimed to tackle issues of class, gender, and race in my memoir in a similar tone.

It was first published in 1937 and the book is an account of a journey Robert Byron made through Persia and Afghanistan in 1933.

The Oxiana he writes about no longer exists having been torn apart by wars and revolutions. I read of his visit to see the Buddhas in Bamian with an ache. I wish they had never been destroyed.

His conversational narrative vividly describes life in towns and villages and the people he meets and their ways of living. He is driven by a love for Islamic architecture that lures him to make this journey.

He attends tea parties and fancy dress balls in remote consulates that now seem absurd but they were no doubt fun at the time and a welcome break.

It’s the account of 2 young Swiss men who in 1953 decide to drive from Geneva to the Khyber Pass in a beat-up and tiny Fiat Topolino with very little money but with big plans. He shared the journey with his good friend Thierry Vernet, an artist whose powerful graphic drawings illustrate the text.

Bouvier begins the story with some wise words about the nature of travel: "Travelling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making the trip, but soon it is making you- or unmaking you."

They had an arduous journey with all kinds of mishaps and automobile problems but they are both such likable characters and so hopeful in adversity. 

Travelling in India is never easy or predictable and it is a great test for ones resilience and sense of calm.

I read Slowly Down the Ganges before making my first trip to the north of India and I found it to be a great source of information and wisdom.

Newby travels with such a positive outlook open to all happenings and eventualities.

He set himself a difficult talk in sailing the Ganges but he shares beautiful and fascinating descriptions of the landscapes and villages. Newby talks with great respect about the sacred importance of the River Ganges and tells us all her 108 names.

The book makes you realize that travelling in India will be difficult but ultimately so rewarding.

Wilson Heflin’s indispensable but unfinished account of Melville’s life at sea from 1841-45, here lovingly edited by two experts on Melville and maritime life, unearths the full story and factual basis of Melville’s Pacific travels. Drawing from logbooks, consular records, newspaper accounts, and museum archives from around the world, Heflin reveals what Melville knew and fictionalized in his books. Highly readable for novices and scholars alike, this book provides an exciting entrée into early shipboard adventures and dangers and a chronicle of places and people around the globe—many long gone. 

As a teenager, Abraham Lincoln built a flatboat and floated down the Mississippi to New Orleans to sell the produce his family and neighbors had grown. This and a similar trip three years later were his only exposure to the Deep South. They immersed him in a culture of riverboat men that was archetypical of the era and included events that became part of the mythology surrounding him, an attack by runaway slaves that could have killed him, and his rescue of fellow boatman from drowning. Campanella is a university professor, tireless researcher, and excellent writer.