Why am I passionate about this?
Iāve been fascinated by nonfiction since my teens, by the idea of books about things that really happened. Fiction gets all the kudos, all the big prizes, all the respect. But as far as Iām concerned, trying to wrestle the unruly matter of reality onto the page is much more challenging ā imaginatively, technically, ethically ā than simply making things up! My book The Travel Writing Tribe is all about those challenges ā and about the people, the well-known travel writers, who have to confront them every time they put pen to paper.
Tim's book list on writing about the real world
Why did Tim love this book?
Great travel writing requires serious honesty ā and thereās no more honest book than this. An aging, crotchety American sets out on a sentimental journey through Brazil after a forced departure from his adopted home in Ecuador. You start out thinking that heās been the victim of some sort of sketchily explained injustice, but as he travels, he gradually tears more and more strips off himself and your perspective changes. Brutally honest. Thomsen is also remarkably open about his own writerly craft: ālet me shift my characters around a bitā he says at one point, revealing the fundamental tension of nonfiction ā between faithfulness to narrative and faithfulness to reality.
1 author picked The Saddest Pleasure as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Unflinchingly honest about his family, his failures, his already broken health at the age of sixty?three and the loss of the hopes he once had for himself, Thomsen is also sickened by the corruption and rapacity of our societies, the inequality and the economic destitution. What starts as an almost reluctant concatenation of memory and poignant, limpid descriptions of Brazil, grows into a shattering romantic symphony on human misery and life s small but exquisite transcendent pleasures. He spares the reader nothing.