Gail Pool - TraveLit--A blog about travel literature. Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys.

My aim on TraveLit is to introduce readers who share my love of travel literature to good books they may not know about. Mostly classics, some new, the books cover travel in its many forms, from exploration to tourism. I welcome comments on the readings, the reviews, or the fascinating enterprise of travel itself.

Selected Works

Travel Memoir

Lost Among the Baining: Adventure, Marriage, and Other Fieldwork

"My couch is about as far away from Papua New Guinea as one can possibly get. And yet, Gail Pool made her story of the year she and her husband Jeremy spent studying the Baining...feel nearly tangible."--Tahoma Literary Review

"This engaging memoir is peppered with figurative language and realistic conflicts neatly interwoven...The author does an excellent job of peeling back the layers of how insiders and outsiders might simultaneously realize the tension and intentions that lie between them." --Kaavonia Hinton, Foreword Reviews*****

Nonfiction

Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America

"Everyone in the field will applaud Pool's passionate insistence on the importance to literary culture of the serious, informed critique, which is increasingly endangered and in need of such vigorous support." -–Publishers Weekly

"A thoughtful and thought-provoking guide to the artistry and scholarship, not to mention the agony and ecstasy that is part of good book reviewing... Pool's crisp, intelligent, and witty style moves the reader from the lonely and unrewarding depths to the lofty heights of book reviewing." –Lawrence Rubin, Journal of Popular Culture

Anthology

Other People's Mail: An Anthology of Letter Stories

“Captivating stories in an anthology of epistolary fiction from the last 50 years...Warning: Reading these fantastic letters might make your own next trip to the mailbox seem a bore.”-–Kirkus”

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TraveLit--A blog about travel literature.
Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys.

Rudyard Kipling's Bad Trip

March 13, 2018

American Notes.
By Rudyard Kipling. First published in 1891. Kindle Edition.

Having read Charles Dickens’s American Notes, I decided to try Rudyard Kipling’s identically titled book, an account of a trip he made in 1889, some 50 years after Dickens’s excursion. What a letdown!

I can’t say that I wasn’t warned. The introduction to the edition I read observes that these “Notes…are considered so far beneath Mr. Kipling’s real work that they have been nearly suppressed and are rarely found in a list of his writings.” Curious, I plowed on--I was interested in yet another view of America’s earlier days, and the book is only 48 pages long.

Kipling begins his journey in San Francisco, Read More

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Review: American Notes

March 2, 2018

American Notes for General Circulation.

By Charles Dickens. Project Gutenberg.

Charles Dickens’s account of his 1842 tour of America is, as I expected, a lively travelog. It is also, as I hoped, an insightful commentary that offers enlightening, if dispiriting, links between the country’s early days and its present.

Dickens spent six months in America, and American Notes covers a lot of ground, recording where he goes, how he gets there, what he sees, and what he thinks of it all. He admires Boston, laments the squalor in New York, scorns the politicians in Washington, enjoys the west—especially Cincinnati—and finds tranquility and joy in the beauty of Niagara Falls.

Travel by coach, railway, and steamboat was strenuous, but he makes good fun of the discomforts—the bad food, the atrocious sleeping accommodations. He cannot find humor, though, in the filth, especially the omnipresent tobacco spitting, which disgusted him. I would have liked to hear from Mrs. Dickens about these ordeals, but though she accompanied him, she remains voiceless throughout. Read More

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