Great Journeys and Love

I received two book-sets on Wednesday. I thought I'd share some information on them since the other journals tended to get quite a few comments. The two sets - 20 books in each - are (Penguin's) Great Journeys and Great Love.



Penguin Great Journeys

* Snakes with Wings and Gold-digging Ants – Herodotus (North Africa)
* From The Meadows of Gold - Mas'udi (The Middle East)
* The Customs of the Kingdoms of India - Marco Polo (South Asia)
* The Shipwrecked Men – Cabeza De Vaca (North America)
* Piracy, Turtles and Flying Foxes – William Dampier (South-East Asia)
* Life on the Golden Horn - Mary Wortley Montagu (Asia Minor) (PICTURED)
* Hunt for the Southern Continent – James Cook (South Pacific)
* Sold as a Slave – Olaudah Equiano (West Africa)
* Jaguars and Electric Eels – Alexander Von Humboldt (South America)
* In the Heart of the Amazon Forest – Walter Henry Bates (South America)
* To the Holy Shrines – Sir Richard Burton (The Middle East)
* Borneo, Celebes, Aru – Alfred Russel Wallace (South America)
* Can-cans, Cats and Cities of Ash – Mark Twain (Europe)
* Adventures in the Rocky Mountains – Isabella Bird (North America)
* A journey to the End of the Russian Empire – Anton Chekhov (North-East Asia)
* The Cong and the Cameroons – Mary Kingsley (Equatorial West Africa)
* Escape from the Antarctic – Ernest Shackleton (Antarctica)
* Fighting in Spain – George Orwell (Europe)
* Across the Empty Quarter – Wilfred Thesiger (The Middle East)
* The Cobra''s Heart – Ryszard Kapuscinski (East Africa)

(There isn't a link for Orwell for some reason. But, I'm almost certain it's heavily based on Homage to Catalonia.)

Penguin Great Loves

* Doomed Love - Virgil
* Forbidden Fruit – From the Letters of Abelard and Heloise
* The Eaten Heart: Unlikely Tales of Love – Giovanni Boccaccio
* Of Mistresses, Tigresses and Other Conquests – Giacomo Casanova
* Cures for Love - Stendhal
* The Seducer's Diary – Soren Kierkegaard
* First Love – Ivan Turgenev
* A Mere Interlude – Thomas Hardy
* The Kreutzer Sonata – Leo Tolstoy
* A Russian Affair – Anton Chekhov
* Deviant Love – Sigmund Freud
* Magnetism – F. Scott Fitzerald
* Something Childish but Very Natural – Katherine Mansfield
* The Virgin and The Gipsy (PICTURED)
* Mary – Vladimir Nabokov
* Bonjour Tristesse – Francoise Sagan
* Giovanni's Room – James Baldwin
* Eros Unbound – Anais Nin
* Bodily Secrets – William Trevor
* The Women Who Got Away – John Updike

Travel writing and stories about 'love' are probably my two favourite areas in literature. The Love set has a number of awesome writers who I've already read (Kierkegaard, Lawrence and Nabokov), but I'm interested in a lot of the others too. Anais Nin is supposed to be really good, and the number of French writers in the set is quite high for obvious reasons.

As for the travel set. I've been reading A.A. Gill's travel essays for a long time now, and I'm interested to start reading the more 'exotic' stuff. Almost all the books are from when the Western world 'discovered' the rest of the world. They're timeless in a sense since we can no longer visit these places as they were.

The books all have much better covers and feel much better made than the Great Idea's set as well. I'll going to start reading Lawrence's story now. Good morning!