Telling stories in telling rooms: 12 more travel books

Telling stories, hearing stories, writing stories: I love it all, especially when they take us beyond home, in imagination or reality. And what better than travel books or any genre that inspires travel?

After reading The Telling Room, by Michael Paterniti, we visited Guzmán, Spain, where the author lived for a year while researching his non-fiction book about a famous cheese, and we found dozens of these telling rooms built into the hillsides. I discovered that visiting a setting can turn a so-so book into an exciting one. 

“Almost any book set in a far-off location revs my travel motor,” my friend Jennifer commented after my first blog story about books that inspire wanderlust. I fully agree!

Here are 12 more books, which I and travel-loving friends have enjoyed, that get me packing my bag. They are in no particular order.

1. The Telling Room, by Michael Paterniti

Subtitled “A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge and the World’s Greatest Piece of Cheese,” Michael Paterniti’s non-fiction book tells the story of a fabulous cheese called Páramo de Guzmán. He tasted it in the U.S.A., then traveled to northwestern Spain to interview its maker – Ambrosio Molinos – who lived in the village of Guzmán. Paterniti resolved to write a book about Molinos and his cheese, even moving his family to Guzmán for a year to learn Spanish and the village’s culture. But it took him 10 years to write the book.

It took me 10 tries to get into the book – the same for all my fellow Book Club members. But I stuck with it and it grew on me. The story follows his writing (or non-writing) process, which interested me. And gave me hope for all my book projects that have yet to come to fruition. I concluded it was an interesting tale for writers, but may be tedious for others.

However! My analysis took a 180-degree turn when I discovered that Guzmán was very close to our route on a planned drive across northern Spain!

The Páramo de Guzmán cheese paired excellently with dried cherries and the local red wine, which we enjoyed after exploring the village’s telling rooms, aka bodegas. At the top of the hill, a cross marked the remains of an old castle being excavated.

As we drove into the village, we passed a half-dozen tiny stone cottages built into the hillside, with grass roofs. I squirmed with delight at finding these telling rooms, which are called bodegas in Spanish and translate as wine cellars. And there were dozens more, spiralling in lines up the hillside. We investigated them all, peering through the slatted doors to see the stone steps leading down tunnels into the murky depths where wine (and the Páramo de Guzmán cheese) was stored in caves. Some were more elaborate than others, with little rooms, tables and chairs, sometimes a sink or a fireplace. Outside, many had stone seats and tables, wood-burning barbecues, TV antennas and electricity wires. In the book, we learned, men would gather in groups to pass around a porrón (like a pitcher) of wine and tell stories. Hence the name telling rooms.

To my disappointment, we didn’t encounter anyone on that drizzly January day; I had hoped to be invited inside a telling room. We learned that cheesemaker Ambrosio had died two years ago. Later, during dinner at the Palacio de Guzmán (where we also stayed overnight), we sampled the Páramo de Guzmán cheese. It truly was fabulous – somewhat like a Parmesan with its crumbly dry texture and bits of salty goodness, yet also creamy in the mouth.

I took many photos to share with my Book Club friends, who said they also appreciated the book better after seeing where the story had been set and what the telling rooms looked like. I hadn’t imagined those adorable little hobbit houses. The less romantic view is that, honestly, they were man-caves where the men hung out to drink wine and avoid their wives.

2. The Vagabond’s Way, by Rolf Potts

Rolf Potts is an excellent writer and among my top favourite travel writers. I had already fallen in love with Vagabonding: “An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, and was thrilled when I saw The Vagabond’s Way on a bookstore shelf. I bought it for my friend Kathleen’s birthday and tried to surreptitiously read it without cracking the spine before I gave it to her. Fortunately, Bill came to my rescue and gave me a copy for Christmas.

Subtitled “366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the Art of Travel,” the book offers a one-page meditation for each day of the year, including leap years such as 2024. I read it slowly, deliberately, taking time to contemplate the points he made. I found myself repeatedly exclaiming inside my head: “Yes, I’ve found exactly the same thing!!” For example: March 25, Lighter luggage makes for freer experiences; April 24, Slow journeys make for more engaged connections; October 17, Living in a foreign culture is a window into your own; and November 27, It’s okay to feel travel burnout sometimes.

3. Slow Trains Around Spain, by Tom Chesshyre

I bought this excellent book at Stanfords, said to be the world’s largest map and travel book store, in London and thoroughly enjoyed Tom Chesshyre’s “3,000-Mile Adventure on 52 Rides.” The author takes the Tube (subway) to St. Pancras station in London, travels by high-speed train to Spain, and then takes his time on slow trains in a zigzag pattern all around the country. He doesn’t spend long in each place – just one night – and sees the tourist spots that he can get to easily, but of course misses anything not close to a train station.

However, he describes the sights out the train window, the people he encounters, and the feel of each town where he stops, all in enough detail that you feel you’re with him. He also discusses some Spanish political sore spots, such as Catalonian separatism, immigrants and unemployment.

Obviously fascinated by trains, Chesshyre has also written Slow Trains to Venice, Ticket to Ride and Tales from the Fast Trains. His adventures inspired me to look up the train schedules and maps for Portugal to see if I could do the same thing. The dream is in motion; stay tuned.

4. Acqua Alta, by Donna Leon

When I’m not reading travel books, you’ll find me with my nose buried in a murder mystery. And when those mysteries are set in places like Venice, well, how could I resist?

Two years ago, my friend Christina lent me half a dozen books by Donna Leon and now I go through regular binge sessions, reading about Commissario Guido Brunetti – homicide police detective in Venice.

Death at La Fenice was the first – about a murder in the famous Venetian opera house – and I was hooked. I read Acqua Alta next (the fifth in the series), and realized I was learning many details about living in Venice. Acqua alta (Italian for ‘high water’) takes place during the winter when rain and high tides cause flooding throughout Venice, but people still go about their business, wading through water as high as their thighs. They even go shopping in flooded stores. When acqua alta is expected, a siren warns shopkeepers to start their pumps and raise their merchandise. So different from my experience!

Through a Glass Darkly involved a death in a Murano glass factory and readers learn that chemical run-off from the factories pollutes the Venice Lagoon. From A Sea of Troubles, I learned about clam fishermen in the lagoon. When we visit Venice, I know now not to eat local clams – they’re scraped off the lagoon’s polluted bottom.

Many of Leon’s books end with the perpetrators not brought to justice due to the corrupt political system in Italy, which can be dissatisfying to a reader but is likely, I assume, part of reality there. Another interesting lesson.

5. The Portuguese: A Modern History, by Barry Hatton

Since we’re living in Portugal, I read anything I can get my hands on about my adopted country. My expat friend Kate lent me this excellent book, but I want to buy my own copy since it’s worth re-reading. Author Barry Hatton does an excellent job of explaining how the Portuguese and their country have become what they are today. It helps me understand the places we visit and put them into the context of Portugal’s lengthy history.

“The Portuguese remind me of those ancient olive trees you come across around the country – bent out of shape by bigger forces, flawed and suffering, but robustly surviving with an unusual beauty,” wrote Hatton. What an apt comparison.

When we wander the streets of Lisbon’s Baixa neighbourhood, I attempt to recall its spice-trade glory days when goods from around the world arrived there: “The narrow streets contained amber and rubies from Burma, diamonds from India, pearls from Ceylon, gold from Mozambique, spices and bolts of cloth from the East,” he wrote. “Each year 2,000 ships came into the Tagus [River], an average of more than five a day pulling up to the quay. Lisbon was a colorful, cosmopolitan emporium, a swanky, vibrant metropolis that invented its own architectural style called Manueline.”

I took note of many places, often off the main tourist paths, that we should visit: a Jewish museum and Discoveries museum in the village of Belmonte where Jews fled during the Inquisition; in Lisbon, the National Museum of Ancient Art, the Museum of the Orient, and the Berardo art collection at the Belem Cultural Centre.

“As the Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno said after a visit about a hundred years ago: ‘The more I go there, the more I want to go back’,” wrote Hatton.

Or, simply, move to Portugal.

6. Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, by Robert Louis Stevenson

I first read this years ago but it stuck with me, so I re-read it recently on Project Gutenberg (an online library of free ebooks). Robert Louis Stevenson’s short travel journal tells about his 12-day, 200-kilometre hike through the Cevennes mountains in southern France in 1878 with Modestine, an ornery donkey he bought to carry his heavy camping gear. The Scottish author, in his late 20s at the time, later wrote Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

He paid a woman to create a “sleep sack” for him – one of the first sleeping bags ever. Wikipedia noted that Stevenson’s travel book was “one of the earliest accounts to present hiking and camping outdoors as a recreational activity.”

Stevenson’s sense of humour shines through in reporting his troubles getting the slow-walking Modestine to do his bidding (although he’s also mean to her sometimes). I loved his descriptions of the mountains and rivers, roads and rough paths, as well as his insightful profiles of people he met along his perambulations. Father Apollinaris, for example, is a Trappist monk who thinks Stevenson is a pedlar.

“Ah, he had never seen a Scotsman before. And he looked me all over, his good, honest, brawny countenance shining with interest, as a boy might look upon a lion or an alligator,” he wrote. “Might he say that I was a geographer? No; I thought, in the interests of truth, he positively might not. ‘Very well, then’ (with disappointment), ‘an author.’”

I discovered that hikers today can follow in Stevenson’s footsteps along most of his original path. Check out the Stevenson trail.  

A famous quote about travel came from this book: “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more clearly; to come down off this featherbed of civilization and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.” 

7. Travel as a Political Act, by Rick Steves

After sharing my first list of travel books, I asked friends to send me their suggestions. Gayle recommended this one, which I also thoroughly enjoyed.

“We heard him speak in Palm Springs a few years ago,” Gayle said. “He gave out his book called Travel as a Political Act.” Like me, Gayle enjoyed Steves’ easy and informative writing style, and how he blends history and interviews with local people he meets in various countries.

Steves’ main point is that travel helps broaden our perspectives. Using examples from his experiences in Europe, Central America and the Holy Land, he explains how anyone can travel in a more thoughtful and enlightening way. (His book is supported by a video plus many articles and talks given by him, all available on his website.)

To learn “How to Leave your Baggage Behind,” Rick offers 10 tips that he elaborates upon:

1. Get out of your comfort zone.
2. Connect with people and try to understand them.
3. Be a cultural chameleon (i.e. embrace cultural differences).
4. Understand contemporary context (i.e. read the local news).
5. Empathize with the other 96 percent of humanity: walk in their shoes.
6. Identify – and undermine – your own ethnocentricity. 
7. Accept the legitimacy of other moralities. 
8. Sightsee with an edge. 
9. Make your trip an investment in a better world. 
10. Make a broader perspective your favorite souvenir. 

All these steps can be put into action on any trip – short or long, local or international. I try to do so.

8. The Footloose American, by Brian Kevin

The subtitle explains this book’s raison d’etre: the author followed Hunter S. Thompson’s 1963 year-long trail across South America. Along the way, Brian Kevin contrasts his experiences of 21^st-century culture and politics in South America with Thompson’s descriptions in letters and published stories.

His observations about cities, for example, has stayed with me: “I think Thompson shared a bias that’s common among overseas travelers, a tendency to view cities as somehow less authentically ‘other’ than what he called the ‘wild country.’ Among the gringo nomads I ran into along the Thompson Trail, I regularly heard the statement ‘It’s a city’ deployed as a kind of verbal shrug, a shorthand method of telling a fellow traveler that Bogota or Lima or La Paz was less worthy of description than, say Bolivia’s mountain villages or Ecuador’s sparsely trammeled beaches.”

In our travels now, I purposely do not shrug off cities in favour of the countryside. Both must be experienced because both are part of most cultures (Singapore might be an exception, for example). In fact, you can see cities as a concentration of that culture. I particularly enjoy books that help me learn to experience places with a different mindset. Rick would be proud.

9. The Dutch, I Presume? by Martijn de Rooi

When we arrived in the Netherlands to house-sit and cat-sit for 3.5 weeks, the family had left this book out for us to read. And we’re happy they did, since it gave us interesting social, cultural, political, historical and geographical background about the Dutch people.

Martijn de Rooi discusses the “Icons of the Netherlands,” the symbols, myths and common knowledge about the low country, explaining how they came to be. We learned about polders, living below sea level, tulips, windmills, cheese, cows, clogs, gezelligheid (coziness), tolerance, Delft blue, skating, beer and more. Lots of great photos and illustrations also helped inform our explorations.  

10. The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, by Richard Zimler

This is one of those novels that’s hard to describe as “enjoyable” since it’s based on the true, gruesome story about the mass slaughter of Jewish people in Lisbon on April 19, 1506. But really, it’s a good story, told with intensity and sensual descriptions.

After Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, many fled to Portugal, where they were somewhat more tolerated. However, by 1497, under pressure from Spain, they were forced to be baptised as Christians or leave Portugal. Many became surface Christians but celebrated their Jewish faith in secret.

Richard Zimler‘s book tells the story of Berekiah Zarco, a 20-year-old kabbalist (Jewish mystic) and manuscript illuminator who tries to solve the murder of his uncle amid the anti-Semitic pogrom. On that fateful day, 2,000 (with some estimates of up to 4,000) people were slaughtered, suspected not only of being secret Jews but also of having caused a plague and drought.

As I read, I studied the maps and neighbourhoods of Lisbon in my Lonely Planet and Rick Steves’ guidebooks for Portugal. Most of the story takes place in the Alfama neighbourhood of narrow, twisting, steep streets just below the São Jorges Castle. Today, on the plaza Largo de São Domingos, a monument honours those who were killed.

On the down side, I was sometimes confused about who was who and about half a dozen typos annoyed me – it needed better proofreading. (Overlook Press was ironically named.) However, it’s a recommended read, especially if you’re planning to explore Lisbon.

11. The Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain

Before Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he travelled by steamship for five months through Europe and the Holy Land with a group of American tourists and humorously recounted his exploits in The Innocents Abroad. Although the book (available on Project Gutenberg) was published in 1869, Twain’s cogent observations and lessons about travel are just as valid today – that’s what I especially enjoyed about it.

He admires, for example, the comfort and relaxed pace of life in Europe, compared with the frenzy of America. He wished he could “export some of it to our restless, driving, vitality-consuming marts at home. Just in this one matter lies the main charm of life in Europe – comfort. In America, we hurry.” That could have been written today.

His remarks about relics in Catholic churches made me laugh, since his questions mirrored my own: “But isn’t this relic matter a little overdone? We find a piece of the true cross in every old church we go into, and some of the nails that held it together. I would not like to be positive, but I think we have seen as much as a keg of these nails…. And as for bones of St. Denis, I feel certain we have seen enough of them to duplicate him if necessary.”

Twain describes his faux pas of commenting on how beautiful a woman looks while standing right beside her, assuming she doesn’t know English. But then she replies in English, thanking him for the compliment, although not in the way it was delivered. To his credit, he is embarrassed. “Why will people be so stupid as to suppose themselves the only foreigners among a crowd of ten thousand persons?” It’s a lesson that’s still valid for travellers today.

“We saw every thing, and then we went home satisfied.”

12. Snow Falling on Cedars, by David Guterson

In this case, our travels inspired me to read the book, not vice versa.

During the two Covid-era winters we spent in Osoyoos, British Columbia (Canada’s western-most province), we drove through and visited the village of Greenwood several times. Many of the old brick buildings sported oversized painted murals about seafood and fishing, and some abandoned stores had “Amity Harbor” in their names. Confusing, in this village 480 kilometres from salt water.

But then we learned that many scenes from the movie “Snow Falling on Cedars” had been filmed in Greenwood in 1998 (and had been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Cinematography). So of course I read the book that had inspired the movie.  

Snow Falling on Cedars is a mixed-race love story and murder mystery that David Guterson set in Amity Harbor, a fishing- and strawberry-growing village on the fictional San Piedro Island, off the coast of the state of Washington, U.S.A. In 1954, just after the Second World War, Japanese Americans are struggling to be accepted by their fellow Americans, including some of German background.

Interestingly, Greenwood had been an internment camp for Japanese Canadians during the war. We visited the village museum, where we learned how families had been housed in drafty buildings that had been abandoned after copper mining declined. Old photos showed rows of schoolchildren, boys’ hockey teams and girls in fancy dresses on a Labour Day float. On the edge of town, the Nikkei Legacy Park explained more of the internment history and honoured Japanese-Canadian who fought in both world wars, despite the racism that ostracized them.

While our visits gave us the facts, the book filled in the gaps with human emotions and stories.

Greenwood B.C. stood in for Amity Harbor in the movie “Snow Falling on Cedars” based on the book of the same name.

Sometimes books inspire travel, and sometimes travel inspires the reading of certain books.

Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.