BOOKS TO MAKE THE WORLD FEEL BIG AGAIN
Eight books for anyone who suspects there is more to life than what can be found at the end of a scroll.
The world has never been more accessible. We can stand virtually on a street in Tokyo, watch somebody eat breakfast in Copenhagen and see the view from a hotel room in Rome before we have even booked the flight. Places that once existed largely in our imaginations can now be inspected, reviewed and mapped before we leave the sofa. Yet for all this access, the world can sometimes feel strangely small. Mystery has been replaced by information and curiosity is quickly satisfied by a search bar. We know what the restaurant looks like before we arrive, what everybody thought of the exhibition before we see it and precisely where to stand to take the same photograph as everybody who came before us.
Books offer another way of travelling. They take longer and demand imagination, but more importantly, the best of them do not simply give us information about the world. They complicate it. This is not a list of books one ought to have read in order to appear well read at dinner. These are books for curiosity. Some take us to distant places, while others barely leave a room. What connects them is the peculiar sensation of reaching the final page and finding that the world has become a little larger than it was before.
JOHN BERGER
WAYS OF SEEING
Most of us assume that looking is passive. We open our eyes and the world simply arrives, but John Berger suggests otherwise. First published in 1972 and developed from his BBC television series, Ways of Seeing asks us to reconsider how we look at paintings, photographs and advertisements, and particularly at images of men and women. Berger is interested not simply in what an image depicts, but in the ideas about beauty, ownership, power and desire hidden inside it.
It is a remarkably small book for something capable of causing so much trouble. Once Berger encourages you to question why an image has been constructed in a particular way, it becomes difficult to stop. A Renaissance painting begins to look different, but so does an advertisement for perfume or an image encountered online. Read it and then go to a gallery. Leave the audio guide behind and stand in front of something you know nothing about. Look at it before asking somebody else to tell you what it means. The world becomes considerably more interesting when looking becomes an active pursuit.
ALAIN DE BOTTON
THE ART OF TRAVEL
We spend an extraordinary amount of time imagining that happiness is waiting somewhere else. Perhaps it is in Paris, or Capri, or a whitewashed hotel overlooking the Aegean. We research it, save photographs of it and eventually arrive, only to discover that we have inconveniently brought ourselves along too.
The Art of Travel is less concerned with where we should go than with why we go at all. De Botton writes about anticipation, airports, exoticism, landscapes and the occasional disappointment of discovering that reality cannot possibly compete with the version of a place we created in our imagination. The great pleasure of the book is that it makes travel feel philosophical without removing any of its romance. It asks us to become better travellers not by going further, but by noticing more. Perhaps the attention we give to an unfamiliar street in Florence could just as easily be given to the street outside our own front door. Adventure is partly geography, but the rest is attention.
GEORGE ORWELL
DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON
Long before 1984 and Animal Farm made Orwell one of the defining writers of the twentieth century, he wrote about washing dishes in Parisian kitchens and living among the poorest inhabitants of London. Down and Out in Paris and London takes the reader into a world of cheap rooms, restaurant kitchens, casual labour and people existing just beyond the comfortable society most travellers encounter.
Paris is here, but not the Paris of beautiful hotels and café terraces. Orwell takes us through the back door, and that is precisely why the book belongs on this list. Travel can become a way of seeing only what we hoped to see, whereas Orwell does the opposite. He pays attention to the people who make the polished world possible but are rarely invited into its stories. The world becomes bigger when we begin noticing the lives taking place beside our own.
PATTI SMITH
JUST KIDS
Before Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe became Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, they were two young people in New York trying to work out how to become artists. That is the heart of Just Kids. Smith's memoir follows their relationship through late 1960s and 1970s New York, including their years around the Chelsea Hotel, when ambition was plentiful and money considerably less so.
It is a book about art before success makes the story neat. They make things because making things matters. They encourage one another, change direction, meet extraordinary people, struggle financially and slowly construct lives around creativity. Knowing what they eventually become gives the early years a poignancy, but the real beauty is in how uncertain everything once was. Just Kids makes the artistic life feel possible without pretending it is easy, and reminds us that almost everybody interesting was once unknown.
HERMANN HESSE
SIDDHARTHA
Some journeys are measured in miles and others happen almost entirely within a person. Hermann Hesse's Siddharthafollows a young man in ancient India who abandons the life expected of him in search of understanding. He moves through asceticism, desire, wealth, disappointment and solitude, repeatedly discovering that wisdom cannot simply be borrowed from somebody who claims to possess it.
It is short enough to read in a few sittings and large enough in its questions to remain with you considerably longer. Modern life offers an endless supply of people willing to tell us the correct way to live. There are routines to adopt, philosophies to follow and formulas promising happiness if only we organise ourselves correctly. Siddhartha offers something quieter. Some things have to be experienced before they can be understood, and there are worse reasons than that to leave home.
JOAN DIDION
SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM
Joan Didion could enter a room, notice the thing everybody else had ignored and somehow make it explain the entire room. Slouching Towards Bethlehem gathers essays largely concerned with California in the 1960s. There are hippies, Hollywood, suburban lives, desert landscapes and a culture changing faster than many of the people inside it could understand.
Didion does not simply report what she sees. She watches the details, from what people wear and how rooms feel to what somebody says when they do not realise it will matter later. The result is journalism that reads with the precision and atmosphere of fiction. There is a useful lesson in Didion for anyone trying to understand a place: do not only visit its monuments. Notice its supermarkets, motel rooms, newspapers, parties and peculiar little rituals. Culture often reveals itself most clearly when nobody thinks anything important is happening.
BRUCE CHATWIN
IN PATAGONIA
Bruce Chatwin left for Patagonia in the 1970s and returned with a book that helped change travel writing. Published in 1977, In Patagonia moves through the southern reaches of Argentina and Chile in fragments, encountering landscapes, legends, settlers, outlaws, descendants of immigrants and stories that become increasingly difficult to separate from myth.
The book does not behave like a guide. It wanders, which is part of its charm. One person leads to another, a story sends Chatwin elsewhere and the landscape seems to become stranger the further he travels. There was a time when distant places could exist for years in the imagination before we saw them, and Patagonia represented something close to the edge of the map. It is harder to preserve that sensation now, which is perhaps why In Patagonia remains so intoxicating. It makes the reader want to go somewhere they cannot entirely picture beforehand.
VIKTOR E. FRANKL
MAN'S SEARCH FOR MEANING
Not every book that enlarges the world does so by making it more beautiful. Viktor Frankl's account of surviving Nazi concentration camps is difficult for obvious reasons, but Man's Search for Meaning is not simply a testimony of what happened to him. Frankl, a psychiatrist, became deeply interested in what allowed human beings to retain a sense of meaning when almost everything else had been taken from them.
It would be reductive to turn such experiences into a collection of reassuring lessons for modern life. The circumstances Frankl describes deserve far more seriousness than that. What the book can do is challenge our understanding of what makes a life meaningful. Comfort, success and happiness are revealed as less reliable foundations than we might imagine. Purpose can exist alongside suffering and a person's inner life can remain consequential even when their external freedom has been brutally restricted. Some books expand our understanding of the world by showing us unfamiliar landscapes. Frankl does it by showing us the dimensions of a human being.
CLOSE THE BOOK AND GO SOMEWHERE
Eight books cannot explain the world, and eight thousand could not. That is precisely the point. Curiosity should not end in certainty. Berger makes us suspicious of the way we look, De Botton asks why we travel, Orwell takes us behind the polished façade and Smith remembers what it was like to become an artist before anybody was watching. Hesse turns the journey inward, Didion teaches us to notice, Chatwin makes the edge of the map irresistible, while Frankl asks what remains when almost everything else disappears.
We live at a strange moment in which it is possible to know a little about almost everything without experiencing very much of anything. The answer is not to reject technology or romanticise a world in which information was harder to find. It might simply be to remain curious. Read something you would never normally choose. Go to the gallery without researching the exhibition first. Take the train somewhere because you like the name of the station. Speak to somebody whose life looks nothing like yours and travel occasionally without watching twenty videos of the destination before you leave.
The world has not become small. We have simply become very good at looking at it through small windows, and perhaps a book is still one of the best ways of opening them.