What Book Exchanges Tell Us About Travel Narrative

Let’s go over why you insisted on leaving, though a justification isn’t really necessary. Travelling is the most ancient human desire. Just ask Odysseus.
——Intan Paramaditha, The Wandering

The first time I visited a book exchange was in the lounge of a backpacker’s hostel in Barcelona, long before the words ‘sharing economy’ had entered the lexicon. I remember surveying the tattered spines of the books, studying the ones on offer in English wedged between French travel guides and German romance novels. I loved the idea that I could pick up something gifted by another traveller, as though it had been placed there especially for me, and then leave behind a novel carried from the other side of the earth in return. It felt like a trail of literary breadcrumbs, marking my footsteps as I backpacked across the continent.

This romantic idea of the book exchange is part of why it has remained a fixture of hostels and travellers’ cafes. Offering up books in this way is entwined with the act of travel itself, greeting new arrivals in the lobby and sending the message to consider the place a home. Unlike bookstores or libraries, there are no shelves labelled by genre—erasing any distinction between literary and popular fiction, prompting users to read beyond their comfort zone. These book swaps are revealing for what they tell us not just about the books that people read on their travels, but how the books might connect with their hopes for their own journeys.

I loved the idea that I could pick up something gifted by another traveller, as though it had been placed there especially for me.

With predictions of a wholesale shift to e-readers having failed to materialise, the book exchange remains a feature of modern travel. Yet it does not solely exist for paper-book purists. Its persistence these days is in part due to the way it is visually curated for a digital audience. The Instagram-friendly nature of book exchange sites—a red telephone box in London, a bookshelf floating on a Californian canal, a boat-shaped nautical exchange on a Greek beach, or perched outdoors in the Himalayas—is part of their appeal. When distilled down to a snapshot image, these book exchanges capture a trifecta of travel aspirations in a single frame—an exotic destination, a photo-worthy setting and content with cultural value. This aestheticisation of travel extends to the role books themselves play for the traveller. Just as a charming book exchange makes for a perfect travel picture, a book from its shelves is a desirable prop. Sharing an image of a book on a beach towel with the ocean in the background doesn’t only document the geography of the traveller but sends a message to their followers that the trip is less an indulgence than an act of enrichment. The choice of reading material is both part of this visual curation as well as a signifier of where the traveller is seeking guidance from along their path.

 

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Many classic travel memoirs readily lend themselves to playing this dual purpose—being good fodder for the travel aesthetic while also mirroring the traveller’s pursuit of adventure and enlightenment. If a traveller summits Mount Kilimanjaro, they document it. And if they read Ernest Hemingway’s Snows of Kilimanjaro in the tent at base camp, they document that too. In Myanmar, George Orwell’s Burmese Days is a regular on cafe bookshelves and the most widely read English-language book in the country. The appeal of capturing yourself reading Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia while actually in Patagonia is not for the synergy of the title alone. These books portray travel as the gateway to self-actualisation. These novels form part of the canon of travel writing that is typically authored by men and in which hyper-masculinised activities are celebrated. The more extreme the travel experience is—whether scaling Everest or spending the night in a Mexican prison—the more ostensibly enlightened the traveller becomes. These adventures of hedonism or survivalism continue to be idealised in contemporary travel as bucket list items to be ticked off with each photo-op on the road to self-discovery.

Book exchanges capture a trifecta of travel aspirations in a single frame—an exotic destination, a photo-worthy setting and content with cultural value.

Travellers want to read these stories. Last month, I perused a book swap in Luang Prabang, Laos. The ancient capital cluttered with golden Buddhas, glistening temples and adventure sports is a magnet for those seeking excitement wrapped up in enlightenment. On the shelves, and those of every book exchange I’ve surveyed since, there is a definite trend—classic travel memoirs are abundant.

The aspiration of travel is often that it will be life-changing—or at least life-clarifying—and these memoirs reflect this pursuit in a way that is adventurous and bold. Travel literature can encompass a sprawling selection of fiction, non-fiction, hybrid and experimental works, but the one element usually consistent to these books is the role of journeying as an aid to self-discovery. Simply put, the protagonist explores the world and learns things about themself in the process. But despite the broad nature of travel literature as a genre, the selection routinely offered up at book swaps is far narrower. The perspectives of male, Western travel writers dominate and the quest for self-discovery these stories model for the reader is often one that positions foreign cultures and people as little more than plot devices in the travellers’ personal journey. Exploiting local realities and lives for the benefit of the protagonist’s personal insight reinforces legacies of colonialism in many contexts and capitalises on the inherent privileges in travel—having enough financial and cultural capital to undertake such a journey, while possessing a passport from the ‘right’ country of origin to easily move across national borders.

In The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers Abroad, Emily Thomas suggests that ‘travel is about otherness’. She distinguishes an everyday journey from a travel journey by the amount of ‘otherness’ experienced. Traditional travel literature shows us the otherness of far-flung places and grand feats of searching for mystical cities in the Amazon or driving sled dogs through the Arctic. These books place the protagonist in stark opposition to their exoticised context. It is through othering the culture and people that they encounter that the hero faces, and conquers, the extremes of travel.

However, different types of otherness exist. Books that have a more nuanced exploration of the otherness of travel and that resist orientalising need a greater place in the canon. A traveller can pursue the otherness of the self by placing themselves against a new backdrop that allows them self-reflection that ordinary life at home doesn’t provide.

Books that resist orientalising need a greater place in the canon.

This idea appears throughout recent publications, which reframe the way that books approach travel. In these stories travel is focused on the journey of introspection. In her memoir Holy Woman, Louise Omer pursues a religious pilgrimage to explore questions of faith and feminism. Intan Paramaditha’s experimental The Wandering channels The Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy in red shoes, which are given to the protagonist (and the reader) in a ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ style narrative by a demon in exchange for the freedom to explore the world. Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow and Larissa Behrendt’s After Story both craft travel as a transitory space where their central characters seek to strengthen mother-daughter relationships. These travelogues subvert the idea of travel as a quick ticket to self-actualisation through a journey of extremes in favour of a more subtle exploration of its internal impact. These books are authored by women—and notably, predominantly by Indigenous women and women of colour—and they align with the idea of ‘slow travel’, seeking depth of experience rather than ticking off a to-do list.

Unlike traditional travel memoirs that seek to represent travel as artistically or visually desirable to prompt the reader to covet the experience, these books explicitly grapple with the tension between the aesthetics of travel and the pursuit of authenticity. To ‘memorialise her presence’, The Wandering’s Lila takes photographs of her shoes as she travels in New York, her ‘red shoe photo shoots creating [their] own narrative’. She is challenged not to reduce her travel experience to a visual representation when the demon gifts her a magic mirror that can ‘show you who you really are… however, I strongly discourage you from doing so. You shouldn’t be too critical on a journey.’ In Holy Woman, Omer considers whether her internal desires will be reflected in her outer representation recounting ‘in every country, I turned my head before mirrors, searching for the inner shift.’ On a trip through Japan in Cold Enough for Snow, Au’s protagonist takes a photograph of her mother: ‘immediately, she assumes a stock pose… Is this alright, she asked me, or should I stand over there, nearer to that tree? Actually, I had wanted to catch something different, to see her face as it was during ordinary time, when she was alone with her thoughts.’ Their trip is intended to bridge the gulf in their relationship but the temptation to visually curate their travels challenges this pursuit of connection.

These travelogues reflect an approach to travel that is less performative and more experiential. They prompt the reader to think twice about prioritising the aesthetics of travel in favour of a more introspective experience. The otherness of the self is the focus, and the exoticism of their foreign settings is wrestled with and reflected on, rather than fetishised. If the taste among travellers for brash memoirs is complemented with this type of literature, then the entire experience of travel can be broadened and influenced for the better.

These travelogues reflect an approach to travel that is less performative and more experiential.

One of the great gifts of the book exchange is that it allows us to act as ambassadors for literature by introducing new books—and with them, new ideas—to its shelves. While the physical site of the exchange can be highly stylised, the books it contains remain user-curated. A bookstore can shape what is being read through guiding the reader to new releases but the book exchange is reliant on users to shift the composition of its shelves. Introducing books that focus on the otherness experienced in the traveller’s interior world and less on aesthetics can redefine the category of travel literature and influence the type of travel the reader engages in.

This week I finished Elif Batuman’s Either/Or, placing it on the shelf of a cafe in Jakarta. I’ll never know who picks it up next—or what they leave in return—but I hope that its musings on travel and identity keeps them company on their own journey.