What is your favourite genre for reading? Romance novels? Crime thrillers? Biographies? Cook books? Sport? Chick Lit? Vampire Romance? History?

The genre I most like to read does not fit easily into a cute sticker-size description or book shelf. You will find these books interspersed amongst travel, self help, culture, adventure, biography, geography, fiction, poetry, health and well-being. I like to read personal accounts about people who set out from their known, safe worlds, and travel off with some purpose in mind – a quest perhaps. It is done with a spirit of adventure, challenge, and personal discovery. The single word that comes closest to describing this would be “exploration”. Or perhaps “journeys” – although the word “journey” has been cheapened in popular colloquialism.  Exploration of the world, life, culture, the individual.  It is travel with a twist.

In no particular order here is a list of some books I’ve read and loved that I think fit into this genre:

• Illusions by Richard Bach
• The Bridge Across Forever by Richard Bach
• Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer
• The Happy Isles of Oceania by Paul Theroux
• Into the Blue by Tony Horwitz
• Walden by Henry David Thoreau
• Out on a Limb by Shirley Maclaine
• The Camino by Shirley Maclaine
• My Pilgrim’s Heart by Stephanie Dale
• Almost French by Sarah Turnbull
• Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
• The Treehouse by Naomi Wolf
• The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield
• Throwim Way Leg by Tim Flannery
• Lost in the Jungle by Yossi Ghinsberg
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
• Touch the Dragon by Karen Connelly
• Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes
• Salvation Creek by Susan Duncan
• Last Seen in Lhasa by Claire Scobie
• When in Rome by Penelope Green
• Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie
• The Well at the World’s End by A.J. MacKinnon