Everything here speaks for the book

Even those of us who love to travel need a break from everything that makes traveling uncomfortable. While we download various apps onto our cell phones before every trip and book hotels and tickets online, the good old paper book is still the best option.

With our four favorites, you can go on a journey with good literature.

Without luggage restrictions, it can also be a hardback book. Add a lemongrass tea, a cozy blanket and off to the sofa.

The downfall of the Wager

Author: David Grann. The true story of an English Admiralty ship built and sent to the high seas to capture a Spanish galleon laden with gold, gems and silver from the Spanish colonies of the time and fill the royal coffers.

The book was number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list for weeks. In our view, rightly so. The author David Grann knows how to tell an exciting and vivid story, from the renovation of the old ship in a shipyard in England, where more rats than workers run through dark workshops, to the forced recruitment of sailors on the streets and fields of the kingdom.

The H.M.S. Wager leaves England in 1740 and makes it to Cape Horn in an arduous voyage, is shipwrecked off the Chilean coast and some of the sailors manage to save themselves on a deserted island. After months, Robinson Crusoe with group dynamics between the captain, officers and crew leads to some of the stranded men daring to set sail again in a self-built vessel made of wreckage. After an adventurous journey, they make it to Brazil and from there back to England.

Years later, another group of shipwrecked sailors, including the captain, land in England and accuse the rest of the returnees, who have now become heroes, of mutiny. For this, the Admiralty has provided for the death penalty. No more will be revealed.

The book not only provides an interesting insight into seafaring at the time, but also a realistic look at class relations in England, mutiny, cannibalism and the dangers of the sea without modern electronics and sea rescue services.

This exciting book, the contents of which were researched in the archives of the British navy, is hard to put down until the last page.

Hardly anything has changed since then, as Sir Walter Raleigh recognized: “He who rules the oceans rules the world’s trade, and he who rules the world’s trade rules the world’s wealth.”

The Moselle trip

Author: Hanns-Josef Ortheil. Exactly the opposite of the Wager’s downfall, but just as worth reading. As an eleven-year-old boy, the author undertook a trip along the Moselle with his father. By train, boat, bicycle and on foot along the Moselle to Trier.

The author took notes every day as a child and now, as an adult, has transformed these travel notes into the book of the Moselle journey. The charm of this book lies in the fact that the journey is told through the eyes of the child and is written in the style of an 11-year-old child.

It is exciting for all parents and grandparents to put themselves in the little boy’s head and experience how lovingly he looks at his parents.

The Moselle trip took place in 1963. Back then, people were still eagerly writing postcards, enjoying eggs for breakfast and the Moselle wines were still called Kröver Nacktarsch and Zeller Schwarze Katz.

Dennis Scheck says of this book: “A wonderful book about children, about traveling, about security and strangeness … It was written by the eloquent and brilliantly clever writer Hanns-Josef Ortheil.”

There is nothing to add to this. We were so enthusiastic that we ordered more books by this author, whom we had never heard of before, from our local bookseller.

Death in Venice

Author: Thomas Mann. Don’t immediately wave goodbye when Dirk Bogarde as Gustav von Aschenbach in the film adaptation by Luchino Visconti, the ballet choreography of the same name or the opera by Benjamin Britten appear in your mind’s eye.

Even if readers of The Magic Mountain may not believe it, this edition of Thomas Mann’s famous book is short, precise and a real pleasure to read.

This book should be accompanied by a glass of excellent red wine, and then you can settle down on the sofa and enjoy planning your next trip to the Serenissima.

Travels With My Aunt

Author Graham Greene. At his mother’s funeral, he meets his aunt Augusta, who had only seen him once as an infant. Augusta bursts into his life like a whirlwind, as the former bank manager was actually very content with his retirement: Time to devote himself to his beloved dahlias and look back on an orderly, successful life at the bank.

His aunt’s exciting life is different, and he learns more and more about it because she wants to go traveling with him. At first they only go to Brighton, but soon they board the Orient Express together. After some initial reluctance, the previously quiet, proper nephew takes a liking to travel, adventure and the underworld.

The charm of this book lies in its language. We therefore highly recommend the original English edition. This book is a feast for every lover of fine English humor. Those around you will wonder why you are so often laughing on the sofa, engrossed in the book.

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