Every Friday, Marilyn Knapp Litt, who blogs at ClassicKindle.com, brings us her recommendation of a free classic book to discover (or rediscover) on Kindle. Find more of Marilyn’s recommendations at her blog, ClassicKindle.com, a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the Kindle. You can also get Marilyn’s blog on Kindle and I recommend that you “Like” the Classic Kindle Facebook page as well so you don’t miss anything. Here’s Marilyn’s post:

Here is a selection from travel memoirs with the unwieldy title of The World’s Greatest Books – Volume 19 – Travel and Adventure

Here is a selection from travel memoirs with the unwieldy title of World’s Greatest Books — Volume 19 — Travel and Adventure. It was edited in MCMX! I find a book of excerpts is a handy thing to have on your Kindle. It is a change of pace and you may want a shorter piece to read than a book.

The chapters, each from a different memoir, are hyperlinked. I know some people do not want a book without hyperlinks- but I do not use the hyperlinks. I let Kindle bookmark my place and I forward through if I don’t like a writer.

Some names are familiar, Dickens, Darwin and Cook. Kinglake is included. There is an excerpt from Eothen, arguably the best travel book ever written, ” distinguished for its refined style and delightful humour.”

“At Semlin I was still encompassed by the scenes and sounds of familiar life, yet whenever I chose to look southward I saw the Ottoman fortress—austere, and darkly impending high over the vale of the Danube—historic Belgrade. I had come to the end of wheel-going Europe, and now my eyes would see the splendour and havoc of the East. We managed the work of departure from Semlin with nearly as much solemnity as if we had been departing this life. The plague was supposed to be raging in the Ottoman Empire, and we were asked by our Semlin friends if we were perfectly certain that we had wound up all our affairs in Christendom.”

Not what you read in a travel memoir today!

Here is an account of traveling light, circa 1813:

“I carried with me nothing but my gun, sabre, and pistol, a provision bag, and a woollen mantle, which served either for a carpet or a covering during the night. I was dressed in the blue gown of the merchants of Upper Egypt. After estimating the expense I was likely to incur in Nubia, I put eight Spanish dollars into my purse in conformity with the principle I have consistently acted upon during my travels—viz., that the less the traveller spends while on the march, and the less money he carries with him, the less likely are his travelling projects to miscarry.”

Happy Trails!

It was edited in MCMX!

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