Books, Food & Travel

I love books, food and travel, not necessarily in this order.

My home library has about 2000 titles and this figure pales in comparison to others' book collections. I read somewhere that the late film maker Yasmin Ahmad had 8000 in hers and national laureate Muhammad Hj Salleh has a houseful of books. Bookshops are top priority for bibliophiles everywhere, even when travelling in a foreign country, and we can only sigh because there are so many books out there, but so little time...

Inevitably I have quite a number of books on food and travel. Cookbooks especially are usually colourful and attractive and even if one does not do a 'Julia' (remember the girl who cooked her way through all the recipes in Julia Child's cookbook?), just flipping through the pages conjures up heavenly meals eaten in congenial dinner parties. Many books by celebrity chefs now combine the subject of food and travel, usually spin-offs from their tv shows. Think Jamie Oliver, Anthony Bourdain, Bobby Chin, Chef Wan, etc.

There are travel books aplenty now, a boon especialy for the armchair traveller. How else could we experience 'riding the Iron Rooster' or 'the old Patagonian express'. The ability of a traveller to recount his/her journey and convey it in writing is no mean feat. My latest acquisition is "The Tao of Travel" by Paul Theroux, whose 'work remains the standard by which other travel writing must be judged' (Observer).

My own travels have really been 'walks in the park' compared to the adventures of most travel writers. No book would come out of them (my walks, not their adventures!) so maybe I shall just blog my experiences of the 22 countries I have been to (the same number of countries Tony Wheeler, co-founder of Lonely Planet, visited in 1 year, 2010). C'est la vie!