#014 Riaan Wolmarans | Travel books: Memories and aspirations

Riaan Wolmarans, guest · [00:47]The first city that came to mind for me is New York City, because it's a city that features in so many aspects of nonfiction and fiction, of course, and it's a city that I've also visited before. Which was an amazing experience, but it has obviously many sides because it's such a complicated and big city, and a book that I read before I went to New York City was Great Eastern Alice's American Psycho, which is quite famous in its own regard for being a terrifying novel to read. It's very hard reading at times. I mean, I'm a big fan of horror, but the kind of graphic descriptions in this book of murder and mayhem, and it can be quite severe.

Petro du Pisani, host · [01:29]And I can't read any gory stuff at all, so there's a, there's a big reason why I don't read half of Stephen King's novels, because there's a lot of gore involved, and I just can't, I can't cope with it.

Riaan Wolmarans, guest · [01:39]But what this book does, it shows you, because the, the main character is a, a Wall Street banker, and he's a complete psycho also, of course. It paints a very grim picture of the hard, human-less side of New York, emotionless side. It was all about money and greed and fame, et cetera. So It's one picture of New York that it's painted through this one book, but then you actually go there and you discover how amazing the city is. And we went there after 9/11 and we visited the site where the Twin Towers had stood. At the time, there was just a hole in the ground and they were still busy developing the idea of the memorial that's gone up there since. And it was a very emotional moment to visit that scene. And then after my visit to New York, I read Jonathan Safran Foer's book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was also made into a film. Well, as was American Psycho, of course. So Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close tells a post-9/11 story of a, of a nine-year-old boy whose dad died in 9/11, and then, he's trying to get through life, this boy with his mom, and he finds a mystery key. And then, of course, the key needs a door, and he goes on a mission to find The door that matches the key, and that's how amazing, tragic, funny, and intensely moving tale, as the spectator called it, unfolds, and it really is an astoundingly beautiful book. So it was interesting to show how two books can paint a city in two different lights so beautifully.

Riaan Wolmarans, guest · [08:09]I wanted to talk about books on holiday, because one thing I love about reading paper books, which I almost exclusively do, unlike Pietro, is the fact that when I see them on my bookshelves, I, they feel like old friends. I can look at a book and I know that book I spent hours reading on a train through Japan, or On a boat in Halong Bay in Vietnam, and those tactile memories are very important for me in terms of how I remember the books and when I read them and how much I enjoyed them or not. So the first destination abroad that I visited outside South Africa was, the Netherlands in Amsterdam in the beginning of the 2000s. And the very first time I went to Amsterdam, I one day thought, let me see if I can find a bookshop, but I kind of couldn't really on the first day find an English language one because, you know, Europe is weird that way. I just walked and walked and walked one day and looking at the city, and I found suddenly stumbled upon a very unmarked bookshop, really. It's not, not a big sign outside or anything, but they actually had all these books in a kind of a, over several stories in an old house, and including many English books. And I found a book by Steve Alton called Meg. Now, this is complete schlocky holiday reading. It's about a giant prehistoric shark that awakens in the deep. And terrifies the world. But, you know, it was, it was great for holiday reading. So that was great. And then a couple of years later, I visited Amsterdam again, and I thought, let me see if I can find the same bookshop. And I did. And one of the first shelves I looked, there was the sequel to, to Meg called The Trench, which I then also bought and read on holiday. So, I mean, these two books are really not by quality, but they completely take me back to those visits to Amsterdam because they just bring back those memories so beautifully.

Riaan Wolmarans, guest · [12:30]I do, I do have a book around Johannesburg. This is a new one, just lest you think I unread old books. It's by Harry Colmer. it's called A Thousand Tales of Johannesburg, a City Novel. So this is a book that really brings together the idea of Johannesburg being a city of immigrants, because Johannesburg is an interesting city in many ways. It's one of the few cities around the world that's not built around a major river, for example, because of course it was a city built around gold, and it brought people from all over the world in, in the hunt for gold. The mining industry is how the city got started. And years down the line, we still have such a mix of people from across the world living here. This book really explores what it means to have all these legacies of different cultures in the city, telling it through the tales of, several people and spanning more than a hundred years. It is a, it's really a book that in the beginning feels a bit fragmented to start reading, because it's all these different tales presented to you. Seemingly quite randomly, but as the book progresses, they all start fitting together quite beautifully, and I think the way that the book comes together is similar to the way that our society in Johannesburg can come together, even though we are fragmented in terms of religion and race and culture, in the same way that the book brings these stories together, you know, so Johannesburgers can also come together.

Riaan Wolmarans, guest · [15:44]We spoke about books that can take you back to a place you've visited before, for example, holiday trip, but books can also take you back to a time in your own past and evoke certain memories, and I brought along today Stephen King's book, The Tommyknockers. and I mean, it's quite a good book in its own right, and it's definitely worth reading, an interesting kind of take on the idea of alien visitation and all of those things. So as a high school boy, I started working at the public library, and I was so into books and reading that the librarians, the kindly librarians, said, well, you know, since you read such a lot, we may as well make you part of the book selection committee for the library. So, which means I got to take a copy of brand new books home to read, and then fill out a form to help the library decide whether to buy this book for the library. And this book by Stephen King was one of the very first books that I got to, to review in that sense for the library. the one I brought today is, it's actually one of the original editions with, its specific cover that's quite beautiful. And then when I saw this book in a bookshop once, I was like, this is the copy I must own because this takes me back to that very happy time of me working in the library, and this book is really quite precious to me because of that reason.

Riaan Wolmarans, guest · [24:50]Why, yes, I do, and I'm glad you asked. We have traveled extensively, and we always buy travel guides, the likes of a Fodor's guide or Time Out or any of those books, because we find it incredibly useful to have a, an actual paper book with us when traveling. There's something quite nice about just whipping out the book and going to the right page to check up on the history of a museum that you are visiting, or just to find the next attraction in the same neighborhood that you might want to visit. And, I mean, yes, obviously your phone and Google, those things have made it quite easy, but there's something to be said about having an actual travel guide in your backpack, and they become little memories of that time that you were visiting a city, because The bookmarks are ticket stubs and subway tickets and things like that, and there's marked passages of museums that he went to that turned out to be closed or that were really cool that you might want to go back to. But I didn't specifically bring any of those travel books today. I brought... I looked at our travel shelf and I thought, let me bring something that our listeners might actually not have heard of, but it's the most amazing book. It's called Atlas Obscura by Joshua For, Dylan Thurus, and Ella Morton. It's quite a beautiful book. It's called Atlas Obscura, An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders. And what it does is you can basically open to any page, and it shows you the most amazing things and locations around the world that it sounds like fantasy, but these things all exist in our actual real world. I mean, I opened randomly to a page, and there's the Waitomo glowworm caves and the cargo cults of Tanna. Watson, Lakeside, Post Forest, Uranium City, the Saskatchewan Twisted Trees, I'm just paging through the book. You can see the Museum of Clean. It just, all of these things sound like actual titles of amazing fantasy novels, and yet they are real places on earth that you can go and visit. So, yeah, in terms of inspiring places that you might want to go visit, Atlas Obscura is a very good guide to that.

Riaan Wolmarans, guest · [27:51]Okay, and yes, on travel guides, I did bring along one book. It's the last one that I brought today. It's the Fodor's Guide to South Africa from 2006. This is the edition that I brought, and the fun thing about this book is that I wrote large parts of it back in 2005, and for this edition to come out the next year. It was a very interesting experience because we're talking about travel writing and everything, but To actually have to be the one to do the travel writing teaches you such a lot about looking at the attractions of your city, country, the places people might want to visit, and then trying to figure out not to just write a listing of these things. I mean, anyone can write a list of museums and places to go to and opening hours and prices, but how do you then, in only a few words sometimes, paint a picture of this place that will make someone living in Indonesia, maybe, or New York City, or London, or Amsterdam go, well, you know what, I really should go to Johannesburg to see the following things, because it sounds actually really attractive. So that was a rare bit of insight from the other side about travel writing.