AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

South and West: From a Notebook

Joan Didion · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️
Essay CollectionAmerican SouthTravel WritingNonfiction
❤️

Pulphead

John Jeremiah Sullivan · 392 pages

"A sharp-eyed, uniquely humane tour of America's cultural landscape--from high to low to lower than low--by the award-winning young star of the literary nonfiction world In Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan takes us on an exhilarating tour of our popular, unpopular, and at times completely forgotten culture. Simultaneously channeling the gonzo energy of Hunter S. Thompson and the wit and insight o

Essay CollectionTravel WritingAmerican SouthNonfiction
🙂

Eiger Dreams: Ventures Among Men and Mountains

Jon Krakauer · 191 pages

Krakauer takes the reader to wonderful, awful peaks like Denali, the Eiger, Devil's Thumb, K-2 and Everest.

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
🙂

Here Is New York

E.B. White · 56 pages

What is most amazing about E.B. White's "Here Is New York," This book written in 1948 says: "A single flight planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end t his island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions." The city is both the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence. White says, "This i

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
🙂

Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You

Lewis Grizzard · 211 pages

Essay CollectionAmerican SouthNonfiction
🙂
American SouthEssay CollectionNonfiction
🙂

White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World

Geoff Dyer · 256 pages

"From "one of our most original writers" (Kathryn Schulz) comes an expansive and exacting book--firmly grounded, but elegant, witty, and always inquisitive--about travel, unexpected awareness, and the questions we ask when we step outside ourselves. Geoff Dyer's perennial search for tranquility, for "something better," continues in this series of fascinating and seemingly unrelated pilgrimages--wi

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
🙂

Paris Was Ours: Thirty-Two Writers Reflect on the City of Light

Penelope Rowlands · 279 pages

Paris is “the world capital of memory and desire,” concludes one of the writers in this intimate and insightful collection of memoirs of the city. Living in Paris changed these writers forever. In thirty-two personal essays—more than half of which are here published for the first time—the writers describe how they were seduced by Paris and then began to see things differently. They came to writ

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
🙂

1 Dead in Attic: Post-Katrina Stories

Chris Rose · 384 pages

Essay CollectionAmerican SouthNonfiction
🙂

Dimestore: A Writer's Life

Lee Smith · 212 pages

A "book about Smith's process and her life, first as a Southern mountain child and, later, as the parent of a schizophrenic child...Despite being surrounded by loving family and being blessed with an active imagination, Lee copes with a mentally ill mother. Later, her son's mental illness and early death brings her to the breaking point but she is saved by her writing"--Lois Gross for LibraryReads

Essay CollectionAmerican SouthNonfiction
🙂

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away

Bill Bryson · 381 pages

After living in Britain for two decades, Bill Bryson recently moved back to the United States with his English wife and four children (he had read somewhere that nearly 3 million Americans believed they had been abducted by aliens--as he later put it, "it was clear my people needed me"). They were greeted by a new and improved America that boasts microwave pancakes, twenty-four-hour dental-floss

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
🙂

The Art of Travel

Alain de Botton · 256 pages

A journey through the satisfactions and disappointments of travelling. Dealing with such topics as airports, exotic carpets and mini-bars it reveals the hidden motivations, expectations and complications of our voyages into the wide world.

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
🙂

Down the River

Edward Abbey · 242 pages

This sparkling book, which takes us up and down rivers and across mountains and deserts, is the perfect antidote to despair.

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
🙂

What Am I Doing Here?

Bruce Chatwin · 367 pages

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
🙂

Dancing in Cambodia, at Large in Burma

Amitav Ghosh · 114 pages

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
🙂

Uncommon Carriers

John McPhee · 252 pages

McPhee's books are about real people in real places. Over the past eight years, McPhee has spent considerable time in the company of people who work in freight transportation. This is his sketchbook of them and of his journeys with them. He rides from Atlanta to Tacoma alongside Don Ainsworth, owner and operator of a sixty-five-foot, eighteen-wheel chemical tanker carrying hazmats. He attends ship

Travel WritingEssay CollectionNonfiction
🙂

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

Tony Horwitz · 432 pages

Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance. He joins "hardcore" reenactors; witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war; finds that Ande

American SouthTravel WritingNonfiction
🙂

Paris to the Moon

Adam Gopnik · 342 pages

Paris. The name alone conjures images of chestnut-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafes, breathtaking facades around every corner--in short, an exquisite romanticism that has captured the American imagination for as long as there have been Americans. In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of New York City for the urbane glamour of the City of Light.

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
🙂

The Braindead Megaphone

George Saunders · 257 pages

George Saunders's first foray into nonfiction is comprised of essays on literature, travel, and politics. At the core of this unique collection are Saunders's travel essays based on his trips to seek out the mysteries of the "Buddha Boy" of Nepal; to attempt to indulge in the extravagant pleasures of Dubai; and to join the exploits of the minutemen at the Mexican border. Saunders expertly navigate

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
🙂
Travel WritingEssay CollectionNonfiction
🙂

Way Off the Road

Bill Geist · 256 pages

Travel WritingEssay CollectionNonfiction
🙂
Essay CollectionAmerican SouthNonfiction
🙂

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

Flannery O'Connor · 237 pages

The essays and articles in this volume are concerned mainly with the art of fiction--its quality, in regional writing; its nature and its aims; and its relatino to the writer's religion.

Essay CollectionAmerican SouthNonfiction
🙂

The Nasty Bits

Anthony Bourdain · 304 pages

Essay CollectionTravel WritingNonfiction
📖 New 2026 Kindles just released. See them on Amazon ↗