Interests

If Leslie isn’t traveling, then she is reading about traveling. Here are her top ten travel books:

The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron
Byron, a distant relative of poet Byron, wrote of his 1933 misadventures on an overland journey through the Middle East to Afghanistan.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene
A novel set in Vietnam in the early 1950s.

The Golden Earth by Norman Lewis
Travels in Burma in the 1950s. 

Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
A passionate plea to respect the natural world.    

The Tree Where Man Was Born by Peter Matthiessen
If you carry only one book on your travels through East Africa, make it this nature classic written in the 1960s.

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby
How to climb some of the world’s highest mountains totally unprepared.

In the Light Garden of the Angel King by Peter Levi.
In 1972, Oxford scholar, poet and ex-priest Levi sets forth with a young Bruce Chatwin to explore Afghanistan.

West with the Night by Beryl Markham
Autobiography of a courageous woman who was Kenya’s first female aviator. In 1936, Markham became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west.

Facing the Congo: A Modern Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness by Jeffrey Taylor
Leslie reads anything Taylor writes

The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson
Frank and funny.