Reading Patagonia
Read and Recommended
Bruce Chatwin
Bruce Chatwin’s first book helped to change the idea of what travel writing could be. In Patagonia blended fragments of fact, fiction, myth, and memoir to explore exile and restlessness. I read this travelling around Patagonia in 2025 and it still dazzles. One of the most vivid and elusive writers of the late 20th century.
Chile: Travels in a Thin Country
Sara Wheeler
A book about finding what binds a country that is 25 times longer than it is wide. A country where the weather is “very hot in the north, pleasantly warm in the middle, and perishing at the bottom.” Wheeler’s reliance on local pisco sours and her ability to laugh at her own self-inflicted misfortunes keeps the tone light.
Lucas Bridges
The story of a life lived alongside the last indigenous people of Tierra del Fuego, written in 1947. Bridges learned the Yaghan language and Tok part in many of their ceremonies. This haunting book is the reason I traveled to Estancia Harberton, where Bridges live and wrote the book.
Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda is widely celebrated as Chile's most famous and beloved writer. Pack this book and let him show you Patagonia beyond the postcard. It’s full of his love for Chile’s landscapes, wild Patagonian elements, lyrical beauty and deep connection to nature.
A Long Petal of the Sea
Isabel Allende
An epic story for a Patagonian journey. The book gets its title from Neruda’s famous description of Chile as a "long petal of sea and wine and snow." A Long Petal of the Sea follows Victor Dalmau and Roser Bruguera, who flee the Spanish Civil War and secure passage to Chile on a ship chartered by Pablo Neruda.
Paul Theroux
A classic travelogue written by Paul Theroux, detailing his two-month rail journey from Massachusetts to the tip of South America. Theroux’s sharp observations of people amuse, as does his arrival at his final destination—an isolated, freezing plateau—concluding that he had essentially arrived precisely at "nowhere.
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