Summer has drawn to a close, and the urge to wander loosens its grip. The idea of leaving routines behind feels like winning a quiet victory against tradition. When the itch to return to the familiar surfaces, the solace of a travelogue can be a gentle companion, especially if it comes from a voice that could belong to a neighbor, a colleague, or a friend rather than a professional explorer.
What I recommend for the imaginary reader is a book titled Beautiful Cities and Me. The author, a seasoned traveler with decades on the road, shares a life lived among maps and memories. From the first daring escapes of youth in Paris and Florence to journeys toward distant deserts and vibrant markets, the chapters unfold across continents and climates. The narrative travels through Yemeni sands, the Sahel’s mud cities, and the shores of distant oceans, pausing in places as varied as Timbuktu, Ushuaia, Samarkand, Salvador de Bahia, Cuzco, Khartoum, Bali, and Mombasa. In seventy or so vignettes, the reader encounters impressionistic brushstrokes, personal reflections, and a fusion of landscape, everyday labor, and the rhythms of life. It feels like listening to a friend describe a road trip without a strict itinerary, letting chance and curiosity steer the pace.
The author’s choice to forgo a chronological travel log, in favor of an alphabetical arrangement, adds a subtle elegance to the collection. Each city is listed with its country and the month and year of an escape, providing a tiny beacon for the reader to anchor a story in time and place. This structure avoids a straightforward biographical tone and instead presents a series of perceptive, humorous, and curious observations. The result is a text that moves with agility and lightness, offering an impressionistic tapestry rather than a rigid map of travel. It reads as if the writer allows the scenes to arrive, then brushes them into a coherent whole through memory, mood, and a touch of wanderlust that refuses to fade.
Among all the places experienced, the deserts and desert-border cities of the Sahel leave the strongest imprint. The writer recalls special moments, such as the days spent in a Libyan desert corridor near an oasis town, where the sense that time itself slows within the city of sand becomes a haunting refrain. That single line—Time lives in the city of sand—resonates deeply, inviting the reader to linger in the image and its quiet wisdom. It is a sentence that could delight even the greatest writers of the past, a testament to how a well-chosen image can outlive an entire chapter. The collection suggests that a road movie of a life might be possible, even if the soundtrack remains elusive; what endures is the written record of experiences that feel both lived and reimagined for readers who crave a sense of place and motion during long late-summer afternoons.
With a voice that blends humor, sensitivity, and curiosity, the work captures the interplay between landscapes and the people who inhabit them. It treats travel as a way of learning who we are, how we see the world, and how memory can be braided with sight and sound. The descriptions carry a light touch, yet they carry weight, inviting readers to imagine themselves wandering through sunlit streets, crowded markets, and quiet corners where time seems to slow enough to savor a conversation with a stranger turned companion. The book’s cadence—quick, reflective, sometimes almost lyrical—makes it a reliable companion for those late summer hours when the day begins to decline and the mind turns toward far horizons. It isn’t merely a travel log; it is a record of perception, a map drawn with ink and light rather than routes and distances. In that sense, the volume becomes less about geography and more about the act of seeing—and the urge to keep seeing, even when the days grow shorter and the season shifts toward memory.