Currently reading
Vineland (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)
Tristes Tropiques
Richard III
The Dwarf
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
Labyrinths
Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
Gravity's Rainbow
A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel
This is not a travelogue, in any normal sense. It is rather a collection of 97 very short vignettes (almost like 'palm-in-the-hand' stories), many (as is now generally admitted) partially fictionalized, based on Chatwin's wanderings and readings and musings and imaginings about Patagonia, aka 'the end of the world' (geographically speaking), written throughout with a very odd tilt which is quite unique and which is Chatwin's own. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid play as great a role (greater, in fact) as do the penguins and condors...The book is really unclassifiable (as Chatwin himself insisted), and is a very enjoyable read.
The introduction to this edition, by Nicholas Shakespeare, Chatwin's biographer (and he was not at all a hagiographic biographer), is itself quite interesting and worthwhile.
4.5 stars