Travels with Charley
John Steinbeck
Like Guevara's journey, it is a middle-aged writer setting out on the road to rediscover the places and people he has lost touch with, told with wit and close observation.
10 books to read next
Books Like The Motorcycle Diaries
If you loved The Motorcycle Diaries by Che Guevara
The Motorcycle Diaries is Ernesto Che Guevara's account of the 1952 journey he made with his friend Alberto Granado across South America on a worn-out motorcycle. Readers usually love its warm humour, its open-hearted curiosity about strangers and landscapes, and the slow shift from youthful adventure toward a deeper awareness of poverty and injustice. It is a short, episodic, personal book, not a dense political treatise, and it rewards readers who enjoy travel writing with a human centre.
Road trips across South America
The Old Patagonian Express
Paul Theroux
Theroux rides trains through the Americas with a wry, unsentimental eye, offering the same sense of a long journey revealing a continent's contrasts.
Youthful idealism meets reality
Notes of a Native Son
James Baldwin
Baldwin's essays share Guevara's clear-eyed attention to injustice and his willingness to let personal experience drive political understanding.
Born a Crime
Trevor Noah
A memoir of growing up under unjust rules, told with humour and warmth, it echoes the diaries' blend of youthful exuberance and growing moral awareness.
Endurance
Alfred Lansing, Elena Grau
A true account of men pushed to their limits far from home, it matches the diaries' appetite for hardship and the human bonds forged on a risky expedition.
A lighter read
A Walk in the Woods
Bill Bryson
Bryson's account of hiking the Appalachian Trail has the same self-deprecating humour and comic friendship that make the travelling companions in Guevara's book so engaging.
Into the Wild
Jon Krakauer
A young man sets out on an unplanned journey in search of freedom, and the restless wanderlust and vivid narration will appeal to readers who loved the diaries' youthful spirit.
Wild
Cheryl Strayed
Strayed's solo trek is a personal, candid travel memoir about hardship and self-discovery, with the same frank voice and sense of a journey changing the traveller.
Go deeper into Latin America
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A landmark of Latin American literature, its vivid sense of place and history will resonate with readers moved by the diaries' portrait of the continent and its people.
Pedro Páramo
Juan Rulfo
A short, haunting novel of rural Mexico, it offers another compact and intensely felt portrait of Latin American life for readers who valued the diaries' brevity.
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