Books to help & inspire – the Montenegro Girl way!

Books to help you explore Montenegro

1. Lonely Planet Montenegro

by Tamara Sheward & Peter Dragicevich

You can’t beat Lonely Planet as a guide book.  I have done all my travels with them right from my student days.  When I first went to Montenegro, they did not have a book exclusively for the country, so I am pleased that this is no longer the case.

2. Montenegro Bradt Travel Guide

by Norm Longley

Another useful guide for Montenegro with lots of practical tips for where to eat, stay & eat, with information on both well-known and off-the-beaten track sights.

3. Berlitz Pocket Guide Montenegro

This pocket travel guide to Montenegro is compact, concise and packed full of essential information about where to go and what to do.  It even comes with a useful free bilingual dictionary.

4. Insight Guides Pocket Montenegro

This definitive pocket-sized travel guide comes with a free eBook and handy pull-out map.

5. Montenegro Marco Polo Pocket Travel Guide

Explore Montenegro with this handy, pocket-sized, authoritative guide, packed with Insider Tips.  It also has some useful phrases in Montenegrin and a download for the Touring app.

6. Lonely Planet Western Balkans

If you are planning a trip over the Western Balkans, this Lonely Planet travel guide will be useful as it incorporates not only Montenegro but also Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia and more. 

7. Montenegro Coast in 7 Days

 By Guidora (available as Kindle version only)

Enjoy the best things to do on the Montenegro coast in 7 days as a first-time visitor without being bombarded with options.  This kindle book provides specific 72-hour plans with only one great choice on where to stay, what to eat, what to see.  Free Bonus is  included at the end of the ebook.

8. The Mountains of Montenegro: A Walker’s and Trekker’s Guide

This guidebook describes a range of 17 day-walks and multi-day treks throughout the mountains of Montenegro. Routes range from short (2km) walks through to multi-day treks. It also includes useful background information, covering mountain huts and shelters, and travel to and within the country.

Books to get you thinking about life

9. Walden

By Henry David Thoreau

This book really got me thinking.  Not least of all about making your own mind about how you think about life and then being willing to forsake some comfort to live according to what you believe is most important.  Walden is an account of how Thoreau spent several years living simply in a basic cabin that he built in Walden woods.  It inspired me as the book is about how he challenged the norms of his day and carved out his own counter-cultural time-rich life.

10. Finding Sanctuary: Monastic Steps for a Everyday Life

 By Abbott Christopher Jamison

When I read this book I found myself underlining and folding down the corners of the pages at every turn.  Needless to say it one I keep coming back to.  You don’t need to be have monastic tendencies to get something out of this book.  But it will get you digging deeper – in a very postive way. 

11.The Saint’s Guide to Happiness

By Robert Ellsberg

Another thought-provoking book on a topic that is close to all our hearts: happiness.  Another book to you to reflect on your life and approach to it.  Robert Ellsberg suggests that happiness is not a matter of circumstances or feeling, but of finding our true self. Thoroughly recommended.

12. Stuffocation: Living More with Less

How We’ve Had Enough of Stuff & Why You Need Experience More than Ever

By James Wallman

This book really helped me see the impact of having so much stuff and has spurred me on to minimise my possessions even more since having my first epic declutter some years ago. In this groundbreaking book, trend forecaster James Wallman finds that a rising number of people are turning their backs on all-you-can-get consumption, from the telecoms exec who’s sold almost everything he owns, to the well-off family who have moved into a remote mountain cabin.

13. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

By Greg McKeown

A great book, which raises the deeper questions of being busy but unproductive and information overload.  Being an Essentialist is about a disciplined way of thinking. It means challenging the core assumption of ‘We can have it all’ and ‘I have to do everything’ and replacing it with the pursuit of ‘the right thing, in the right way, at the right time’. Highly recommended.

 Books to inspire you to live

life on your terms

14. Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

 By Ken Ilgunas

I absolutely love this book!  It combines loads of elements that fascinate me in one excellently-written book.  Alternative living, following your heart’s passion, determination, simple living and small space living. Inspired by the frugality and philosophy of Henry David Thoreau, Ilgunas undertook a three-year transcontinental journey, working in Alaska as a tour guide, garbage picker, and night cook to pay off his student loans before hitchhiking home to New York.

15. Get Real, Get Gone: How to Become a Modern Sea Gypsy & Sail Away Forever

By Rick Page

The author, Rick Page, featured on Ben Fogle‘s programme “Return to the Wild”and it was truly an inspiration (even though I am not even a yachter myself!).  Rick Page gave up his work and bought a sailing boat to follow his dream of a simpler and freer life as a nomadic sea-gypsy.  If you need some inspiration for a simpler, freer life of your own, this might just get the juices flowing.  It does contain quite alot of technical information for yachts but it is still fascinating to understand the mindset of someone who has made this alternative life work on a budget.