I’m not very fond of the books commonly found in the travel section.
The books below aren’t truly “travel books“.
They’re books that make you want to travel (or make me want to, anyways).
Books that have an adventurous spirit. A spirit of exploration and inquiry. Or maybe just books that I like to read while traveling.
1. The Worst Journey in the World, by Cherry Apsley Gerrard
Gerrard’s magisterial memoirs of Robert Falcon Scott’s disastrous trip to the South Pole.
“The Worst Journey in the World is to travel writing what War and Peace is to the novel… a masterpiece.” – The New York Review of Books
2. The Song of the Dodo, by David Quammen
Stunningly awesome. The perfect mix of travel, exploration, and science.
“Here is what a book can be.” – The New York Times Book Review, Robert Kanigel
3. Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt
A memoir of a boy’s miserable – yet strangely magical – youth in the Irish town of Limerick.
Excerpt
My father and mother should have stayed in New York where they met and married and where I was born. Instead, they returned to Ireland when I was four, my brother, Malachy, three, the twins, Oliver and Eugene, barely one, and my sister, Margaret, dead and gone.
When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I survived at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.
People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious alcoholic father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying schoolmasters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years.
4. The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams
Henry Adams was the son of one President and the grandson of another. He recounts his life and travels – and with it the major events of 20th century history.
“The pleasure of reading The EDUCATION is the pleasure of seeing history come alive, of seeing it move, of seeing behind history to the actions and actors. It is the pleasure of seeing revealed the humanity so often concealed in history.” – Alfred Kazin
5. The Fatal Shore – The Epic Story of Australia’s Founding, by Robert Hughes
Australia’s rip roaring history is recounted with color, passion, and narrative flare.
“An extraordinary volume – even a masterpiece – about the early history of Australia that reads like the finest of novels. A brilliant and enduring achievement… history of the highest order combining thorough research with vivid narrative and thoughtful assessment.”
– Arthur M. Schlesinger
6. The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje
A riveting tale of explorers, spies, and lovers during the Second World War. The story bounces between the deserts of North Africa, a villa in Tuscany, and London during the blitz.
“A rare and spellbinding web of dreams.” – Time
7. Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie
The story of India’s rise to nationhood as experienced by one uniquely positioned family.
“A marvelous epic… Rushdie’s prose snaps into playback and flash-forward… stopping on images, vistas, and characters of unforgettable presence. Their range is as rich as India herself.” – Newsweek
8. My Life in France, Julia Child and Alex Prud’Homme
A memoir of Julia Child’s 10 plus years living in France, where she transformed herself from a diplomat’s wife to the author of a fantastically popular French cookbook.
The result is a delight. On one level, it’s the story of how a “6-foot-2-inch, 36-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian” — her words — discovered the fullness of life in France. On another, it recounts the making of “Julia Child,” America’s grande dame of French cooking. Inevitably, the stories overlap.
– NY Times
9. Guests of the Ayatollah, by Mark Bowden
The history of the Iran hostage crisis. How it happened, why it went on so long, and how it finally came to an end. The chapter on the failed helicopter rescue sent into Iran by President Carter is impossible to stop reading.
“Heart-stopping, and heart-breaking.” – James Traub, New York Times Book Review
10. The Last American Man, by Elizabeth Gilbert
Gilbert wrote this before Eat, Pray, Love – and it’s way better.
Excerpt
By the time Eustace Conway was seven years old, he could throw a knife accurately enough to nail a chipmunk to a tree. By the time he was ten, he could hit a running squirrel at fifty feet with a bow and arrow. When he turned twelve, he went out into the woods, alone and empty-handed, built himself a shelter, and survived off the land for a week. When he turned seventeen, he moved out of his family’s home altogether and headed into the mountains, where he lived in a teepee of his own design, made fire by rubbing two sticks together, bathed in icy streams, and dressed in the skins of the animals he had hunted and eaten.
11. In the Heart of the Sea – The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, by Nathaniel Philbrick
A vivid account of a 19th-century maritime disaster that engaged the popular imagination of the time with its horrors of castaways and cannibalism. Just west of the Gal pagos Islands, the Nantucket whale ship Essex was struck on November 20, 1820, by an 85-foot bull sperm whale. Yet the sinking was only the beginning of a fantastic voyage…
For three months the 20 men who escaped the Essex drifted in three smaller open boats, enduring squalls, attacks by sharks and another whale, starvation, dehydration, madness, and despair, capped by eating the flesh of comrades who had begun to die offand, in one instance, casting lots to see who would be killed and eaten next. When eight remaining castaways were retrieved off the coast of Chile, they had sailed almost 4,500 nautical miles across the Pacific. – Kirkus Reviews
12. The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman
The story of one young Hmong child who has severe epilepsy and her family’s background, their difficult experience with Western Medicine, and the culture of the country they escaped from.
Into this heart-wrenching story, Fadiman weaves an account of Hmong history from ancient times to the present, including their work for the CIA in Laos and their resettlement in the US, their culture, spiritual beliefs, ethics, and etiquette. – Kirkus Reviews
13. A Peace to End All Peace – The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, by David Fromkin
Want to know more about the Middle East? This is the book for you.
“Ambitious and splendid… An epic tale of ruin and disillusion… of great men, their large deeds and even larger follies.” – Fouad Ajami, The Wall Street Journal
14. Dragon Hunter – Roy Chapman Andrews and the Central Asiatic Expeditions, by Michael J. Novacek and Charles Gallenkamp
The riveting biography of the explorer Roy Andrews Chapman.
On his first journey to East Asia in 1909, when he was 25 years old, Andrews spent two weeks stranded on a deserted island; fended off sharks after his boat was capsized by a finback whale; survived typhoons, heatstroke, poisoned bamboo stakes, headhunters and 20-foot pythons. Employing his rudimentary knowledge of medicine, he delivered two babies, pulled several teeth and amputated a man’s mangled hand. He also sampled opium; befriended Mother Jesus, Yokohama’s most famous madam; enjoyed the pleasures of Shimonoseki, ”the hardest-drinking port in the East”; and along the way collected 50 mammals, 425 birds and a new species of ant. And that’s in just the first 35 pages of this propulsive, nonstop biography. – NY Tiimes
15. Rimbaud – A Biography, by Graham Robb
Superb… the single best work to read about this haunting and haunted poet. – Richard Howard, New York Times Book Review
Excerpt
In the last three years, Rimbaud had spent about fifteen months at home and about twenty-one at sea or on the road. He had visited thirteen different countries – excluding coastlines seen from the deck of a ship – and travelled over 32,000 miles. He had worked as a pedlar, an editorial assistant, barman, farm labourer, language teacher, private tutor, factory worker, docker, mercenary, sailor, tout, cashier and interpreter, and he was about to add a few more jobs to the list. On almost every occasion, he had done something for which he was not previously qualified.
Though he lacked the most ordinary qualification of all – the baccalauréat – he had a working knowledge of five languages, had seen more sights and experienced more interesting intoxications than an English lord on the Grand Tour, published a book, been arrested in three countries and repatriated from three others. The most he had ever earned from his writing had been a free subscription to a magazine, but he had left behind a body of work that would one day open up new regions of the mind to poetic explorers. He had begged, been to jail, committed approximately twelve imprisonable offences with impunity, and survived war, revolution, illness, a gunshot wound, his own family and the Cape of Good Hope. He had been on intimate terms with some of the most remarkable writers and political thinkers of the age.
The Arthur Rimbaud who eventually washed up on the shores of East Africa was not a helpless innocent.
Questions and Comments
Hotel Tips
Many readers ask about the best websites for booking hotels. These are my favorites.HotelsCombined.com – The absolute best for finding deals and discounts.
Booking.com – Specializes in Europe.
Agoda.com – Specializes in Asia.