Best Travel Books

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A CLASSIC FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF ONE SUMMER Every time Bill Bryson walks out the door, memorable travel literature threatens to break out. His previous excursion along the Appalachian Trail resulted in the sublime national bestseller A Walk in the Woods. In A Sunburned Country is his report on what he found in an entirely dif...
Featured in 22 articles
Vagabonding is about taking time off from your normal life - from six weeks to four months to two years - to discover and experience the world on your own terms. Veteran shoestring traveler Rolf Potts shows how anyone armed with an independent spirit can achieve the dream of extended overseas travel. Potts gives the necessary information on:- finan...
Featured in 19 articles
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Tim FerrissA quest across America, from the northernmost tip of Maine to Californias Monterey PeninsulaTo hear the speech of the real America, to smell the grass and the trees, to see the colors and the lightthese were John Steinbeck's goals as he set out, at the age of fifty-eight, to rediscover the country he had been writing about for so many years.With Ch...
Featured in 15 articles
What happens when an adventure travel expert-who's never actually done anything adventurous-tries to re-create the original expedition to Machu Picchu? July 24, 1911, was a day for the history books. For on that rainy morning, the young Yale professor Hiram Bingham III climbed into the Andes Mountains of Peru and encountered an ancient city in the ...
Featured in 15 articles

The Geography of Bliss
One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World
Part foreign affairs discourse, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide, "The Geography of Bliss" takes the reader from America to Iceland to India in search of happiness, or, in the crabby author's case, moments of "un-unhappiness."...
Featured in 14 articles
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Derek SiversHailed as a masterpiece of American travel writing, Blue Highways is an unforgettable journey along our nation's backroads.William Least Heat-Moon set out with little more than the need to put home behind him and a sense of curiosity about "those little towns that get on the map-if they get on at all-only because some cartographer has a blank space...
Featured in 12 articles
Any Baedeker will tell us where we ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us how and why. With the same intelligence and insouciant charm he brought to How Proust Can Save Your Life, de Botton considers the pleasures of anticipation; the allure of the exotic, and the value of noticing everything from a seascape in Barbados to the takeo...
Featured in 12 articles
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Jason SilvaWhen Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia was published in 1977 it heralded the arrival of a startling new talent in British literature. Critics were surprised and spellbound by a story of an adventure which blurred the boundaries between travel writing, biography, history and memoir. All readers recognised its timeless quality – Auberon Waugh went as far ...
Featured in 12 articles
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Richard Branson"It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured."So begins this epic, mesmerizing first novel by Gregory David Roberts, set in the underworld of contemporary Bombay. Shantaram is narrated by ...
Featured in 11 articles
In Dark Star Safari the wittily observant and endearingly irascible Paul Theroux takes readers the length of Africa by rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry, and train. In the course of his epic and enlightening journey, he endures danger, delay, and dismaying circumstances.Gauging the state of affairs, he talks to African...
Featured in 11 articles
First published in 1975, Paul Theroux's strange, unique, and hugely entertaining railway odyssey has become a modern classic of travel literature. Here Theroux recounts his early adventures on an unusual grand continental tour. Asia's fabled trains -- the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, th...
Featured in 11 articles
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Shashi BellamkondaThe Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron
Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling
The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain
How Not To Travel The World by Lauren Juliff
Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby
Atlas Obscura by Joshua Foer
Marching Powder by Thomas McFadden
Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger
Love with a Chance of Drowning by Torre Deroche
Becoming by Michelle Obama
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
West with the Night by Beryl Markham
Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer
Catfish and Mandala by Andrew Pham
Tracks by Robyn Davidson
What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding by Kristin Newman
The Good Girl's Guide to Getting Lost by Rachel Friedman
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski
A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor
Venice by Jan Morris
Great Plains by Ian Frazier
In Search of Captain Zero by Allan Weisbecker
Video Night in Kathmandu by Pico Iyer
The Lost Girls by Jennifer Baggett
The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald
The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz
The Travel Book by Lonely Planet
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee
Rice, Noodle, Fish by Matt Goulding
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West
The Most Scenic Drives in America, Newly Revised and Updated by Editors of Reader'S Digest
DK Eyewitness Italy by Eyewitness
The Bucket List by Kath Stathers
Microadventures by Alastair Humphreys
Atlas of Adventures by Rachel Williams
Lonely Planet Japan by Lonely Planet
DK Eyewitness Japan by Eyewitness
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
No Mercy by Redmond O'Hanlon
A Geek in Japan by Hector Garcia
Lands of Lost Borders by Kate Harris
Maximum City by Suketu Mehta
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
Educated by Tara Westover
Endurance by Alfred Lansing
Journey by Aaron Becker
Oh, the Places You'll Go! by Dr. Seuss
Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney
First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung
Magic Tree House Boxed Set, Books 1-4 by Mary Pope Osborne
The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Rick Steves Italy 2020 by Rick Steves
Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez
Destinations of a Lifetime by National Geographic
Rick Steves Paris 2019 by Rick Steves
The Travel Book by Lonely Planet Kids
This is San Francisco [A Children's Classic] by Miroslav Sasek
The Penguin Lessons by Tom Michell
Fodor's Paris 2019 by Fodor'S Travel Guides
Tokyo Maze – 42 Walks in and around the Japanese Capital by Axel Schwab
Frommer's EasyGuide to Tokyo, Kyoto and Western Honshu by Beth Reiber
A Month in Siena by Hisham Matar
A Walk Across America by Peter Jenkins
Four Corners by Kira Salak
The Kindness of Strangers by Mike McIntyre
Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux
Lonely Planet Paris by Lonely Planet
Travel as Transformation by Gregory V. Diehl
Madlenka by Peter Sís
Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
The War That Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
Wonder by R. J. Palacio
Shogun by James Clavell
Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay
It's What I Do by Lynsey Addario
Angels in America by Tony Kushner
Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go by Richard Scarry
River Town by Peter Hessler
Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Coming into the Country by John Mcphee
Book Scavenger by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman