We just finished posting our top 30 travel books of all time, and we know you don’t agree with every selection on our list. Did we leave off your favorites? What’s in your top 30—or at least your top five? Let us know.

He’s among the best travel writers working today, and this Sunday The Times of London began a series of three excerpts from Colin Thubron’s new book, Shadow of the Silk Road. Thubron, whose Behind the Wall landed at No. 23 in World Hum’s countdown of the Top 30 travel books, travels through China, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey, and the first excerpt finds him en route to Tibet. 

Continue reading >>

Back in May, World Hum’s Top 30 Travel Books of all time included Tony Horwitz’s Baghdad Without a Map, which occupied the number 26 slot. Curious about Horwitz’s take on the World Hum Top 30, I e-mailed him asking which travel books he might have included.

Continue reading >>

Two months ago, World Hum’s Top 30 Travel Books rundown put Jeffrey Tayler’s 2000 tome Facing the Congo in the number 28 slot. Tayler is a regular visitor to my summer writing classes at the Paris American Academy, so I recently had the chance to ask him what he thought of the World Hum Top 30, and which books he might have included.

Continue reading >>

Back in May, World Hum’s Top 30 Travel Books of all time included Tim Cahill’s Road Fever, which occupied the number 21 slot in the countdown. Since I know Cahill from the Key West Literary Seminar, and also from my online interview of him in 2004, I e-mailed him to see what he thought might be missing from the Top 30.

Continue reading >>

Last month, World Hum’s Top 30 Travel Books of all time included Peter Hessler’s River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, which weighed in at number 20 on the list. Curious to know Hessler’s take on the Top 30—as well as his own suggestions for books that might have been included—I contacted him by e-mail as he toured the U.S. in support of his latest China book, Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present.

Continue reading >>

Last month, we posted our list of the Top 30 Travel Books of all time, to which I contributed a number of reviews. After the dust settled and dozens of readers weighed in with their own recommendations, it occurred to me that I correspond with a number of the authors who made the list. What, I thought, would Pico Iyer or Peter Hessler or Tony Horwitz or Tim Cahill or Jeffrey Tayler think of the selections? Curious, I queried these five writers, all of whom gave me thoughtful replies. I’ll share comments from each of these writers in coming days, starting today with Pico Iyer, whose “Video Night in Kathmandu” weighed in at number 8 on the list. 

Continue reading >>

To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1959
Territory covered: Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Arabian Penninsula (now Yemen, Oman, Saudia Arabia, United Arab Emirates)
Not long after Wilfred Thesiger finished his second crossing of the vast, lifeless swath of Arabian sand called the Empty Quarter, and not long after he narrowly escaped beheading by Ibn Saud for illegally entering his kingdom, the traveler and his thirsty companions stumbled across a small well in the desert. “We tasted the water,” Thesiger wrote, “but it was too brackish to drink; the thirsty camels, however, drank as if they could never have enough. While we watered them a gleam of sunlight flooded across the wet plain, like slow, sad music. Then it started to rain again.” It is a near perfect moment, and for a minute we are there, on the edge of the place Thesiger wrote about eloquently and timelessly in Arabian Sands. Thesiger’s masterpiece spans his five years traveling throughout the region just before the age of oil, when the Middle East was still as it had been for ages, when his Bedouin friends still felt that, “Only in the desert could a man find freedom.” There are many things which elevate Thesiger’s account to the pinnacle of travel literature. There is the window he gives us to Bedouin warmth and generosity and fierceness. There is his beautiful writing about a time and place now gone. And there is his profound reverence for the desert itself. But what really sets “Arabian Sands” apart is Thesiger’s pure love of the journey, of the experience itself. “Here, life moved in time with the past,” he wrote. “These people still valued leisure and courtesy and conversation. They did not live their lives at second hand, dependent on cinemas and wireless.” Ignoring the obvious romanticism, that notion of trying to live life first hand, of feeling the world for oneself, is at the heart of the urge to travel. At one point, unable to sleep due to some uninvited guests, and feeling “thoroughly ill-tempered,” Thesiger wrote, “I tried the old spell of asking myself, ‘Would I really wish to be anywhere else?’ and having decided that I would not, I felt better.” It’s the kind of thing one has to do while starving in the desert. But also, it is the kind of thing we all might hope to find ourselves doing, because that is what traveling is about. “It is not the goal, but the way there that matters,” Thesiger wrote, “and the harder the way, the more worthwhile the journey.” Arabian Sands is one of the most worthwhile journeys we can take vicariously, and reading it inspires us to find our own hard way. If we’re lucky, we might just find what Thesiger found in the sands. “I had come here looking for more than locusts,” he wrote, “and was finding the life for which I sought.”

Continue reading >>

To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1937
Territory covered: Persia (Iran) and Afghanistan
A few have called The Road to Oxiana the “Ulysses” of travel writing, which implies a zenith. No. More properly it is the “Don Quixote” of travel writing—ground zero of an entire genre. People wrote travel literature before Byron, of course, but few wrote it the same way after him. The persona he created—fussy, funny, patient (except when he is not), respectful of others but always ready to pounce—can be seen in much of the great travel literature of the latter half of the 20th century. It is a book that makes you laugh harder than you thought possible. It is a book whose beautiful prose can make you cry. Most important, it is a book that will get you out of your house, your city, your country, in search of your own Oxiana.

Continue reading >>

To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1975
Territory covered: India, Sri Lanka, Southeast Asia and Japan
“Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.” So begins what is arguably Paul Theroux’s most universally beloved travel tome, The Great Railway Bazaar—a book that beckons train enthusiasts, lovers of literature and armchair adventurers as easily as the seasoned traveler. The great American author set off from London in the early 1970s, determined only to ride the rails east. “It was my intention to board every train that chugged into view from Victoria Station in London to Tokyo Central,” reads Theroux’s first page introduction. But before the journey begins, even a reader new to Theroux realizes that this voyage, like all true on-the-road awakenings, has more to do with the people one meets than the places one goes. “I sought trains; I found passengers,” writes Theroux. The book unravels more as a series of vignettes than a traditional travelogue, and can be read as such as Theroux rolls along the great rail lines of the time—the Khyber Pass Local, the Delhi Mail, the Grand Trunk Express to Madras and Burma’s Mandalay Express, to name a few. Perhaps the most resonant passages are those from Vietnam. The author’s visit to the south of the country straddled the insecure years between the 1973 ceasefire and the 1975 withdrawal of U.S. troops. To see glimpses of ordinary Vietnamese life through Theroux’s vigilant eyes transcends history and time, making the dead weight of bloody war fall momentarily silent to the relentless pace of culture and man. (A postscript to his Vietnam chapters, written in April 1975, explains that nearly all the towns Theroux wrote about had since been destroyed and many of their people killed.) If the best travel writing transports the reader, then Theroux remains the master. Few authors affect us like the very trains Theroux writes about –- blurring the peripheries at times to focus on a single, exponentially elaborated detail, then letting the world in and pulling the reader hypnotically along.

Continue reading >>

To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1978
Territory covered: Africa, Central America, Cyprus and Israel
In his more than a decade working as Poland’s only foreign correspondent, Ryszard Kapuściński traveled all over Africa, and even to Latin America. Not satisfied with the short news dispatches he had to telex home, he also wrote longer pieces to be published later, which helped establish him as one of the best of the new writers using the tools of literature to illuminate their travels. And the things Kapuściński saw lent themselves to this well: He was thrown in jail, he heard Prime Minister of the Congo Patrice Lumumba speak before he was assassinated and he was almost burned to death by angry mobs in Nigeria. The tales are mythic, but it is his eye for the details of life that give The Soccer War its richness. “The so-called exotic has never fascinated me,” he wrote, “even though I came to spend more than a dozen years in a world that is exotic by definition. I did not write about hunting crocodiles or head hunters, although I admit they are interesting subjects. I discovered instead a different reality.” Elsewhere, amid the war and struggle and corruption, Kapuściński finds that, “There is so much crap in the world, and then, suddenly, there is honesty and humanity.”

Continue reading >>

To mark our five-year anniversary, we’re counting down the top 30 travel books of all time, adding a new title each day this month.
Published: 1997
Territory covered: Central Africa
Following in the literary footsteps of Joseph Conrad, Redmond O’Hanlon makes a downright dangerous (some might say foolhardy) journey into the heart of Africa. His chronicle of the adventure, No Mercy, is at times frightening, and at other times laugh-out-loud funny. O’Hanlon’s quest is the legendary dinosaur of Lake Télé. Naturally, he takes the long way to the lake and nearly gets killed by a village headman who holds a longstanding grudge against his guide. Along the way, O’Hanlon tries to save an abandoned baby gorilla and battles his demons and the haunting spirits of Central Africa. One wonders if O’Hanlon will ever return from this long, dark night of the soul. In a sense, he doesn’t: the O’Hanlon who emerges from the central African jungle is not the same O’Hanlon who went in.

Continue reading >>