The Best Travel Books Are More Than Guides

In looking for gifts at Christmas, my kids are baffled by my interest in travel books. After all, they can use Internet search to find highly rated places to visit without the cost and bulk of a book! What they don't seem to realize is that the best books about travel go way beyond tourist info. The best books are explorations of nature, culture, art and philosophy, and are really quests that lead to expanded self-knowledge for the author and, vicariously, for the reader. For example, consider the late TV star Anthony Bourdain's memoir Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to The World of Food and the People Who Cook, in which Bourdain still expresses his long-held convictions about what makes good cooking but also reveals, by meeting people who are less fortunate yet happier than he can ever be, how stepping outside comfort zones can be a road to growth--even if he could not follow that road beyond a premature end. Another classic combination of food and travel is A Moveable Feast (Life Changing Food Adventures Around The World), a collection of 38 short stories from famous chefs, culinary writers and foodies, edited by Don George. This book will definitely spur a foodie travel lust! For women hesitating to travel alone, find the impetus to explore the world solo in A Woman Alone: Travel Tales From Around the Globe, a collection of inspiring tales of female adventure edited by Faith Conlon, Ingrid Emerick and Christina Henry de Tessan. Then maybe you can follow the path of Kate Harris, author of Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road as she spends a year cycling the Silk Road and penning meditations on remote places, history and human borders. Or get inspired by Judith Schlansky's Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Not Visited and Never Will to go where she has not, based on both the factual secrets, enticing and daunting, of 50 isolated islands and her poetic essays on rare wildlife, surprise discoveries and human folly. For those who dream of an African safari, Paul Theroux satisfies in Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town, taking readers on a road trip via rattletrap bus, dugout canoe, cattle truck, armed convoy, ferry, and train, as he details his encounters with dangers, hardships and delays as well as revealing interactions with Africans, aid workers, missionaries, and tourists. Finally, if you want to know less about where to travel and more about why to travel, read Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel, as he discusses the "pleasures of anticipation; the allure of the exotic, and the value of noticing everything," from grand vistas to mundane events, and enriches his own observations with those of famous travelers. For more inspiration, see https://www.rearviewmirror.tv/best-travel-books/