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/

Travel Changes Thinking Not Just Scenery

The holiday vacation period has arrived, and many will be making travel plans--whether an annual pilgrimage to a family home or a journey to an exotic land. So here's a timely look at just three of the latest crop of travel best sellers courtesy of the New York Times listing. Atlas Obscura, by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras and Ella Morton Workman offers nearly 500 pages about more than 700 hidden marvels, events and curiosities around the world. That's an almost overwhelming amount of inspiration for the adventurous! If you want to stick with the less exotic, check out The Road to Little Dribbling, an irreverent travelogue around Britain by American expat Bill Bryson, or go for a more luxe experience with The Hotel on Place Vendome by Tilar J. Mazzeo, about the history of Paris' famous cultural landmark, the Hotel Ritz. But mainly, I hope your travel reading will inspire actual travel plans, since prose, no matter how intriguing, is no substitute for real exploration. A trip, whether to a neighboring town or a country on the other side of the world, can broaden understanding, providing new perspectives, unlimited by ignorance and bias, on peoples and cultures. An open-minded tourist is following the sage counsel of Mark Twain, also a talented travel writer: "Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all of one’s lifetime." The best journeys then aren't about seeking a change in scenery but finding a change in thinking. So don't just read a travel book, use it to inform your next real-life travel adventure. Take the advice of Saint Augustine to heart: "The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page." For more travel best sellers, see http://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/travel/?_r=0

Great Travel Writing Offers an Inner Journey

I am currently traveling in India. As I sat in a rocking train, reading Indian author Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey, I began to think about how talented writers have informed my appreciation and understanding of foreign places, or helped me to rediscover domestic places. Now travel literature is an old genre, including the travel journals of ancient Greek tourists, medieval Arab raconteurs, Song Dynasty Chinese classics, and Captain James Cook's best-selling diaries. Among more contemporary U.S. writers, William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, John Steinbeck's Travels With Charlie, Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, and Cheryl Strayed's recent Wild stand out for me. Travel writing can also be fictional, although based on real journeys, such as Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness or Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums. Personally, John Berendt's City of Falling Angels was fascinating preparation for a visit to Venice, Italy, and Peter Hessler's River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze provided great insight during a recent trip to China. What makes great travel literature stand out? It is not just about the physical journey, although vivid descriptions of natural and man-made sights are important. A really good tale reveals the culture and history of a place on a living, human scale in a way monuments and vistas cannot. It also reveals the inner journey of the writer and takes us along to our own insights about leaving home, about being a stranger in strange lands, about confronting new experiences, ideas and lifestyles. At the end of travels together, author and reader will share some truths about the variety and universality of the human adventure. So, if you are planning a trip, don't just get the maps and guidebooks, look for insights from authors who've blazed the trail. You can start with a Condé Nast Traveler selection of the best travel fiction at http://www.cntraveler.com/features/2008/11/The-69-Greatest-Fiction-Travel-Books-of-All-Time