Honestly, this piece on the best travel books of all time began as a list of the books I loved in 2023. As the number of books about traveling surpassed other categories, I decided to dedicate an entire blog post to the best travelogues.
Here you will find all kinds of books about travel and adventure, including some on traveling within one’s room and another one on setting up a home in a foreign country. Some travel essays are as old as 1794 while others are from a couple of years ago. The list has solo walking adventures, solo mountaineering on horseback in the old-day Persia and current-day Iran, one travelogue is of a lone woman biker, another one of a tramp, and you will find even artists sharing their traveling experiences. I have also kept two of my best travel novels. They were so good that they belong here. Irrespective of the variety, all these books on travel have the same intention: to share the experience of exploring this wonderful, magical world and inspire us to open our senses to it.
I’m still to add many more books, but until then, enjoy. August 2025: I have just updated the article. Now this is a complete collection of the best travel literature I have ever read. Enjoy.
The Best Travel Books of All Time: Handpicked, Enjoyable, and Soul-Stirring
1. The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton (First published 2002) — One of the best books on travel
In The Art of Travel, the visionary Alain de Botton takes the readers on a journey of external and internal exploration. The author doesn’t mystify travel. Botton begins the book by introducing travel as an uncomfortable endeavor in the unknown. He explores the themes of going on a trip for change, nature, and seeing the unusual and exotic while elaborating that wherever we go, we still carry the self—and all its desires, imperfections, and limits.
In the modern digital world, any form of travel is overhyped: a trip is a series of photographs, each brighter, happier, and glossier than the previous. A real journey is much different, though. As a constant traveler, or an itinerant writer, also known as a digital nomad, I’m on the move throughout the year. With my partner and all our stuff in our car, I have been traveling through India slowly for almost three years (Update August 2025: for more than four and a half years now, and without the car). We stay in a place for a day, a week, or even six months. There’s always more to see, do, feel, process, and write about.
There’s no denying—as my friends say after listening to my narrative—that my life is hard. It’s privileged: I have visited as many places in a year that most people never see in a lifetime. But everything comes at a price. Often I do not have a bed to sleep on until I spend hours looking for it on the internet, or at times, only after getting lost in dingy streets. The morning might come with fresh host troubles. About tomorrow, I cannot say.
I am not complaining about the hardships, but I often write about them. As I do in this essay on judgment in which I am brutally honest about how our lifestyle fetches harsh criticism from people who may have seen us for the first time a moment earlier. So I loved Botton’s honesty in delineating every aspect of a short or long trip: starting from how hard it is to leave one’s home and its unmeasurable comforts, and also how we frame the unknown as charming while our surroundings stay unexplored and unnoticed. Throughout the book, he uses examples of legendary artists, adventurers, and writers, learning about whom was delightful in itself.
The Art of Travel is comforting and clever with its eloquent elaboration of moods, travel compatibility (or the lack of it), loneliness, the habit of having habits, and other human traits that make travel hard. It is one of the essential books for travelers, but also for those who want to understand this need to see, wish to learn to notice their surroundings, understand the effect of a stunning landscape on a human being, crave to live and experience more deeply, and—who sometimes cancel a trip to remain home.
I am thankful to Botton for helping me name many feelings that surge through me on a journey and introducing me to a constellation of classic and neglected authors that I have started reading.
“I was looking for beauty. ‘Delight and enliven me’ was my implicit challenge to the olive trees, cypresses and skies of Provence. It was a vast, loose agenda, and my eyes were bewildered at their freedom.” Alain De Botton
2. The Valleys of the Assassins and Other Persian Travels by Freya Stark, one of the best travel writers of all time (First published 1934)
The English writer Freya Stark is one of my favorite authors.
I discovered Freya through the book The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Because I’m so awed by her bravery, enthusiasm, honesty, kindness, and the sublimity with which she writes, the review of this travel narrative is the hardest of all.
Honestly, I haven’t finished reading the travel essays, yet. I haven’t read any other books of hers, though I have downloaded a couple. As I couldn’t find any of Freya’s titles online at that time, I had to download them from PdfDrive.com: a website I reluctantly visit when I am desperate to read a book but can’t get it in India, or if only the paperback is available, which I can’t add to my already overflowing cartons of books. Can one keep a library on the go in a car that already has a minimal household worth of stuff?
This legendary book about traveling was not a hard read, but it is a big one, and reading from the PDF, with its typing errors and abrupt spacing, hasn’t been easy. Ah well!
At the age of 38, Freya set out on a journey through Luristan, the mountainous terrain nestled between Iraq and present-day Iran. As, of course, there were no telephones back in 1931 or other fancy modes of transport, or even the sports gadgets and shoes of today, she did this excursion on horseback with local guides, things that she carried from home, and through as many makeshift solutions as were needed to stay in the mountains.
Why did she go so far from her home to wander around a world unknown and unsafe?
As Freya herself said, “But as this book is intended for the Public, and is therefore necessarily truthful, I must admit that for my own part I travelled single-mindedly for fun. I learned my scanty Arabic for fun, and a litde Persian—and then went for the same reason to look for the Assassin castles and the Luristan bronzes in the manner here related.”
Definitely, Freya’s brave and curious spirit stunned me. She traveled from England through some of the toughest terrains just for curiosity and to see the place and its people. She jumped past every barrier to continue traveling mostly without knowing if she would be alive beyond the next nomad tribe or the steep curve of the wild mountains. To top it all, she wrote about her adventure in the most eloquent, poetic, and lyrical language while bringing out the local people in the truest light and telling their side of the story as if she were one of them.
The most thrilling part of the travel story was how Freya was perceived. At that time, Persia, modern-day Iran, didn’t see any foreign woman explorers. She had the perfect words to describe every situation in which she was singled out as a woman.
“The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised.”
Freya Stark is hilarious and probably one of the world’s most underrated writers. Here I am sharing some of my highlights from the book to pique your interest in this unique and one of the best books about travel and adventure.
“This climbing into a country which is not considered safe is exhilarating, though no sense of peril is possible in so bright sunlight, such radiant solitude, such breadth of mountain ranges under the pale October sky.”
“And it is pleasant now and then to go among people who carry their lives lighdy, w h o do not give too much importance to this transitory world, and are not so taken up with the means of living that no thought and time is left over for the enjoyment of life itself.”
“The land was smiling and prosperous, a rolling stretch of plough, then brown in autumn, but with the pleasant homeliness of man’s labour printed upon it.”
Freya has forever changed how I see my travels and my writing, thus she has quickly become my favorite travel author. Her voyages and her books both make me happy. In her happy life of 100 years, she put two dozen travel titles under her name. Start reading now.
Get the Valley of Assassins on Amazon
I should also introduce my own and recently released travel memoir at this point.
3. Journeys Beyond and Within… : An Indian Woman’s Life-Changing Travel Adventures
In my usual self-deprecating, vivid narrative style (that I have been told you love so much, ahem), I’ve put out the stories I have never shared before (all fears aside).
Journeys Beyond and Within… has some of my most unusual and challenging adventures, including a nine-month solo trip to South America. While summiting mountains, learning Spanish, or stumbling with a broken knee, I explore landscapes, people, and culture with as much vigor as my own self. Along with the stories, I also narrate the difficulties I faced while traveling alone as a woman and an Indian and the scoldings I got from home for not settling down (I am from a small city in North India). How I explored different professions to finally settle on writing is part of the book, too: I wanted to tell everyone that we can do anything we set our minds upon.
Embarrassingly honest, witty, and introspective, the travelogue will entertain you, if not also inspire you to travel, rediscover home, and leap over the boundaries. Some readers call it a “no-holds-barred” account of a small-city girl defying norms to pave her path.
The travel memoir has been getting exceptional reviews. Readers write that this is a must-read book for everyone, and that it feels like a conversation with a dear friend. My stories don’t glorify “going after your passion” or “traveling the world.” Neither is this a glossy tale of “see that” or “do this.” The best feedback I get is that my blog, and now my book, are both extremely honest and raw. As with all my travel narratives, this one is as much about the journey outward as inward.
The memoir is a mirror: one to make you reflect, laugh, and step out the door, all at once. Most importantly, I hope this book serves you well and helps you as you explore this world and yourself.
Sikkim Express: “Simple, free-flowing, but immensely evocative. (You can read the full review here.)
The Telegraph Online: “An introspective as well as an adventurous read.” (The complete review is here.)
4. A Journey Round My Room by Xavier de Maistre (First published 1794) — One of the classics of travel literature
Though the traveling book deviates from its aim of exploring the various tunings of the author’s goal—a journey around one’s room—it’s still the account of a brave, clever, and insightful endeavor, and so the memoir inherits the qualities of the experience itself.
Xavier de Maistre, a young French aristocrat, was confined to his house in Turin for 42 days, and this non-fiction book is an account of that time. Xavier goes on to describe his room, his bed, servants, paintings on the wall, his suppers, and even the belongings in the drawers of his bedroom. As I said, he rambled on a bit but has also explored the ideas of enjoying our own dwelling, looking at the walls, appreciating the bed that has comforted us for years (or months) and people near us whom we stop finding interesting, looking at our own selves in the mirror, and staying put a while in our space without the rush of getting outside. These practices are not only keystone to appreciating and enjoying the outdoors when we finally get there, but they also root us to the ground.
In the colors of our walls and the creases of our beds, we might find some of the undercurrents of our own lives too. Our room and home are a reflection of who we are, and here we can put our mind to peaceful contemplation without the discomforts of finding lodging, being stared at by strangers, or having to buy every sip of tea that goes down our throat—that was Maistre’s idea. (My counteridea here is that outside of our homes we are vulnerable and face our worst fears and demons.)
When you read A Journey Round My Room you wonder why one has to go to India to find oneself. Hey, we could just confine ourselves to our room or house!
I have undertaken and performed a forty-two days’ journey round my room. The interesting observations I have made, and the constant pleasure I have experienced all along the road, made me wish to publish my travels; the certainty of being useful decided the matter. And when I think of the number of unhappy ones to whom I offer a never failing resource for weary moments, and a balm for the ills they suffer, my heart is filled with inexpressible satisfaction. The pleasure to be found in travelling round one’s room is sheltered from the restless jealousy of men, and is independent of Fortune.
Xavier de Maistre
bookstores have taken a special meaning since my own travelogue has come out. Do you visit book shops too?
5. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (First published 1889) — One of my best travel novels
Three Men in a Boat is a classic fiction novel about three friends and a dog who decide to sail down the Thames for a change of air. What follows is an adventure because everything that could go wrong, goes wrong, and the friends do everything else apart from what should have been done. As their quagmires deepened, my laughter got louder.
This is one of the most hilarious and one of my best travel and adventure books, and it taught me not to take life and every bit of it so seriously. Read Three Men in a Boat for adventure, hopeless laughs, and to get inspired to step out.
As Jerome said, “Such is life; and we are but as grass that is cut down, and put into the oven and baked.”
A hilarious quote from the travelogue I have to share: “It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.”
6. Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle by Dervla Murphy (First published 1965)
— one of my favorite books on world travel
Full Tilt is the true story of the Irish travel writer Dervla Murphy cycling solo from her home in Ireland to India in 1963.
Let me pause at that. If I take a flight to Chile or another harmless nation, my parents and the whole of India try to stop me. If I tell them I am going to cycle from India to Ireland, which I intend to, I intend to cycle all over the world, they wouldn’t take more than a second to tell me what is wrong with me and would call our family priest and ask him to tell me what is wrong with me.
But Dervla, the fierce solo woman traveler, did the entire trip during the three months of April-July. She wasn’t just any regular traveler. At thirty-two years old, she was an adventurer whose spirits couldn’t be dampened by any barrier, human or natural.
Upon being refused an Afghan visa, Dervla said, “Of course everyone at the Embassy was very sorry to frustrate me thus and they offered to provide free transport from here to Kabul and looked bewildered when I patiently pointed out that I wanted to cycle because I liked cycling, not because of economic distress. I also pointed out that women get murdered in Europe with monotonous regularity and that the hazards of travelling alone through their country were probably no greater than the hazards of doing likewise in Britain or France.”
If you need to get out of your comfort zone, read this classic travel story. Or read it to travel on a bike vicariously through cultural communities and a time which does not exist any more. Dervla Murphy’s journey shows that one doesn’t have to be brave to travel, one has to be willing to travel, come what may. If you have an itch for the unknown and/or are planning a bicycling trip, these are the travel essays for you. But the book is yours even if you never go on “seemingly” scary adventures. Murphy details the many struggles and joys of traveling vehemently, and those might just inspire you, or frighten you.
After all, on the road, it’s just you, the light, and whatever, or whoever, comes along your way.
“Then came the Persian frontier–the most closely guarded we had yet crossed – and now Roz and I were really in our stride, cycling day after day beneath a sky of intense blue, through wild mountains whose solitude and beauty surpassed anything I had been able to imagine during my day-dreams about this journey. Particularly I remember the unique purity of the light, which gave to every variation of every colour an individual vitality and which lucidly emphasised every line, curve and angle. Here, for the first time, I became fully aware of light as something positive, rather than as a taken-for-granted aid to perceiving objects.”
Dervla Murphy
Here’s another great incident from her ride, “At midday I went asleep for about half an hour on a mountainside, having been up since 5.30 a.m., and woke to find myself in a tent. I had decided that I was still asleep and dreaming when a filthy old man of the Kochi (nomad) tribes appeared and explained by signs that they’d noticed me going to sleep with no shade, which they thought very bad, so he erected one of their goat-hair tents over me – without loosening a pebble, they move so very stealthily.”
7. To The River by Olivia Laing (First published 2011) — An unusual travel narrative
To The River is a memoir of the English writer Olivia Laing walking along the river Ouse from its source until it joins the sea in England.
Olivia Laing lives through the experiences she wants to write about (as she did in The Lonely City) and then pens them down, interweaving her own journey with history, relevant art, and related stories. Here she talks about the importance of rivers, why she returns to Ouse, and goes on to describe the history of the river and the lives that revolved around it, including the circumstances of the suicide of Virginia Woolf who drowned herself in Ouse sixty years ago. The folklore and mythology associated with the river and its surrounding landscape paint a lucid picture.
The way Olivia lets her loneliness in the wake of a breakup trickle into her long and live walking journey along the river and shares how the past seeps into our present, making the flow of our lives look much like the continuous flow of a river, kept me hooked. At times, it was a lyrical, poetic, and sublime read as if I was walking beside the river too, the gush and gurgle of her ceaseless current connecting my memories, past, and present in a meaningful note only understandable to me. I love day-long walks, and so this travel memoir (I would like to think of it as one) called out to me in ways my own journey on my feet does. (I need to do a post about walking and its effects on me soon.)
What lies beneath the surface of the river? How does our past affect us? Why does walking bring up so many thoughts? The book inspired these questions and provided some answers as well.
“As I rose I saw a deer drinking. She didn’t see me as she climbed the bank; then all of a sudden she did. Her hindquarters bunched the way a horse’s will, a motion I knew with my own muscles as the prelude to a buck, and then she sprang away. She moved in an oddly rigid, rocking-horse gait, bounding on stiffened legs across the track and into the darkness of the wood. She was neither rare nor extraordinary, that deer. There were thousands like her, as there were millions like me. But there she was, attending to her own path, which, for a moment, intersected mine. She was as unlikely as the iguanodon, and as imprisoned in time. It was a weave we were all caught up in. Beside me the stream was clicking east, relentless as a needle. A stitch in time, a stitch in time. Was there really more to the world than this? The details of the day – the cool still air, the sharp stink of garlic – were for a moment so precise that the great and hidden age of the earth seemed as unlikely as a dream. I ducked my head, bewildered, and followed the deer into the trees.”
Olivia Laing
8. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (First published 1933)
Down and Out is a memoir by George Orwell on surviving in Paris and London as a broke. In Paris, George works in restaurant kitchens but still remains in near-destitution conditions. In London, he is penniless and wanders around the city, living on the system along with other tramps. The author doesn’t hold back even the most humiliating information and inhumane conditions in which he survived until he found regular writing work.
The book shreds down human life to the threads of survival and shows what really matters. It is not a regular travel read, but an essential one. We might not be so fortunate always. What do we do then? We survive and go wherever the road takes us.
George has some insights:
“The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people—people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.”
“When you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great re-deeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.
9. An Illustrated Journey: Inspiration From the Private Art Journals of Traveling Artists, Illustrators and Designers by Danny Gregory (First published 2013) — one of the best travel books to read, but also to see
An Illustrated Journey has something simple and pure about it. The book is a collection of sketches and writings by artists who travel and draw on location. They don’t do it for anyone. Wherever they go, they draw, sketch, paint. They love it.
Seeing adults all over the world sitting for hours on a small foldable stool over the roadside in the rain and the sun under the watchful eyes of the wayfarers, doing what brings them relief and joy makes me happy and inspires me. The thoughts are simple, the sketches are of everyday scenes, and, yet, they are so rich and interesting. The whole process of sketching personalized the place for the artists, and every drawing seemed to me like a private thought of its maker.
I adore this simple bright unusual travelogue. It holds a lot of dreams, sacrifices, courage, and meditations.
Sharing some of the individual artists’ quotes here,
“And the act of filling these travel journals continues to have an effect on the artist when she returns home. Suddenly she sees her mall or her sidewalk as she saw those in foreign climes, her eyes are opened to the everyday things, she becomes an explorer in her own hometown.”
“Through drawing, I discovered the beauty of the ten thousand things around me. I really saw them for the very first time.”
“Travel opens different eyes to different things, shows things we’ve never seen before, shows the world from entirely new angles. ”
“Energy doesn’t come from the pride of having a nice drawing but from the act of drawing it, the act of doing and living in the present, the here and now.”
“Personally, I see anything and everything we create as a travel journal in some way. Even if it isn’t about travel in the physical sense it’s certainly about our journey—and transience—the transience of life. Well, that’s how I see it, anyway.”
“I feel different when traveling because I’m constantly interacting with new and different people. And so the questions that define me become who I am. I think the energy of the place is reflected through my sketchbook.”
Get an Illustrated Journey on Amazon
10. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed — Wildly known as one of the best travel memoirs of all time
Wild is the travelogue of Cheryl hiking eleven hundred miles for three months through some of the highest peaks of North America.
The book is engaging, honest, and fun. The story is more about the inner transformation inspired by the outward journey. When we are broken and have lost everything, we might sign up for the most physically demanding adventure to get away from it all. Suddenly, we find ourselves out of our minds into the real physical world that needs our attention right now, or else we won’t survive. And then the transformation begins without us knowing.
Cheryl was grieving her mother’s death, her divorce, and her own frivolousness that had pushed her down on her knees. When she thought she couldn’t move an inch, she did something she thought she could never do. Climbing through the rugged mountain paths, skirting rattlesnakes, and running away from harmful men, she pushed, bled, and cried. She did what she had to do and came out on the other side, not healed, but out of the wilderness of grief she had lost herself to.
I relate to Wild a lot because many times extreme physical toil, especially climbing mountains, has brought me back to my senses, too. Many treks have made me realize that as long as I am breathing, it’s all good. Read this one to feel the transformative powers of nature and what handing ourselves over to it, like in the primeval times, can do to us.
“Thank you. Not just for the long walk, but for everything I could feel finally gathered up inside of me, for everything the trail had taught me and everything I couldn’t yet know, though I felt it somehow already contained within me.”
Cheryl Strayed.
11. Walking in Clouds: A Journey to Mount Kailash and Lake Mansarovar by Kavitha Yaga Bugging (First published 2019)
This is not one of my usual travel memoirs. The narrative was a bit monotonous at times. The descriptions of gods, stupas, and beliefs were too far stretched out for me to enjoy them. Or, I found myself judging the hikers for being unfit and endangering others on their hike to Mount Kailash, the 6,600-metre-high snow-covered mountain.
I’m including Walking in Clouds here because, despite everything I said above, I enjoyed parts of it. When I couldn’t read through some descriptions, I skipped them. If the author and her group weren’t being the best trekkers, I tried to understand that they hadn’t prepared for the journey. I didn’t put the book down for the honesty and grit of the memoirist who acknowledges her shortcomings and tries to come to terms with them. Everyone keeps going, despite the harshness of the journey and their own limitations. Not everyone makes it to the end.
But then a hiker says,
“‘I don’t think it is about competing. If you are not strong enough, so what? It does not matter. If you need help, hire a porter. If you can’t walk, ride a pony. If you can’t go fast, go slow. It is not about being first or being strong or taking it as a challenge. Do the journey however you can do it. Don’t let other people stop you.’”
I think about the idea. I don’t want to be the weak one. That’s why I like the thought more because it allows for some human weakness, something I wish I were able to do.
Whenever I was the last one on a hike, or when I complained on a tough trek (as on the Chilean volcano Villarrica), I had friends who encouraged me. I have never quit a hike in between, not because I was always strong. I could reach the top because others trusted me, and their faith pushed me to go on. If we are not the best at something, we don’t have to surrender. One day, we are better and stronger. What’s there in quitting anyhow?
If you really can’t finish something? Kavitha offered insight upon receiving a chocolate which was to be given at the summit of Kailash, but she got it even though she couldn’t finish the last stretch of the journey: “Perhaps the point of the chocolate is to celebrate endings of all kinds, no matter how they have been reached.”
Perhaps it was.
12. A Month In The Country by J. L. Carr (First published 1980) — a great book about travelers and how they feel while leaving a place behind
A Month in the Country is an extraordinary book. The setting is 1920, and a war-return soldier who is also a trained restorer of medieval murals arrives in a Yorkshire village. His job is to uncover the whitewashed-over fourteenth-century painting on the wall of the village church. He is left to work on his own, and he insists on living in the bell tower. There’s another fellow hired to uncover a lost grave in the churchyard. The two men become friends. As the painting restorer uncovers the mural slowly and steadily, the villagers start warming up to him. They come to visit him as he works, bring him food, call him home for supper, and take him to outings. He finds himself ambling around the countryside and visiting the homes of sick friends. From his past life of war and the pain of his wife leaving him, he is skipping along, tugging at the hand of this new village, new people, and all the beauty that has come with everything.
But, it is not to last. The project ends. Desires die within hearts. Goodbyes are said. He is going back to his wife who wants him back. He knows it won’t last, but he goes. And we wonder why he does that. Why doesn’t he continue moving on?
I cannot tell, but these lines bring me peace,
“We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours for ever – the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass.”
J. L. Carr
This is a beautiful fiction travel book on the simplicity and the ephemeral nature of life. A Month in the Country showed me that you can live in the now, without it being connected with your past or future. And that’s sometimes the essence of travel. We move through places where we might never return. For what? For that moment only.
A Month In The Country on Amazon
13. Into Thin Air by John Krakauer — among the best books about adventure and travel of all time
“There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act — a triumph of desire over sensibility. Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasoned argument.”
I love to climb. But I am not sure if I would climb a mountain knowing that the hike could kill me.
Into Thin Air is a story of the 1996 Mount Everest climb that turned into a tragedy, killing eight climbers. It is also a story of outrageous grit and perseverance.
The adventure memoir shows that people can’t rest until they get what they want. That we can train our bodies and minds to do anything. And that nature is the supreme power.
“This forms the nub of a dilemma that every Everest climber eventually comes up against: in order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you’re too driven you’re likely to die.”
“We were too tired to help. Above 8,000 meters is not a place where people can afford morality.”
“My hunger to climb had been blunted, in short, by a bunch of small satisfactions that added up to something like happiness.”
14. The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf — An unconventional travel book to read
A gateway to a magical world — which this children’s book is — I discovered a vintage edition of it in the local library. How much good can libraries and old bookstores do us, I wonder, after finding countless authors and delicious books I hadn’t heard of in libraries this year.
The tale is of a naughty child Nils who is reduced to elfin size and, on top of one of the house ganders, finds himself in a flock of geese migrating and flying over the Swedish country. This might not be a typical travel book, but the escapade of the little one and the birds while making a place for themselves socially and striving to survive is fun to read, like we are on the back of the geese right there, having an adventure. Their journey mirrors our own constant back and forth with those around us and the daily humdrum to stay safe, especially on a trip when we are in strange lands where we don’t know anyone. It is then that our and others’ true characters are shown, and our grit is tested.
I loved The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, and it makes me want to read all children’s books from all countries. It reminded me that books are not only essential for entertainment and knowledge but also to make us dream with open eyes.
15. A Simple Life: Living off grid in a wooden cabin in France by Mary-Jane Houlton (First Published 2021)
A Simple Life is Mary-Jane’s travel memoir of buying a wooden cabin in France’s countryside and making her life there. The author and her husband set up a completely off-the-grid house with a compostable toilet that has no running water. Not only did they design the interiors and do all the fittings themselves, but the couple even set up their water and electricity supply themselves, learning how to do it on the go. They are not in a crowded neighborhood. Mary-Jane mostly talks about two neighbors who are not so close by, and they leave most of their forested yard untouched for the wild animals, birds, and insects.
This nature-dipped book not only teaches us to set up a home in the wilderness all by ourselves, but it also shows how one makes the internal shifts and changes needed to survive in a new country and amongst strange people (You might find my travel essay on spending Diwali in Chile hilarious, if you like this sort of thing). I enjoyed the travelogue immensely and learned a lot from it.
Simple and great travel writing!
16. Rabbit Stew and a Penny or Two by Maggie Smith-Bendell — a solid, good travel book you don’t see being talked about often
Maggie was born into a gypsy family living in the US. After marriage, she turned into a house-dweller and now raises the cause of other gypsies.
I loved reading the wild trips of the little girl driving around in her parents’ wagon, meeting up, and disintegrating from other gypsy families. The places they were moved from, the people they had to leave behind, and the wildflowers they picked on the way together made their lives the adventure it was.
I relate much to Rabbit Stew and a Penny or Two because I know that when we are on the road, life becomes unexpected. As someone who doesn’t have a permanent home and withdraws with fear at the aspect of “settling down,” I understood Maggie’s apprehensions when she finally had to live in a house. Though this isn’t a regular travelogue (as some would say), I don’t know what else would qualify as a journey. For me, this autobiographical memoir is about family, keeping it together no matter what, heading into the uninhabited, and making our own way.
17. An Innocent Abroad: Life-Changing Trips from 35 Great Writers edited by Don Gorge (First published 2014) — a great book to read while traveling
A collection of great travel stories where everything that can go wrong goes wrong, and then some more. Read the anthology for adventure, thrill, entertainment, and the unknown, to know that nothing is in our control, and also to understand that we can take the seemingly uncool way at times.
“As long as we continue to venture into unfamiliar situations, to open our hearts and minds to foreign ways, as long as we are able to keep losing our innocence abroad, that innocence will never end – and our appreciation of the world, our embrace of this unembraceable whole, will extend, and extend, and extend.”
Don Gorge
Get An Innocent Abroad on Amazon
18. Better Than Fiction: True Travel Tales From Great Fiction Writer edited by Don Gorge (First Published 2012)
You have some of the famous travel writers here, putting down their best travel stories. Each one shows how abundant, limitless, and magical this world is—if only we would just step out and look up or around.
This quote from the anthology is special —“But it’s my one night in Old Bombay that I remember most vividly, that I turn to in my quiet moments as proof that the world is as weird and sad and beautiful as I would have it be, and that my place in it is as inevitable as the wind in the trees.”
And this one too,
“I now see that learning is just a gradual revelation of how deep our ignorance really is.”
19. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig — a book about travel, but about so much more, too
“The Buddha resides as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain.”
“The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.”
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is neither easy nor short. It is a classic dovetail of travel, philosophy, psychology, and the nature of things.
In this travel title, the author narrates his bike ride with his son through the US. The journey is interwoven with long contemplations on the meaning of life and what is truly important. Why we shouldn’t run away from systems and machines, that technology is part of all art and art is inside all technology, what is Quality and why does it matter, the imitation propaganda of our education system, how humans run away from the truth, and other ideas about the true nature of universe form the core of travelogue.
“Making… art out of your technological life is the way to solve the problem of technology.”
“We’re in such a hurry most of the time we never get much chance to talk. The result is a kind of endless day-to-day shallowness, a monotony that leaves a person wondering years later where all the time went and sorry that it’s all gone. ”
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a transcendental journey encompassing and penetrating through everything living and dead. Want to read some deep travel writing that will make you think? Pick up this one.
“You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.”
20. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain — among the greatest travel books of all time
What a fun, adventurous book to read!
So while everyone told me how the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was better and funnier than the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, I avoided Finn. I didn’t want to let go of the idea that the book that I had read in school — the Adventures of Tom Sawyer — my favorite book — taught by my favorite English teacher — wasn’t the best book of all time. Wouldn’t I be cheating if I liked any other book better than Tom Sawyer?
But when even my partner told me how he enjoyed Huckleberry Finn’s adventures more than Tom Sawyer’s, I couldn’t help myself from buying the e-book. I read it in two sittings.
Sadly, I now agree with all my friends and my partner.
Read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn if you love books full of mischief and childlike playfulness. I bet you will have a great time. And who knows if you end up stealing a boat or two yourself. Sshh now.
Oh, I wouldn’t call this one a children’s book. We adults need such simple stories more than the children for we get so busy in the doing that we forget the being. You will know what I mean. And is this one of those books about world travel we’ve gathered here to talk about? You bet. What is travel if not some unplanned adventure and escapade into the unknown?
Go for it.
![_Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade)- [Complete and unabridged. 174 original illustrations.] mark twain book cover](https://www.onmycanvas.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Adventures-of-Huckleberry-Finn-Tom-Sawyers-Comrade-Complete-and-unabridged.-174-original-illustrations.-mark-twain-book-cover.jpg "Best Fiction Books I Read in 2020 18")
21. By the Seat of My Pants edited by Don Gorge (First Published 2016) — best of the best travel adventure books
Aptly described as humorous tales of travel and misadventure, By the Seat of My Pants is some of the best travel writing I’ve ever read. Every story is better than the previous one, and then you read the other way around and feel the same.
One lesson is universal in the travelogue — travel is exciting: unexpected things will happen. When they happen, you have to make do. Even if you cry and holler, or if you laugh and work out, eventually life moves on—as it is in its nature—and you find yourself in a new situation, or your hotel room, and wonder what the hell just happened to you. Such is life, and travel takes you on a tight ride.
This is some classic travel writing, as far as I am concerned.
Claim your copy of By the Seat of My Pants on Amazon
More books about traveling the world that I’m currently reading:
- Travels with Charley by John Steinback
- All God’s Children Need Travelling Shoes by Maya Angelou
- The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge Companions to Literature)
- Journey_ An Illustrated History of Travel
- Home in the World A Memoir Amartya Sen
- My First Summer in the Sierra by John Muir
If you are wondering, I don’t have so much time to read, or my to be read list is ever growing, I suggest getting an Audible subscription. You can listen to this list of books on traveling the world while finishing house chores, out on a trip, or even when you are doing some quiet yoga. One day I’d be recording the audio version of my travel memoir, too.
What are some of your top travel books? Tell me in comments.
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My much-awaited travel memoir
Journeys Beyond and Within…
is here!
In my usual self-deprecating, vivid narrative style (that you love so much, ahem), I have put out my most unusual and challenging adventures. Embarrassingly honest, witty, and introspective, the book will entertain you if not also inspire you to travel, rediscover home, and leap over the boundaries.
Grab your copy now!
Ebook, paperback, and hardcase available on Amazon worldwide. Make some ice tea and get reading 🙂
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dear priyanka
nice list of travel books
thanks
i will search through them and find what suits me for reading
two of the following you should also look upon
1 love with the risk of drowings by tores de roche takes you to a beautiful trip in south pacific
2 the motor cycle diaries , if you have seen south america
thanks
rahul
thanks Rahul. I have read your second recommendation and will look through the first one.