My 12 Favorite Books about Travel

There are lots of lists of good travel books out there, but this isn’t one of them because most of these aren’t travel books. These are books that made me want to travel not only to see the world, not only to experience new cultures, not only to eat all that food, but because the authors seem to understand my desire to just go. I get restless staying put, and these books enable me to go--they are my silent, literary cheering section. They get me. And I get them.

1. My Family and Other Animals, by Gerald Durrell 

If you haven’t read this book, call in sick and read it today. A British family, poor but noble, packed up in the 1930’s and moved to the Greek island of Corfu. It’s the memoir of the youngest family member, Gerry, a budding naturalist. Fauna and Family and Birds, Beasts, and Other Relatives are the second and third volumes of the trilogy. The style is beautiful, the writing is elegant, the characters are fascinating, and I snorted my coffee out through my nose more than once when he made me laugh.

A sample, when Gerry discovers two fat frogs: “They squatted there like two obese, leprous Buddhas, peering at me and gulping in the guilty way that toads have. Holding one in each hand was like handling two flaccid, leathery balloons, and the toads blinked their fine golden filigreed eyes at me, and settled themselves more comfortably on my fingers, gazing at me trustfully, their wide, thick-lipped mouths seeming to spread in embarrassed and uncertain grins.” 

It makes me want to pack up the family and move to a different country.  Maybe I will.

2. By the Shores of Silver Lake, by Laura Ingalls Wilder

The Little House books have been in constant circulation in my library for almost forty years.  I read them as a child, I read them aloud to my children, and I have re-read them as an adult. I no longer count them as children’s literature because they’re totally different when you read them as an adult. When I was a kid I just thought Ma and Pa would take care of everything. As an adult, I’m freaked out by their poor nutrition, deadly weather, disease, the way Pa always seems to be in danger of getting killed, and holy cow the grasshoppers.  

By the Shores of Silver Lake best sums up my one-ness with Laura and her desire to just go. In this book she is a teenager, old enough to think for herself, and she describes the family’s journey across the prairie and her desire to keep going in ways that make sense to me. 

“Laura wanted to go so much that she could hardly keep from speaking.” 

For an Ingalls girl, that borders on rebellion.

3. The Pillars of Hercules, by Paul Theroux

I don’t like everything Paul Theroux writes, in fact some of his fiction makes my skin crawl.  His travel writings, on the other hand, are inspirational and educational. He doesn’t just describe the scenery, he puts you there. Whether you want to be there or not. He’s kind of like your prickly uncle--the one who comes back from Timbuktu with great stories, but embarasses your mom with tales that start out with, “I remember this brothel off the Rue de Whatever . . “

He’s a complicated guy, capable of summing up my deepest longings with passages like this, “Observing how people worked and lived their lives is one of the objectives of travel.  It sometimes made me feel bad and fairly useless.  But I was not a ‘mere’ voyeur.  I was a very hardworking voyeur.” 

Riding the Iron Rooster, his account of train travel in China, and The Happy Isles of Oceania, are two other favorites.

4. A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Around the same time that the Durrells (see above) left England for Corfu, Fermor, an eighteen-year-old trying to find himself, set off to walk across Europe. In the winter. Eighteen years old. He had a backpack and his mother sent him money every so often. He slept in churches, jails, and inns, until he got an introduction to some nobles who passed on the word about this charming young traveler, then he stayed in castles and country homes. The world he traipsed through is gone now, lost to WWII, but I want to learn from Fermor about how to enjoy solitude and company, how to appreciate what you see, how to be an outsider who gets inside, and how to make friends out of strangers.

These books are the first two in a trilogy. The third remains unwritten. Pity. A Time to Keep Silence is Fermor’s account of the time he spent in monasteries. 

In A time of Gifts, Fermor describes his time in Holland, where he could not speak Dutch but got on well with the people; “On foot, unlike other forms of travel, it is impossible to be out of touch; and our exchanges were enough, during this brief journey, to leave a deposit of liking and admiration which has lasted ever since.”

5. In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson

Bryson is royalty among travel writers, but this is one of my favorites. He makes you feel like you can go to a foreign country, love it there even when you don’t, be loved there, blend in, and come home happy.

When chased by dogs in Sydney, he picked up rocks to throw and then “In my stumbling haste, I rounded a bend too fast and ran headlong into a giant spider’s web. It fell over me like a collapsing parachute.  Ululating in dismay, I tore at the coweb, but with rocks in my hands only succeeded in banging myself in the forehead. In a small lucid

corner of my brain I remember thinking, ‘This really is very unfair.’ Somewhere else was the thought: ‘You are going to be the first person in history to die in the bush in the middle of a city, your poor, sad schlubb.’ All the rest was icy terror.” 

Notes from a Small Island is in my to-read pile, and A Walk in the Woods is in theatres now.

6. Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell

I love George Orwell like I love barbeque. Like I love thunderstorms with lightening. Doorbells and sleighbells and schnitzel with noodle. You get the picture. If we had listened to his fiction 75 years ago, we wouldn’t be in half the messes we’re in now. Down and Out is his attempt to identify with the poor, although he always knew he couldn’t truly be destitute because he had a loving family back home. It’s also an expose on the hotel industry, the restaurant industry, and hospitals. Mostly though, he really gets down to what’s important: eating.

“It was now about half-past one, and I had walked twelve kilometres and had no food for sixty hours. Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes. Then the luck changed as though by a miracle. I was walking home through the Rue Broca when suddenly, glittering on the cobbles, I saw a five-sou piece. I pounced on it, hurried home, got our other five-sou piece and bought a pound of potatoes.  There was only enough alcohol in the stove to parboil them, and we had no salt, but we wolfed them, skins and all.  After that we felt like new men, and sat playing chess till the pawnshop opened.”

7. A Moveable Feast, by Earnet Hemingway

I know you had to read this in college, but please give it another chance. Come on, just read this sentence and see if it doesn’t resonate more than in 1985:

“It was a pleasant cafe, warm and clean and friendly, and I hung up my old waterproof on the coat rack to dry and put my worn and weathered felt hat on the rack above the bench and ordered a cafe au lait.”

Feels good, doesn’t it? Mm-hm. I know Paris in the 20’s is over, but I’d sure like to try it.

8. Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson

This book is not about travel. It’s about being on the move. Keeping house, or living in a house, may not be everyone’s cup of tea. This novel explores that concept. And by the way if you haven’t read Robinson’s (sort of) trilogy Gilead, Home, and Lila, you’re missing out. The writing is superb, gentle but probing. It makes me uncomfortable but I know it’s true so I have to believe it.

“When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.”

9. Doomsday Book, by Connie Willis

Willis is hit-or-miss with me, but Doomsday Book is a hit. It’s about time travel but it still fits in with my longing to just go. British scientists go back to the middle ages. It’s good reading for a long plane ride, or any time you need a good page-turner that doesn’t tax you too much.  

“It’s beautiful here. It doesn’t feel as though I were seven hundred years away from you.  Oxford is right there, within walking distance, and I cannot get the idea out of my head that if I walked down this hill and into town I would find all of you, still standing there in the lab.”

10. My Father’s Dragon, by Ruth Stiles Gannett


Now that my children are big, I’m done with kid stuff.  No kid movies, no games, no water parks.  However, there is a big place in my heart for high-quality children’s literature.  In My Father’s Dragon, the protagonist embarks on a rescue mission, oddly equipped with exactly what he will need to accomplish his task.

“People never go to Wild Island because it’s mostly jungle and inhabited by very wild animals.  So I decided to go and explore it for myself. It certainly is an interesting place, but I saw something there that made me want to weep.”

Don’t you love that? People never go there, so I decided to go and explore. That’s where dreams begin.

11. Travels with Charley, by John Steinbeck

Road trip with a camper and a dog. I don’t love Steinbeck like I love Orwell, but I like him well enough. Orwell sounds a little more suave-y English, so everything’s elegant and removed.  Steinbeck sounds like your elderly neighbor who’s been watching the news, telling it like it is--urgent, yet take it or leave it.  

“Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sounds of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage.”

I actually like taking people to the airport because I get to be near people that are going. Steinbeck gets me.

12. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac

Well what travel-book list wouldn’t be complete without On the Road?  That would be like a list of travel songs without On the Road Again. Sorry if it’s a little too obvious for you, but FUN FACT: I read this book for the first time while on a road trip through the southwest.  Ok, it was with my dad in the pickup so my story isn’t quite as spicy as Keruoac’s, but it’s still my story.

“Every bump, rise, and stretch in the landscape mystified my longing.  In inky night we crossed New Mexico; at gray dawn it was Dalhart, Texas; in the bleak Sunday afternoon we rode through one Oklahoma flat-town after another; at nightfall it was Kansas. The bus roared on. I was going home in October.  Everybody goes home in October.”

BONUS: Trips I Don’t Want to Take

The Grapes of Wrath 
Dust bowl Okies trek to California. Grandma dies in the back of the pickup and they pretend she’s sleeping to get through a border crossing. Baby dies and lactating mom breasfeeds dying stranger.  No thank you.

The Swiss Family Robinson  
Kudos for making the best of a bad situation, but I’m pretty it would turn out more like the Tom Hanks in Castaway for me.

The Martian Chronicles  
This one almost made my favorites list but SPOILER ALERT it confirmed my suspicions that if we ruin this planet we’ll just go find another one to ruin.

Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party  
True story. Stranded pioneers eat each other. No matter how succulent Sam looks, I don’t think I could eat him.

Moby Dick  
Deep-sea fishing expedition gone horribly wrong.

The Odyssey 
Sam is gone a little too long, and Caleb and I are home beating off my suitors with a stick.

The Wizard of Oz 
Guilt-ridden teenager has two-hour nightmare about schlepping through a psychedelic jungle being chased by demon monkeys.  Been there. Done that.