Top Travel Narrative & Armchair Travel Books
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1. The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the English
by Sarah Lyall
Sarah Lyall, a reporter for The New York Times, moved to London in the mid-1990s. She came to terms with its eccentric inhabitants (the English husband who never turned on the lights, the legislators who behaved like drunken frat boys, the hedgehog lovers, the people who extracted their own teeth), and found she had a ringside seat at a singular transitional era in British life.
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2. Shadow of the Silk Road
by Colin Thubron
Making his way by local bus, truck, car, donkey cart and camel, the author travels from the tomb of the Yellow Emperor, the mythic progenitor of the Chinese people, to the ancient port of Antioch– in perhaps the most difficult and ambitious journey he has undertaken in forty years of travel.
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3. Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer
Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer
by Chuck Thompson
From Bangkok to Bogota, a hilarious behind-the-brochures tour of picture-perfect locales, dangerous destinations, and overrated hellholes from a guy who knows the truth about travel. Travel writer, editor, and photographer Chuck Thompson has spent more than a decade traipsing through thirty-five (and counting) countries across the globe, and he’s had enough.
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4. The Last Polar Bear: Facing the Truth of a Warming World
by Steven Kazlowski
Over the course of the last six years, wildlife photographer Steven Kazlowski has photographed the polar bear in its wild habitat, from Hershel Island in Canada to Point Hope in Alaska. The Last Polar Bear pairs his intimate images with anecdotes about his Arctic adventures, as well as authoritative essays about the polar bear in the context of climate change.
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5. Three Cups of Tea
by Greg Mortenson
One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time. The astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones and his humanitarian campaign to use education to combat terrorism in the Taliban’s backyard.
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6. Chinglish: Found in Translation
by Oliver Lutz Radtke
Chinglish offers a humorous and insightful look at misuses of the English language in Chinese street signs, products, and advertising. A long-standing favorite of English speaking tourists and visitors, Chinglish is now quickly becoming a culture relic.
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7. The Flaneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris
by Edmund White
A flaneur is a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure, esthetic or erotic. Edmund White, who lived in Paris for sixteen years, wanders through the streets and avenues and along the quays, taking us into parts of Paris virtually unknown to visitors and indeed to many Parisians.
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8. The Travel Book: A Journey Through Every Country in the World
by Lonely Planet
The definitive pictorial dedicated to travel and the world, The Travel Book captures every country on the planet in photographs and atmospheric text. Inspirational, inviting and beautiful, it combines stunning images with entertaining, informative text that captures the essence of being there.
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9. Transit Maps of the World
written by Mark Ovenden, edited by Mike Ashworth
Transit Maps of the World is the first and only comprehensive collection of historic and current maps of every rapid-transit system on earth. Using glorious, colorful graphics, Mark Ovenden traces the history of mass transit-including rare and historic maps, diagrams, and photographs, some available for the first time since their original publication.
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10. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
by Peter Godwin
When A Crocodile Eats the Sun is the unforgettable story of one man’s struggle to discover his past and come to terms with his present. Award winning author and journalist Peter Godwin writes with pathos and intimacy about Zimbabwe’s spiral into chaos and, along with it, his family’s steady collapse.
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11. My Life in France
by Julia Child, with Alex Prud’homme
This delightful memoir of Julia’s years in Paris, Marseille, and Provence opens with Paul and Julia–a tall, wide-eyed girl from Pasadena who can’t cook and doesn’t speak a word of French–disembarking in Le Havre, and ends with the launching of the two Mastering cookbooks and with Julia winning the heart of America as “The French Chef.”
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12. Travels with Herodotus
by Ryszard Kapuscinski
Just out of university in 1955, Kapuscinski told his editor that he’ d like to go abroad. Dreaming no farther than Czechoslovakia from Poland, the young reporter found himself sent to India. Wide-eyed and captivated, he would discover in those days his life’ s work: to understand and describe the world in its remotest reaches, in all its multiplicity.
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13. Disappearing Destinations
by Heather Hansen & Kimberly Lisagor
This book presents cherished, world-wide “wild and sublime places.” The places selected include treasured cities such as Venice and Timbuktu, as well as endangered natural areas such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the Great Barrier Reef. Disappearing Destinations is a unique mix of armchair travel, natural history, and remarkably practical information for eco-tourists.
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14. God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre
by Richard Grant
Part gonzo misadventure, part cultural history, God’s Middle Finger explores a fascinating land–the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico–where few outsiders are foolish enough to venture.
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15. Travelers’ Tales the Best Women’s Travel Writing
edited by Lucy McCauley
This title presents stimulating, inspiring, and just plain wild adventures from women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples, and facets of themselves. The common threads connecting these stories are a woman’s perspective; fresh, lively storytelling; and compelling narrative that makes the reader laugh, weep, wish she was there, or be glad she wasn’t.
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16. Out Stealing Horses
by Per Petterson
Set in the easternmost region of Norway, Out Stealing Horses begins with an ending. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated area to live the rest of his life with a quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on one fateful summer.
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17. Eat, Pray, Love
by Elizabeth Gilbert
In order to give herself the time and space to find out who she really was and what she really wanted, Gilbert got rid of her belongings, quit her job, and undertook a yearlong journey around the world all alone. Eat, Pray, Love is about what can happen when you claim responsibility for your own contentment and stop trying to live in imitation of society’s ideals.
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18. Metro Stop Paris
by Gregor Dallas
Metro Stop Paris recounts the extraordinary and colorful history of the City of Light, by way of twelve Metro stops–a voyage across both space and time. At each stop a Parisian building, or street, or tomb, or landmark sparks a story that holds particular significance for that area of the city.
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19. Four Seasons in Rome
by Anthony Doerr
Four Seasons in Rome describes Doerr’s varied adventures in one of the most enchanting cities in the world. He and his family are embraced by the butchers, grocers, and bakers of the neighborhood, whose clamor of stories and idiosyncratic child-rearing advice is as compelling as the city itself. This book is a celebration of Rome, a wondrous look at new parenthood, and a fascinating story of a writer’s craft.
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20. The World Without Us
by Alan Weisman
From places already devoid of humans Weisman reveals Earth’s tremendous capacity for self-healing. As he shows which human devastations are indelible, and which examples of our highest art and culture would endure longest, Weisman’s narrative ultimately drives toward a radical but persuasive solution that doesn’t depend on our demise.
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21. Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolano
This novel, which established Bolano’s international reputation, is the story of two modern-day Quixotes–the last survivors of an underground literary movement, perhaps of literature itself–on a tragicomic quest through their darkening world. A 2007 New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
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22. The Mayan and Other Ancient Calendars
by Geoff Stray
The study of heavenly cycles is common to most ancient cultures. The ancient Egyptians, Chinese, and Babylonians all tried to make sense of the year. But it fell to the later Mesoamerican Maya to create a series of calendars that could be cross referenced. In doing so, the Maya discovered many strange numerical harmonics.
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23. A Sacred Landscape: The Search for Ancient Peru
by Hugh Thompson
Thompson provides a clarifying overview of Andean scholarship along with vivid descriptions of astronomically oriented buildings and powerful artworks, some sexually explicit, others grotesque depictions of human sacrifice. In doing so he creates an encompassing vision of the complex cosmologies of pre-Columbian Andean civilizations.
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24. The Geography of Bliss
by Eric Weiner
Eric Weiner takes readers on a whirlwind tour of countries that are quietly pursuing the most American of obsessions: the pursuit of happiness. Weiner doesn’t profess to know what happiness is, but with a mixture of psychological insight, scientific research, geopolitical analysis and wry humor, he successfully shows us where happiness is.
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25. Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?
by Thomas Kohnstamm
Kohnstamm unveils the underside of the travel industry and its often-harrowing effect on writers, travelers, and the destinations themselves. Moreover, he invites us into his world of compromising and scandalous situations as he races against an impossible deadline.
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