Travel book reviews

Apart from a Moleskine notebook and an iPod loaded with enough music to survive six hours beside a screaming child, a good book remains one of the essential companions for a long journey.

And if you’re going somewhere, why not read about someone else going somewhere? Preferably somewhere more dangerous, uncomfortable and badly organized than wherever you happen to be heading.

I’ve read a fair amount of travel literature over the years. Guidebooks like Lonely Planet are undeniably useful on the road. They tell you where the train station is, which museum is inexplicably closed on Mondays, and where you might find a bed that doesn’t involve selling a kidney. Useful facts and little colored boxes containing Top Ten Whatever. They have saved me more than once. Inspiring, however, they are not.

Most guidebooks have all the literary excitement of an instruction manual for a washing machine. So put down the overpriced brick of practical information and wander over to the shelves containing the real stuff: personal travel stories.

My kind of bookstore, found in Prague.

The best travel writing is never really just about travel. The writer moves through two landscapes at once. The one outside the train window and the considerably messier one inside their own head. Somewhere between bad hotels, missed buses, strange meals and encounters with people they barely understand, something happens. Occasionally, they even learn something. That’s the good stuff.

I rarely need to know exactly how many steps there are in Notre-Dame or precisely how tall the Empire State Building is. If civilization ever depends on me knowing either of those things, we’re probably already doomed. Give me the story instead. Tell me what happened there. Tell me who you met, what went wrong, what surprised you, and why the place stayed with you long after you left. That’s why I read travel stories alongside the obligatory guides.

My favorite travel writers all have distinctive voices. Bruce Chatwin could be dry, detached and philosophical, yet underneath it all there was an almost childlike curiosity about the world, the suspicion that something fascinating might be hiding just beyond the next hill.

Bill Bryson is something else entirely. Reading about his adventures in the Australian outback, I can’t help imagining a slightly bewildered Santa Claus wandering through Western Australia, sweating profusely and wondering which of the local animals is most likely to kill him before lunch.

Different writers. Different journeys. Different ways of looking at the same strange planet.

Reading Chatwin by the Thames in London.

Friends occasionally ask me which travel books I recommend. Rather than repeatedly cornering them at parties and delivering increasingly drunken lectures about Bruce Chatwin, I thought I’d do something marginally more useful.

So I’m going to start writing a few words about some of my personal favorites. Consider this the beginning of the bookshelf.