Arm Chair Travel: The Best Throwback Travel Books

Sometimes leaving home is not possible. Maybe you don’t even want to, but the possibility of exploration is something that calls to you. If this is the case, take an afternoon and travel to another place by reading a classic work of travel literature. There is something to be said for the classic romantic literature of travel from the turn of the 19^th century. You could read Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad, or Gertrude Bell’s Persian Pictures, Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World and Goethe’s Italian Journey. The list goes on and the possibilities are more than enough for one lifetime. These might take you in for an afternoon or they might be from a past a little too distant to be enjoyed in brief. If so, look to slightly more contemporary writers of travel narratives and try:

V.S. Naipaul’s A Turn in the South is a razor-sharp look at the American South through the lens of Naipaul’s own family history of emigrating from Trinidad.

Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar, a classic of the genre, is the account of Theroux traveling from England to India and back by train in the early 1970s.

Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines is a mesmerizing look at Chatwin’s immersion in the storytelling practices of Australia’s indigenous culture and his continued exploration of nomadic travel.

Beryl Markham’s West with the Night is the book that made Hemingway feel bad about himself as a writer. This is Markham’s memoir and it is a lot to take in. Growing up in Kenya, she was a ground-breaking pilot.