Travel Books

Five Best Travel Books Every Traveler Should Read

Do you love to travel with a book in your hand? Here are Five best travel books every traveler should read. Eagerly waiting to open the book and read? Go ahead and start reading and explore yourself. In the best travel books the world alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark. Travel is like a good book, you just can’t wait to turn the next page! No matter where or why you travel, there’s always something wonderfully new to be found.

1.On the Road

“Because in the end you won’t remember the time you spent in the office or mowing your lawn. Climb that Goddamn mountain.”     ~Jack Kerouac

“On the Road” is one of the best travel book by American writer Jack Kerouac based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across America. The was written in 1957.A quote from the book On the road- “The only people for me and the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a common place thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”

The idea for On the Road, Kerouac’s second novel, was formed during the late 1940’s in a series of notebooks, and then typed out on a continuous reel of paper during three weeks in April 1951. It was first published by Viking Press in 1957. After several film proposals dating from 1957, the book was finally made into a film, On the Road (2012), produced by Francis Ford Coppola and directed by Walter Salles. When the book was originally released, The New York Times hailed it as “the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as ‘beat,’ and whose principal avatar he is.” In 1998, the Modern Library  ranked On the Road 55th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.

2.The Beach

“Trust me, it’s paradise. This is where the hungry come to feed. For mine is a generation that circles the globe and searches for something we haven’t tried before. So never refuse an invitation, never resist the unfamiliar, never fail to be polite and never outstay the welcome. Just keep your mind open and suck in the experience. And if it hurts, you know what? It’s probably worth it.” ~ Alex Garland

“The Beach”  is one of the best travel book written by Alex Garland an English author in 1996. Every backpacker should read this novel. It is the story of a young backpacker’s search for a legendary, idyllic and isolated beach untouched by tourism, and his time there, in its small, international community of backpackers. A quote from the “If I’d learnt one thing from travelling, it was that the way to get things done was to go ahead and do them. Don’t talk about going to Borneo. Book a ticket, get a visa, pack a bag, and it just happens.”

3.As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning 

“Beauty is being the best possible version of yourself on the inside and out.” ~ Laurie Lee

“As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning” is one of the best travel book written by Laurie Lee, a British poet in 1969. It is a sequel to Cider with Rosie which detailed his life in post First World War Gloucestershire. The author leaves the security of his Cotswold village in Gloucestershire to start a new life, at the same time embarking on an epic journey by foot.

It is 1934, and as a young man Lee walks to London from his Cotswolds home. He is to live by playing the violin and by labouring on a London building site. When this work draws to a finish, and having picked up the phrase in Spanish for ‘Will you please give me a glass of water?’, he decides to go to Spain. He scrapes together a living by playing his violin outside the street cafe, and sleeps at night in his blanket under an open sky or in cheap, rough posadas. For a year he tramps through Spain, from Vigo in the north to the south coast, where he is trapped by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

Experiencing a Spain ranging from the utterly squalid to the utterly beautiful, Lee creates a story which evocatively captures the spirit and atmosphere of the towns and countryside he passes through in his own distinctive semi-poetic style. He is warmly welcomed by the Spaniards he meets and enjoys a generous hospitality even from the poorest villagers he encounters along the way.

4.The Sun Also Rises

“Before you act, listen. Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try.” ~ Ernest Hemingway.

“The Sun Also Rises” is one of the best travel book written by American author Ernest Hemingway in 1926, about a group of American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermin in Pamplona to watch the running of bulls and the bullfights. An early and enduring modernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication. Hemingway biographer Jeffrey Meyers writes that it is “recognized as Hemingway’s greatest work”, and Hemingway scholar Linda Wagner-Martin calls it his most important novel. The novel was published in the United States in October 1926 by the publishing house Scribner’s.  A year later, the London publishing house Jonathan Cape published the novel with the title of Fiesta. Since then it has been continuously in print.

5.The Great Railway Bazaar

“My love for traveling to islands amounts to a pathological condition known as nesomania, an obsession with islands. This craze seems reasonable to me, because islands are small self-contained worlds that can help us understand larger ones.” ~ Paul Theroux

“The Great Railway Bazaar” is one of the best travel book written by American novelist Paul Theroux, first published in 1975. It recounts Theroux’s four-month journey by train in 1973 from London through Europe,the Middle East, the Indian sub continent and Southeast Asia, and his return via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Many people consider it a classic in the genre of travel writing. The first part of the route, to India, followed what was then known as the hippie trial. It sold 1.5 million copies upon release.