There is a time and place for travel listicles and round-ups. When you're planning your trip to London or Florence, listicles that rank the best dining experiences can come in handy for your meal itineraries. Same for round-ups of the best hotels to book or the best landmarks to see. But great travel writing goes beyond that.
Great travel writing will open your eyes, expand your perspectives, teach but not lecture, enlighten and transport. Though much of the world may be off-limits now, we can still use our imaginations to travel to far-flung places through the power of a beautifully crafted sentence and a biting sense of humour, thanks to these travel books.
Here are a few classic and new travel book ideas for your reading and armchair traveling pleasure this weekend.
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The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
One of the great classics of American travel writing, "The Great Railway Bazaar" takes readers on an odyssey throughout Asia aboard some of the most fabled trains in the world: the Orient Express, the Mandalay Express and the Trans-Siberian Express. First published in 1975, the book is part travelogue, part literature, with events and descriptions embellished in Theroux's signature humor and novelistic flair.
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
After living in the UK for 20 years, travel writer Bill Bryson returned to the US in his 60s, and decided on a whim to tackle the 2,000-mile Appalachian Trail, the world's longest continuous footpath that crosses through 14 states from Georgia to Maine. What ensues is a travelogue written in Bryson's classic "riotously funny" LOL style, that recounts his five-month journey with his friend Stephen Katz hiking through some of the most striking landscapes in America. If the premise sounds familiar, that's because the book was adapted into a film starring Robert Redford as Bryson in 2015.