There are lots of good reasons to travel—uncharted horizons to explore and new friends to make among them—but there are also lots of good reasons to stay home—a comfortable chair, a good reading light, and a mug of hot tea among them. So why not combine the two alternatives and stay at home to read books about other people’s travels? Here are some great reads that will take you to Asia, Africa, India, and the far edges of North America.

Three classics of travel literature with which to begin your journey are Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (in fact, everything by Newby is worth reading); Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands; and News from Tartary: A Journey from Peking to Kashmir by Peter Fleming.

The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia by Paul Theroux is in some ways the granddaddy of contemporary armchair travel books. Although Theroux’s later travelogues display a kind of nasty, cynical view of the people and places he encounters, here his descriptions of his trip via such famed trains as the Orient Express, the Khyber Mail, and the Trans-Siberian Express come across as merely eccentric.

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Looking for Lovedu: A Woman’s Journey Across Africa relates the sometimes hilarious adventures of Ann Jones as she traverses the continent in an ancient Land Rover, from Tangier to the southernmost tip of South Africa, in search of the last Queen of Lovedu, and in the company—for the first half of the trip—of the incomparable Muggleton, a young British photographer. (Incidentally, the hard word in the title is pronounced low-bay-due.)

In Colin Thubron’s In Siberia we accompany the author on his journey across this enormous and enormously mysterious land, from Mongolia to the Arctic Circle, as he travels by car, boat, train, bus, and on foot.

Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban details a trip that is both exterior and interior: his voyage up the Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau, on his 35-foot sailboat Penelope, and his ruminations on a wonderful diversity of topcs.

In 1983, Chinese dissident Ma Jian took a three-year walk throughout his native country, as related in Red Dust: A Path Through China.

Another journey on foot—under much more fraught conditions—is Salvomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk, in which he describes his 1941 escape from the Soviet gulag and his arduous hike to India.


In Rowing to Latitude: Journeys Along the Arctic’s Edge, Jill Fredston describes how she and her husband spend their summers making their way around the edges of the Arctic by rowboat and kayak. No four-star hotels and gourmet dining experiences, no splendor on the Orient Express for this couple. They are at sea for weeks at a time, encountering polar bears, mosquitoes, killer storms, and big winds.