What are the fifty greatest travel books ever written?

He's often laugh out loud funny. Some of the humour appears contrived and whole pages set the scene for a punchline, which usually ends in embarassment for the author. They are the kind of books that you often hand to friends, but not the friends you would hand Chatwin to. And you probably love the latter more.

Journals of Captain Cook
Journals of Lewis & Clark
Description de L'Egypte (commissioned by Napolean)

In Xanadu.
From the Holy Mountain.

Amazing place and such a beautifully written book.

For Bryson I would go for his book on Britain - Notes from a Small Island, although Theroux's Kingdom by the Sea takes some beating and the 'Typical' chapter is one of his greatest. But, I'll go with Bryson for Britain, because his stereotyping makes me giggle like a schoolgirl.

"There they are, down there every night at. eight bells, praying for fair winds -- when they know as well as I do that this is the only ship going east this time of the year, but there's a thousand coming west -- what's a fair wind for us is a head wind to them -- the Almighty's blowing a fair wind for a thousand vessels, and this tribe wants him to turn it clear around so as to accommodate one -- and she a steamship at that! It ain't good sense, it ain't good reason, it ain't good Christianity, it ain't common human charity. Avast with such nonsense!"

Iyer knows that the thrill of modern travels is not in finding "unspoiled" places, as there are none left, but in witnessing the beautiful and cacophonous blend of cultures as the world eats its own tail, ouroboros-style.

Word.

In regards to "Stranger in the forest", I can only recommend trying some of the second hand bookshops in and around Sydney - Berkelouws in Paddington, Gleebooks second hand shop in Glebe, the second hand shops along King St Newtown. If this fails, go online - notice that Alibris have about four pages of listings for this book available including several in Australia.

There is a fine biogaphy of him (Cherry) written by Sara Wheeler, who also wrote a travelogue about Antarctica.

The Beach by Alex Garland
Are You Experienced by William Sutcliffe

I really liked both. I don't know if they places in the top "fifty greated travel" books, but they're about young people on travel, experiencing new things. And get that crap DiCaprio movie version out of your mind, the book is so much better.

"The Yage Letters" by William Burroughs is much more lucid and somewhat grounded in comparison to his fiction, but the situations are just as strange.

"Travels with Charley" is a great read.

For a modern take on Georgia (that's Georgia in Europe), Stories I Stole by Wendell Stevenson. It includes a great closing paragraph going against the grain of traditional travel writing.

My vote, though, has to go to Land of the High Flags: A Travel Memoir of Afghanistan (1964), by Rosanne Klaas. She was a young midwestern woman (25ish, I think?) who married and immediately set sail for Afghanistan, where her husband would be teaching, and ends up running a household, teaching her own classes, making peace w/ the mullahs, and going around being a western woman with delightful manners who yet takes no guff. She's lovely, lovely, all the wit and sharp observations of Paul Theroux and none of the mean-spiritedness that sometimes crops up with him, and a little extra derring-do; she makes me want to be her pen-pal and bestest friend. As someone who received her school & college education in the '50s, she's chock-full of all kinds of classical and bibilical references and lots of things that would have been, I imagine, common currency at the time, but they really are so applicable to the places & people she's describing -- after all, that is the "land of the tents of Abraham" -- that one never thinks "way to chalk up another one, Roz, my gal". Mob your local library today.

Account of the expeditions of a U.S. diplomat in the 1840s into the villages of Southern Mexico and his exploration of the Mayan ruins there. He was accompanied by Frederick Catherwood, who produced some of the most spectacular engravings ever. My family used to travel in this region quite a bit when I was a child, so it was fascinating to see what had changed and what hadn't in 150 years' time.

Dover has a nice two-volume edition that contains all of Catherwood's images.

Certainly for Road Fever alone.

For a modern book on the region, Ronald Wright's Time Among the Maya name-checks both Stephens and Catherwood and focuses on post-colonial attitudes towards the indigenous populations of meso-America.

Dunno about "greatest ever written" etc, but I really enjoyed Christopher Robbins' In Search of Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared. Contains everything from horrible tales of the GULags, to the tale of an undercover currency introduction, to fanciful speculations that King Arthur was Kazakh, plus very interesting insights into President Nazarbayev's thoughts about developing a new nation.

VS Naipaul -- An Area of Darkness
VS Naipaul -- Among The Believers
Shiva Naipaul -- North of South: An African Journey (mind-bogglingly good)
Shiva Naipaul -- Journey to Nowhere aka Black & White
Pico Iyer -- Video Night In Katmandu
Pico Iyer -- Falling Off The Map
Graham Greene -- Journey Without Maps
Evelyn Waugh -- When The Going Was Good

I loved Paul Theroux's railroad books but it's been so long since I read em, not sure how they hold up.

I didn't plug "Journey Around My Room" by Xavier de Maistre on this thread? I must be slipping.

Pretty much anything by Harry Franck, but especially A Vagabond Journey Around The World

Well worth reading: The Road, Jack London. Self-mythologizing memoir of tramping and rail-riding all over North America.

Lots of good ones already mentioned. I'd also throw Roads by Larry McMurtry in there.

Not sure if it's one of the 50 greatest ever, but I enjoyed this:

Anthony Trollope - Tireless Traveler: Twenty Letters to the Liverpool Mercury

A series of letters that Trollope wrote for publication in a Liverpool newspaper describing a trip to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), Australia, and California in 1875. Trollope seemed especially interested in the vitality of local industry and the entrepreneurial prospects for would-be immigrants.

Three Men in a Boat ought to be one of them

I also quite enjoyed Rory Stewart's The Places In Between - an absurdly dangerous solitary walk across Afghanistan in the middle of winter in the aftermath of the US invasion.

Eric Newby's A Short Walk In the Hindu Kush is tremendously entertaining. I keep meaning to read When the Snow Comes They Will
Take You Away, just for the title.

J R Ackerley: 'Hindoo Holiday' - about the 3(?) months he spent as secretary for a hugely camp, gay Indian aristocrat in central India in the 1920s. Very funny.

Some of these are not in the "Travel" genre per se:

Chatwin: Songlines (about his time in the Australian outback. It's not as well-written as In Patagonia, but it left a more lasting impression on me, particularly its ruminations on nomadism).

Orwell: Down and Out in Paris and London

G. Dyer: Out of Sheer Rage (the first half or so is ridiculous and hilarious; after that it lags somewhat)

Theroux: Happy Isles of Oceania

Homer: The Odyssey

Paul Schneider: Brutal Journey (about Narvaez's doomed expedition to Florida in 1528). A great tale, based in part on Cabeza de Vaca's memoirs.

WS Burroughs: Junk/y/ie. Keen observations of Mexico City and other locales.

Chatwin got so much shit for the ficitonalized bits in "Patagonia" that he billed Songlines as a novel. all his books mix fact & fiction in various proportions.

Gulliver's Travels ftw.

Mister Quixote

Have I said Mandeville's Travels on this thread yet? Mandeville's Travels! So great.
― Gravel Cafesworth, Tuesday, 21 February 2006 bookmarkflaglink

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— flowerville_ii (@flowerville_II) August 2, 2023

this looks good:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624429/travels-with-a-writing-brush-by-translated-and-edited-by-meredith-mckinney/

C.M. Doughty's 'Travels in Arabia Deserta'. Densely atmospheric read with insurmountable language (over a thousand pages of it). It's taking me years to get through. I've resolutely called it quits multiple times only to pick it up again months later. How come: Doughty's insistence on the incongruous style of the King James Bible, with pre-Shakespearean vocabulary and belletristic sentence construction, to describe a destitute, barren wilderness in exhaustive detail voices what it is to be a world apart from your immediate surroundings. There's really nothing else like it. No longer under copyright and freely available online.

Believe there is a character in a Walker Percy novel who is always reading that for similar reasons.

Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer. It’s the only book he owns!

Journals of Lewis & Clark
some of Richard Francis Burton
Ibn Battuta's works

Mungo Park

xxp
That's awesome! Thanks. And rings 100% true. Not only because it's a lot of book (and it is a lifetime supply of book for anyone who isn't an Olympian reader) but because so many people read books to be immersed and transported, and this one is another world. I've often thought it's the only book I need (having memorized one book I reeeaally couldn't live without).

C.M. Doughty's 'Travels in Arabia Deserta'. Densely atmospheric read with insurmountable language (over a thousand pages of it). It's taking me years to get through.

I tried taking a run at this when I was in my 19 year old phase of reading the beats and encountering Ferlinghetti's "Travels in America Deserta." I still haven't finished Doughty yet, but a great book that's adjacent is Reyner Banham's Scenes in America Deserta. In between architecture gigs, Banham pulls off of I-15 and has a moment of Stendhal Syndrome looking out over the dry lake bed and then follows it around the desert southwest - using the Doughty book as a kind of lodestone.

Big shout out to my sister's biography of four early travel writers: Harry Franck, E. Alexander Powell, Richard Halliburton, and Lowell Thomas. She also translated a couple of Jorge Sanchez's insane travel books (both recommended too)

I've heard of some her subjects, intriguingly enough, Elvis, hmmm. Also looking at several editions of Arabia Deserta online; which one(s) have you guys tried? Have read that Henry Green was a great advocate from early on, though some of his school friends, like Anthony Powell, weren't having any.

Jack London's People of the Abyss is a kind of forerunner of Down and Out in Paris and London, and I think comes after xpost The Road, when he's got some money, success, and need to top himself: he goes to London, buys some old clothes, tramps around. There's an edition with his photographs, big good'uns, taken with a concealed camera, I think he said. I once sold a copy of it to the mother of a competitive collector kid, Happy Bday Richie Rich! Wish I could have afforded it, but I was just a bookstore clerk. It's worth reading, in whatever edition (think it's in one of his Library of America collections, hopefully alongside The Road).

D.H. Lawrence's Sea and Sardinia..

No mention of A Time Of Gifts or The Rings of Saturn?

I haven't really read the former but I have it on good authority it's excellent.

haven't read either, but I did think of Austerlitz!

lawrence is just so ridiculously peevish in sea & sardinia, but love the descriptive passages and bus rides.

the opposite to lawrence in most ways: wyndham lewis's journey into barbary also good.

& dorothy carrington's granite island is amazing.