The folks at Concierge.com (a site somehow associated with Conde Nast Traveler) have compiled a list of the greatest travel books. (Actually, the list was compiled by an allstar panel that included Jared Diamond, Robert Kaplan, Jan Morris, Paul Theroux and Gore Vidal.) At 86 books, it’s a lengthy list, although some of the books included (most notably Democracy in America) are only in the loosest of senses “travel books.”
The ones on the list I’ve read, in addition to de Tocqueville, are:
- George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
- Herodotus, The Histories
- Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
- Matsuo Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches
- Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
On the same theme: about a month ago, a review of a book called Shadow of the Silk Road appeared in the NYTimes. The opening paragraph particularly caught my attention, which was why I remembered it:
Colin Thubron, the dean of British travel writers, would hate being called the dean of anything. A hitchhiking man, he gets drunk with Kyrgyz villagers who drive headlong toward a truck. He camps in a mud hut with workers in the mountains of northern Iran. He equably drinks wine out of paper cups with a Russian beggar. His clothes are dodgy, his rucksack light.
He does, however, speak Mandarin and Russian. And this, his ninth travel book, is no lark.
I looked in vain for any of Thubron’s books on the Concierge list. There’s a reason for the omission, though: he’s on the panel that did the selecting. I suspect this kept a number of fine travel books by contemporary writers off the list.
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