The Best Travel Books to Inspire Wanderlust

For as long as people have been telling stories, we’ve been telling stories about going someplace else. A good travel memoir can satisfy the urge to roam when life gets in the way of planning a trip, or provide extra inspiration before we depart. The best ones are often grounded in the history and culture of a place, and can teach us how to be attentive, curious, and brave. Whether you prefer your prose sharp and incisive or languid and digressive, the world of travel writing is filled with endless options, both classic and contemporary. We gathered recommendations from book critics, travel writers, and bookstore owners to help spark your—dare we say it—wanderlust.

States of Desire: Travels in Gay America, Edmund White

“In 1980, our greatest living gay novelist, Edmund White, published a gloriously idiosyncratic travelogue titled States of Desire: Travels in Gay America. Each chapter corresponds to a city or cities he visited to document what local gay life was like there—’Los Angeles,’ ‘San Francisco,’ and ‘New York City’ of course, but also ‘Sante Fe, Salt Lake City and Denver’ and ‘Portland and Seattle.’ White’s journeys provide an absorbing glimpse into the world of gay men before the internet and hookup apps. ‘When I arrived in Portland I phoned a young gay timber baron, whom I did not know but whose number had been given to me…’ States of Desire, then, is not just a tour of gay urban enclaves in the U.S.; it also lets the reader travel back in time to that blessed, brief parentheses between Stonewall and epidemiological disaster.” — Matthew Sitman, Writer and Co-host of Know Your Enemy podcast.

The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd

“There is something incredibly special about Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, a slim-spined ode to the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland. Shepherd trekked these mountains for many years, and The Living Mountain compiles her stories from these journeys, meditations, and musings. The language is poetic, transcendent, and transportive, a love letter to nature from someone who took the time to know it well. When I read it, I feel like I am there.” — Kori Perten, Senior Travel Editor, Thrillist

In Siberia, Colin Thubron

“I come to Thubron for his vertiginous sense of perspective: The British writer brings a deep attunement to lived history to anyplace he travels. In this, the third of his trips to the territory of the former Soviet Union, he crosses Russia’s vast eastern swathe by train, by boat, by hitchhiking and the power of his feet, a journey that brings him into contact with the Altai ice mummies, Soviet pseudoscience, Tuvan shamanism, and all the many legacies of past catastrophe, from Old Believers exiled under the Tsars to the last remnants of a Jewish community at the nation’s periphery. In Siberia, as seen through Thubron’s eyes, all this history is ever-present, waiting just below the permafrost for the thaw to disgorge.” — Robert Rubsam, Freelance Writer and Critic

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West

“Let’s get this out of the way: Yes, this book is over a thousand pages long. In my view, though, that makes it an ideal travel book for travel as well as for pleasure reading about travel. If you, like me, are too cheap to pay for airline internet, nothing really passes the time on a flight like a gigantic book. (You can even get it on Kindle now if you really don’t want to lug it around.) More to the point, though, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West’s account of her travels through the Balkans in 1937, between the World Wars, never feels like it’s a thousand pages long.

Like many English writers of her time, West is free with her judgments and essentializes wildly about national character, but the effect is not to set her in place as the ultimate authority on all matters Balkan but to make her a sharp-tongued companion as you travel alongside her. You see what she sees, you hear what she thinks, and then you form your own opinions. She is acerbic and frequently hilarious; I flip through the book at random to find, for instance, her description of a Macedonian driver as ‘a man of irrational pride, which we wounded afresh each time we got out of the cab because it was about to fall over the edge of a ravine.’ One thing West was absolutely clear-eyed about, though, was the threat of Nazism. By the time the book came out, that threat had been fully realized, and it is dedicated ‘to my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead or enslaved.’” — B.D McClay, Essayist and Critic at Notebook

An African in Greenland, by Tété-Michel Kpomassie

“Possibly the most charming travel memoir ever written. A young man from Togo becomes obsessed with living among the Inuit, after reading about them in a book, and works his way across West Africa and Europe to make his dream a reality. Arriving in Greenland in the early 1960s, he spends two years traveling farther and farther north, embedding himself in different tribal communities (he learns to fish, hunt whales and seals, and drive a team of huskies, and even has affairs with several of the women) while documenting everything with a keen eye and wit but never a trace of judgment. A fascinating encounter between two cultures I knew nothing about, like the author I never wanted it to end.” — David Del Vecchio, Owner of Idlewild

Trieste and the meaning of nowhere, Jan Morris

“For fans of Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Morris’s book about the northern Italian port city she first laid eyes on as a soldier at the end of World War II and frequented throughout her life begins with the proposition that Trieste’s visitors often associate the place with ‘nowhereness.’ Not a blank page, but a suggestively smudged one. The city has been rewritten many times over, sometimes by the rise and fall of empires, sometimes by actual writers (Joyce and Freud spent time there, Svevo was born there). Trieste, Morris writes, ‘appears to have a particular influence upon those of us with a weakness for allegory.’ If that sounds like what ails you, then this book will surely exacerbate the situation. As will visiting Trieste. Enjoy!” — Hannah Gold, Critic and Fiction Writer

Trailed: One Woman’s Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders, Kathryn Miles

“Trailed is not a travel read like On the Road by Kerouac—it might be a bit closer to Into Thin Air by Krakauer. Miles details her journey from trying to write an article on the anniversary of the decades-unsolved 1996 murders of young couple Laura ‘Lollie’ Winans and Julie Williams. The brutal crime occurred while the women, both in their early 20s, took a weeklong backpacking trip along the Appalachian Trail. Their killings had a chilling effect on women hikers in the area for years after, and brought into the light just how different the experiences white men have while hiking, versus everyone else. Miles goes on two journeys during the book: through the trails that shaped her own life as a hiker and outdoor enthusiast, and through the unraveling of her faith in law enforcement as she learns how this case has remained unsolved for so long.

As a woman who has spent much of her 20s traveling, hiking, and adventuring solo, this book felt intimately familiar with some of my own deepest worries and considerations. Ironically, Trailed never made me feel afraid to keep venturing out; instead it seems imperative that young women keep exploring the world on their terms. By the end of the book you will likely feel deeply disenchanted with the National Parks Service and the FBI, but you will come away knowing more about two incredible young women whose passion for the outdoors is not only admirable but infectious.” — Opheli Garcia Lawler, Senior Staff Writer at Thrillist

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