Suggested Reading

I divide travel books into four categories:

• How to travel:      general advice on how to travel, to a region or the world
• Where to go:        the glossy picture books that weigh far too much to take with you
• How to get there: the logistics guides you tear up to take with you
• After they went:   the travelogs, the books for armchair travelers, for dreamers, for incubating the seeds of the next trip

How to travel:

• Europe Through the Back Door, by Rick Steves. The best guide to budget travel in Europe. Steves' travel videos are a fixture on PBS, and he is a good source for European rail pass information. (For worldwide rail information, with lots of pix, visit the Man in Seat61.)
• The Practical Nomad, by Edward Hasbrouck. The best guide to budget Round-the-World travel. Hasbrouck is the web's guru on air fares. Don't buy international tickets without reading his FAQ.
• The Rough Guide to First-Time Europe, etc. (Lonely Planet's "Read This First" guides are no longer published but you can find second-hand copies on the net). First timer advice by region, with mini-destination guides.

Where to travel:

If you already know exactly where you want to go and what you want to see you can skip this category -- except to admire the pictures. But if you want to go to, say, Spain, but haven't decided where to go after you've seen Madrid or Barcelona or the Alhambra (you have to see the Alhambra), these books are a good starting point. I'm not talking about the big, coffee table books, although they are worth drooling over too, but glossy "guide books". They weigh far too much, and have far too little logistical information, to take on the road, but they are great for initial planning -- and make good souvenirs.

• Insight Guides are my favorites in this category. They have lots of readable background information, reasonable maps and plenty of pretty pictures. The destination sections include enough information for you to decide if you want to go, without overwhelming you.
• Fodor's Exploring Guides. Similar to the Insight Guides. Don't confuse these with their other guide books. Fodors also hosts some lively discussion boards.
• Knopf Guides. Very good on background, selective on destinations. A bit like the Eyewitness Guides, but much better.

How to get there:

• When I want to know how to get from point A to point B, and what I'll likely find when I get there, I reach for a Lonely Planet guide. As far as I'm concerned they are just the best logistics guides around. Rough Guides can substitute, but I find LP easier to use. You do have to read LP's accommodation suggestions with some care. I usually find their mid-range listings are fine, but occasionally I encounter an author whose standards seem a little off.
• For more information on sites, and alternative accommodation listings I like Footprint Handbooks.
• Rick Steves' destination guides are worth their weight if he's covering a place you want to visit, although he has been moving more and more upmarket. And if you're approaching one of Europe's major museums with trepidation, look for a copy ofs his "Mona Winks".

Most of the publishers of series guides offer smaller pocket guides to the big cities. You can also find one-off guides that are worth investigating. Here are a couple I've used:

• Andrew Duncan's "Walking London"
• Royston Ellis's "India by Rail"

After they went

This category covers travelogs and travel essays, and is so subjective that my best advice is to go find a bookshop (or a library) and browse. If you want to browse online try Longitude Books.

I know that my tastes aren't mainline here, because best-sellers like Paul Theroux leave me cold. In fact Theroux annoys me -- he goes to wonderful places and then complains. Since you probably already know about Theroux, and some best-sellers I like better, such as Jan Morris and Tim Cahill, Colin Thubron and Freya Stark I'm just going to make a few quirkier suggestions:

• Richard Bernstein's "Ultimate Journey". I've written about this book before. Bernstein follows the route of the 7th century Chinese monk Hsuan Tsang from Xi'an to India and back.
• Ina Caro's "The Road from the Past". France with some painless history.
• Peter Fleming's "News From Tartary". Brother of Ian crosses China in the 1930s.
• Edward Gargan's "The River's Tale". Gargan stays as close as he can to the route of the Mekong from source to sea, while casting longing glances at the fleshpots of Thailand.
• Susan Hill's "Shakespeare Country". Beautifully illustrated guide to the Cotswolds.
• Robert Kaplan's "The Ends of the Earth" and "Eastward to Tartary". Kaplan's books are turning more to politics than travel these days, but he's always interesting.
• Michael Palin -- formerly of Monty Python, he's been doing some major trips for the BBC, and writing about them. Start with "Around the world in 80 Days".
• Jim Roger's "Adventure Capitalist" and "Investment Biker" -- round-the-world on the ground, including Africa and Latin America, with a little investment advice thrown in.
• Mary Lee Settle's "Turkish Reflections". Sub-title -- A Biography of a Place.

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