100 Best Adventure Books Discover Adventure's picks for the 100 greatest adventure books of all time. Read the top 100 >>

Before every big trip, I have a ritual. A few days prior to my flight, I hop in the car and head over to my local megabookstore to do a little browsing. Invariably I land in the travel section and invariably I am disappointed. The shelves sag with obsessive-compulsive guidebooks to places I don't want to go, à la Welcome to...Wichita or Explore: Detroit. The essay section is filled with florid fiction by cat ladies buying houses in Europe, portly men exploring Britain, and countless people "on the trail of." Hell, these days travel writers are even going in the footsteps of other travel writers.

In my opinion the greatest travel books are often not about travel at all. They are about lives lived and moments in time. Most of the works I love don't even fall in the travel category. Biography. Classics. Fiction. Those are the books that have inspired me to wander the globe. Likely, they'll do the same for you.
 
Ibn Battuta: Travels in Asia and Africa 1325-1354  Translated by H.A.R. Gibb (Manohar, $28)

Something about the modern-day definition of travel—that you get a week between coffee breaks at the office—always kind of irks me. Travel should be all-consuming, a lesson exemplified by Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan scribe who left his home in 1325 to make one of the world's grandest journeys. For three decades Battuta wandered Africa and Asia confronting pirates, kidnappers, battles, poverty, and disease, all the while jotting down his every observation. It's a journey so extraordinary it puts even Marco Polo's to shame.
 
The Devil Drives by Fawn M. Brodie (W.W. Norton, $16)

Called a genius, a rogue, a spy, and a pervert, Sir Richard Burton can best be described as a traveler. A speaker of 40 languages, Burton spearheaded the legendary source-of-the-Nile expedition in 1856, and he was the first Englishman to reach Mecca during the hajj and the first to translate The Arabian Nights into English. In writing Burton's biography, Brodie drew from newly discovered letters and original sources about the explorer's travels and the sexual mores of the people he visited. And though this isn't a travel book per se, its insights into Burton's drive and motivation will inspire anyone.
 
The Flashman Series by George Macdonald Fraser (Plume, $15 each)

Based on fictitious memoirs, the Flashman novels tell the story of Harry Paget Flashman, a British military officer who, like some sort of Victorian Forrest Gump, manages to participate in every major military engagement between 1839 and 1894. Whether it's the Charge of the Light Brigade or the Battle of the Little Bighorn, "Flashy," an incorrigible coward and womanizer, always seems to be the sole survivor. And though the stories are fictional, Fraser's research is meticulous. The characters Flashy meets and the backdrops he wanders through bring a bygone era to life. The latest in the series of 12 novels, Flashman on the March, was published last November.
 
Lord of the Flies by William Golding (Signet, $8)

OK. The plane crashes. Kids rule the island. Chaos ensues. Most of us read this one in high school, but Golding's classic deserves another look. Not the usual tropical getaway tale, Lord of the Flies is a case study of tribal dynamics, power struggles, and group mentality. If you plan to take a long bus tour or hole up in some resort, it may be worth bringing this one along.
 
The Oregon Trail by Francis Parkman (National Geographic, $14)

In 1846 Francis Parkman set out from Boston to learn firsthand about the American West. He began along a portion of the Oregon Trail and ended up joining a band of Oglala Sioux and hunting buffalo across the plains. The result was a first-person account of Indian life, the frontier, and the settling of the West that is one of the most riveting histories of 19th-century America. Read it when you drive cross-country and try to imagine the land as Parkman saw it. I have paddled a few of the rivers he mentions and his descriptions are still dead on.
 
The Short Stories by Ernest Hemingway (Scribner, $18)

I read and reread this collection while beach bumming on the coast of Colombia, and to me they are some of the most perfect travel stories of all time. Whether at the bullfight, on a big-game safari, or in the midst of some World War I ambush, Hemingway's style is spare and absolutely precise. Take a read of "Big Two-Hearted River" and there's no doubt you'll have an inclination to pen a few travel tales of your own.
 
Robert Young Pelton is the author of The World's Most Dangerous Places.



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