Travel

Bill Bryson is not a hiker. That's what makes this book work. His attempt to walk the Appalachian Trail with his old friend Stephen Katz is equal parts comedy, natural history, and honest reckoning with the American wilderness. Bryson is funny in a way that never undermines the seriousness of the landscape he's walking through.

Wilfred Thesiger traveling through the mountains of Central and South Asia — Kurdistan, the Hindu Kush, the Karakoram. The landscapes are harsh, the companions are local, and Thesiger's preference for difficulty over comfort is absolute.

In this spellbinding travel narrative, poet and award-winning journalist Kapka Kassabova returns to her roots in the borderland between Bulgaria, Turkey, and Greece. Nestled near the Black Sea and one of Europe’s greatest wildernesses, this rugged corner of the world has been overrun by shifting borders for millennia. From ancient Greece through the Ottoman Empire, to the Cold War and today’s Syrian refugees, the story takes switchbacks between cultures and centuries. One moment you’re sipping coffee with an armed border guard at The Disco cafe, the next you’re firewalking with an old woman carrying religious relics over hot coals. Boars and bears and wolves roam the old-growth beeches and oaks. And snakes, it seems, are everywhere. Is it 2016 or the 4th century BC? This kaleidoscopic exploration of boundaries—natural and man-made, real and imaginary—will forever change your bearings on the map.

J. Maarten Troost moved to the South Pacific with his wife and wrote about what he found — kava ceremonies, shark-infested waters, colonial history, and the absurdity of a pale Westerner trying to fit in. Funny and self-aware.

Richard Grant traveled into the Sierra Madre of Mexico — a region controlled by drug cartels, where the Tarahumara run and the law doesn't reach. Dangerous, vivid, and written by a man who kept going when common sense said stop.

Jeremy Schmidt and Patrick Morrow spent seven months crossing the Himalaya from Pakistan to Burma. The journey covers the full range of the world's greatest mountain chain — glaciers, monasteries, border crossings, and landscapes that change with every valley.

Bruce Chatwin's book about Patagonia is one of the great travel narratives — though what exactly it is remains debatable. Part travel, part history, part fiction, part hallucination. Chatwin walked through Patagonia collecting stories the way other people collect stamps. Nothing quite like it exists.

Paul Theroux drove the length of the U.S.-Mexico border and deep into Mexico, talking to migrants, cartel survivors, factory workers, and priests. Theroux at his most engaged — the cynicism replaced by something closer to grief.

Theroux paddled a kayak through the islands of the Pacific — Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia — in his characteristically abrasive, observant, and entertaining style. The kayak was the excuse; the cultures were the subject.

Walking across Afghanistan in the winter of 2002, alone, just after the fall of the Taliban. Stewart carried a walking stick and a letter from a warlord. The villages, the hospitality, the danger — all rendered with the clarity of someone who understood he might not make it.

Chatwin's investigation into Aboriginal Australian song-paths — the invisible routes that crisscross the continent, sung into existence by the ancestors. Part travel, part anthropology, part philosophical notebook. Chatwin at his most ambitious and most controversial.

Frazier drove across Siberia — the entire width of it — and wrote about what he found: emptiness, history, mosquitoes, and the ghost of the gulag. Thousands of miles of road that barely qualifies as road, rendered with Frazier's signature deadpan.