Top Ten Travel Books as Selected by Rory MacLean

A Time of Gifts

Patrick Leigh Fermor's fluent, exotic account of his youthful 1933 travels from London to Constantinople was published more than 40 years after the event. It is a book that makes any journey seem possible.

The Alexandria Quartet

I first read Lawrence Durrell's 877-page masterpiece in a single sitting, pausing only for sleep on the second night. His interweaving of emotion, perspective, sensation, and thought wills the reader up the imaginative scale. It is a glittering, inspirational achievement.

On the Road

Kerouac's restless, seminal work blended fiction and autobiography to define the "Beat" generation. Its influence in propelling countless kids onto the road cannot be overstated.

In Siberia

Colin Thubron's extraordinary 15,000-mile journey through this astonishing country after the fall of Communism is a scholarly, compassionate masterpiece by one of the greatest travel writers.

Elephant

Raymond Carver's moving short stories are honest, direct, lean, and adverb-free. Each creation is a triumph of minimalism that conjures extraordinary hope from the minutiae of ordinary lives. No word is spare. Nothing is wasted. These are remarkable and poetic inventions.

A Natural History of the Senses

Diane Ackerman's radiant exploration of our ability to smell, touch, taste, hear, and see, how music moves us, and why touch delights and heals is a lyrical and elegant journey with a literary enchantress.

Night Flight

Antoine de Saint-Exupery's soaring yet humble novel is set in the early days of aviation. The lone aviator travels amidst the stars' timelessness and the sky's immensity.

Silver Darlings

Scottish author Neil Gunn's story of the herring fisheries is set in a time and place when necessity, not whim, motivated travel. It is a work of vast scope, sensitivity, and humanity that shows how historical events impinge on individual lives, enabling the reader to understand one through the other.

Mary Poppins

I admire P.L Travers's modern classic for its healthy disrespect for authority, especially bankers, its promotion of women's rights, and its emphasis on the role of fantasy, which I often rely on as a travel writer.