Travel books are definitely a comfort genre for me, low-stakes but still entertaining. 

Much like a memoir, travel stories can’t just be about places you’ve been. It has to reflect change, and that’s what makes the genre so valuable. We get a window into someone else’s perspective, while also learning about the world.

I remember reading Marco Polo’s The Travels in college. At the time, many Europeans didn’t believe his stories of “lizard dragons that could swallow a human whole.” Even on his deathbed, family members urged him to retract what they believed were lies. They had never seen a crocodile before!

Here are 20 more books to read before you travel.

Jon Krakauer

On May 10, 1996, Jon Krakauer reached the summit of Mt. Everest after 57 hours without sleep and the mind-altering effects of oxygen deprivation. Over the next six hours, he battled ferocious winds and blinding snow, collapsing from hallucinations. The following morning revealed the storm’s devastating toll: six fellow climbers had not returned to camp and were desperately struggling for their lives.

Peter Hessler

Hessler spends two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Fuling, a city along the Yangtze River, where he teaches literature at a teachers’ college. Initially navigating misunderstandings and local bureaucracy, he gradually begins unraveling the layers of Chinese society. Through his students’ writing and small exchanges, the story chronicles life in a rapidly changing China.

Peter Mayle

Trading the rush of London for the quiet rhythms of southern France, Mayle chronicles a year of adapting to life in Provence. From village lunches and eccentric neighbors to vineyard harvests and mistranslations, he captures the humor and charm of a slower, deeply rooted way of life.

Cheryl Strayed

Weak with grief after the loss of her mother and the collapse of her marriage, Strayed sets out alone to hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. Along the way, blisters, black bears, and her own doubts test her resolve. Her story is a reminder that sometimes nature, unforgiving as it is, offers the space we need to piece ourselves back together.

Bill Bryson

Australia, the driest, flattest, and hottest inhabited continent, contains an incredible abundance of life — much of it capable of killing you. From cheerful locals and outback towns to strange wildlife and dangerous landscapes, Bryson recounts his journey across the country with humor, curiosity, and admiration for a place unlike anywhere else on earth.

Tahir Shah

Shah and his family move from London to Casablanca, driven by fond childhood memories of Morocco and dreams of a different life. After purchasing a crumbling mansion once owned by a caliph, he finds himself navigating jinns, endless renovations, and cultural misunderstandings. The result is both a humorous memoir and a reflection on starting over abroad.

Francis Mayes

A celebration of place, Mayes chronicles her restoration of a crumbling villa in the Tuscan countryside. Between sun-drenched landscapes, shared meals, and discoveries of Italian traditions, she finds renewal in slowing down and rebuilding a life from the ground up.

Wilfred Thesiger

Disenchanted with the comforts of modern Western society, Thesiger journeys deep into the Empty Quarter of Arabia, one of the harshest deserts on earth. Traveling alongside Bedouin tribes through years of brutal conditions, he records a disappearing way of life with respect and admiration for those who survive in the unforgiving sands.

Ibn Battuta

In 1325, at age twenty-one, Ibn Battuta left Tangier on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Instead of returning home, he spent nearly three decades traveling across North Africa, the Middle East, India, Central Asia, and beyond. His writings offer one of history’s most remarkable portraits of the medieval Islamic world, witnessing one of the earliest recorded medical school dissections and other innovations.

J. Maarten Troost

Expecting paradise, Troost instead finds himself stranded on a remote Pacific atoll plagued by heat, isolation, and endless cultural surprises. With sharp humor and self-deprecation, he recounts the absurdities of daily life in Kiribati while revealing the beauty and resilience hidden beneath its hardships.

Elizabeth Gilbert

After a painful divorce, Gilbert spends a year seeking pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and balance in Bali. Through food, meditation, friendship, and self-reflection, she examines heartbreak, longing, and the universal desire to feel whole again.

Tim Butcher

Retracing Henry Morton Stanley’s legendary Congo expedition, Butcher travels through a region scarred by conflict, corruption, and colonial legacy. Battling dense jungle, failing infrastructure, and political instability, he combines modern adventure with historical reflection on one of Africa’s most troubled regions.

Conor Knighton

After a broken engagement leaves his future uncertain, Knighton leaves for an ambitious journey to visit every national park in the United States within a single year. Blending personal reflection with natural history, he rediscovers wonder in America’s landscapes and the people who protect them.

Che Guevara

Before becoming a revolutionary figure, Guevara embarked on a motorcycle journey across South America with his friend Alberto Granado. Traveling through deserts, mountains, and leper colonies, he witnesses poverty and inequality firsthand, experiences that profoundly shape his understanding of the continent and his place within it.

Paul Theroux

Returning to Africa decades after teaching in Malawi, Theroux travels overland from Cairo to Cape Town using buses, ferries, cargo trucks, and overcrowded trains. Along the way, he reflects on foreign aid, political instability, and the resilience of ordinary people, offering an unfiltered portrait of a changing continent.

Chris Broad

With humor and curiosity, Broad reflects on a decade spent living across Japan. From rural festivals and awkward cultural misunderstandings to natural disasters and late-night city adventures, he explores the contradictions, beauty, and challenges of life as a foreigner in a country both welcoming and mysterious.

William Langewiesche

The Sahara is so vast and inhospitable that even bacteria struggle to survive. Journeying through this immense desert, Langewiesche encounters smugglers, nomads, and isolated communities while confronting the dangers and strange beauty of one of the harshest environments on earth.

Marco Polo

Beginning in 1271, Marco Polo’s journey to the Mongol Empire carried him across deserts, mountains, and unfamiliar civilizations over the course of twenty-four years. Serving in the court of Kublai Khan, he documented cultures, trade routes, and cities previously unknown to most Europeans, creating one of history’s most influential travel memoirs.