10 Books to Inspire Creative Travel
As we sit at home and wait for the world to get healthy enough to travel again, we’re stuck with finding more creative ways to get the benefits of travel. Here are 10 books to inspire creative travel and inspiration for future trips.
For more ways to experience the benefits of travel without leaving the safety of your home, try one of these VR travel experiences.
The Geography of Bliss is part travel memoir, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide. This travel book by Eric Weiner takes the reader across the globe to investigate not what happiness is but where it is.
Weiner travels to Iceland, Bhutan, Moldova, Thailand, Qatar, and more—to search out how different countries define and pursue happiness. What makes people happy? And what can travel teach us about living healthier and happier lives?
The Art of Travel Paperback by Alain De Botton explores the questions of how and why we travel. Alain De Botton considers the pleasures of anticipation, the allure of the exotic, and the value of noticing everything from a seascape in Barbados to the takeoffs at Heathrow. Using inspiration from his own travels and creative minds like Baudelaire, Wordsworth, Van Gogh, the biologist Alexander von Humboldt, and the 18th-century eccentric Xavier de Maistre, de Botton explores the internal elements of travel.
Vagabonding by Rolf Potts is about discovering and experiencing the world on your own terms. Rolf Potts explains how anyone armed with an independent spirit can achieve the dream of extended overseas travel. Not just a handbook, vagabonding teaches you how to have an outlook on life that emphasizes creativity, discovery, and personal growth. This is not for the traveler who wants the all-in-one vacation package but for the adventurer that travels with purpose.
More than just a companion to the hugely popular Travel Channel show, No Reservations is Bourdain’s fully illustrated journal of his far-flung travels. From New Zealand to New Jersey and everywhere in between, Bourdain shares never-before-seen photos with his own commentary on what really happens when a bad-boy chef travels the world. There are many ways to travel and experience the world and its cultures, and by far one of the best ways is through food. If you enjoy the tv show, you’ll love this book and be inspired to try new foods and learn more about the cultures of where you travel.
The Year of Living Danishly by Helen Russell looks at where the Danes get happiness right, where they get it wrong, and how we might just benefit from living a little more Danishly ourselves. Helen Russell was a London native when she was given the opportunity of a new life in rural Jutland, Denmark. Expecting long dark winters, she was surprised to find it to be one of the happiest places on Earth. What is the secret to their success? Are happy Danes born or made? Over the course of a year, she explored the elements of Danish living, from childcare, education, food, and interior design to SAD, taxes, sexism, and more, to find where they get happiness right, wrong, and what the rest of the world can learn from them.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig is perhaps one of the most important and influential books written in the past half-century. It’s an unforgettable narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America’s Northwest, undertaken by a father and his young son. A story of love and fear — of growth, discovery, and acceptance — that becomes a profound personal and philosophical odyssey into life’s fundamental questions, this uniquely exhilarating modern classic is both touching and transcendent, resonant with the myriad confusions of existence . . . and the small, essential triumphs that propel us forward. It’s a breathtaking meditation on how to live better.
A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson is a modern classic of travel literature about walking the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail. With humor, Bill Bryson tells the story of reacquainting himself with his native country and the bizarre assortment of hilarious characters he meets along the way. The trail provides endless opportunities to witness the majestic silliness of his fellow human beings. But A Walk in the Woods is more than just a laugh-out-loud hike. Bryson’s acute eye is a wise witness to this beautiful but fragile trail, and as he tells its fascinating history, he makes a moving plea for the conservation of America’s last great wilderness.
On the Road by Jack Kerouac is the legendary novel of freedom and the search for authenticity that defined a generation. The book details Jack Kerouac’s adventures with Neal Cassady, the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naiveté and wild ambition and imbued with Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope.
The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux was first published more than thirty years ago and tales a strange, unique, and hugely entertaining railway odyssey. Theroux recounts his early adventures on an unusual grand continental tour eastbound from London’s Victoria Station to Tokyo Central, then back from Japan on the Trans-Siberian. He travels the Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Frontier Mail, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Mandalay Express, and the Trans-Siberian Express. The novel is brimming with Theroux’s signature humor and wry observations and is essential reading for both the ardent adventurer and the armchair traveler.
The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain is both a travelogue and critique of clashing cultures, but more importantly, it is an entertaining and insightful work written by one of the great masters of American prose. The novel tells of a tour in 1867, when Mark Twain and a group fellow-Americans toured Europe and the Holy Land, aboard a retired Civil War ship known as “Quaker City”, or what Twain called his “Great Pleasure Excursion.” The voyage lasted five months and shows just how much travel can change a man and his views of the world.
Zach is an international writer, photographer, filmmaker, martial artist, and creator of Creative Enso, the Zen art of creative living. His goal is to empower and inspire creatives to live healthier, happier, and more creative lifestyles.
