The best books to make you pack your suitcase for far away places

If you only know the movie, you’ve missed the majesty of Isak Dinesen’s rhapsodic love song to the noble creatures and intricate peoples of the African veldts. Despite its colonial overtones, written in 1937, this is a passionate and compassionate portrait of a place like no other, a portrait of the Earth before she received her name. Check out the story of Kamante and Lulu, or “the Giraffes Go To Hamburg”;  they’ll break your heart. “If I know a song of Africa, does Africa know a song of me?” Dinesen writes. I read this book when I was very young and dreamed of going. Because of it, I have travelled there. Part of me has never come back. 

Take everything you know about British Empire—its royal traditions, its stiff-upper-lip haughtiness, its unflappable sense of superiority—and cram it into the character of a nearly-irrelevant, self-deluded yet heartbreakingly sympathetic butler named Stevens, whose comical misadventures lead us from an outdated British manor house across the spectacular countryside of England in his search to recapture a romance that (spoiler) may never have actually been. Kazuo Ishiguro employs the ultimate “unreliable narrator” to poke fun at the British class system; in the process he creates an opera buffo that plays against the haunting rural beauty of that sceptered isle. For my money, it’s a better taste of England than all the tea in Buckingham Palace. Just sayin’.

How far must you travel to discover your true inner self? Pretty far, for Peter Matthiessen—all the way to the slopes of Annapurna in Nepal, in search of blue sheep, the Lama of Crystal Mountain, the elusive snow leopard, and most of all, spiritual enlightenment—very big in the ’70s (trust me, I was there). It’s a journal, a travelogue, a nature study, a daredevil escapade in a setting of such unworldly grandeur that makes you long to be there, at the top of the world, where the clouds dance and the mountains sing. Lots of self-reflection, but absolutely worth signing on for the trek.

Clearly, I have a soft spot for stories about small towns in foreign places, and the people who inhabit them, steeped in the deep ways of village life, bearing the consequences of their collective failures and aspirations. This story, of a small Irish village in rural County Clare facing the unexpected approach of progress, is remarkable not just for the uniqueness of its characters, but for the brilliance of William’s writing. Each sentence is a masterpiece, each surprising phrase music to the ears: hopeful, alive and forlorn. Who would not travel to this place, to be among that kind of human magic? I love this book.

Who wouldn’t want to travel to the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean sea south of Elba? There’s an airstrip there full of bombers—the ones that haven’t yet been shot out of the skies—plus a military barracks that’s closer to an insane asylum, and a certain Captain Yossarian, who’s fighting to keep himself, and anyone dumb enough to join him, alive until tomorrow. Not the stuff of a travel book, you say? I don’t care. This is my favorite book ever, a brilliant, brave, side-splitting, troublemaking, groundbreaking epic that redefined both the comic novel and war as well. At age 12 it made me laugh; at 40, it made me weep. So skip Pianosa and travel somewhere else; just take this book with you. I promise it’ll make your plane ride a lot more interesting.