The Sun Also Rises
1926 · 256 pages
From the cafes of Paris to the bullring at Pamplona, expatriates drink and travel and love the wrong people. Hemingway leaves the wound unnamed, and what nobody says sits under every line.
★ 8.0
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
1702 · 167 pages
Basho sold his house and walked hundreds of miles into northern Japan, writing prose that stops for a haiku. At a battlefield he finds summer grass, all that remains of warriors' dreams.
★ 7.1
The Worst Journey in the World
1922 · 573 pages
Three men hauled sledges through five weeks of Antarctic winter darkness to fetch penguin eggs, in cold that cracked Cherry-Garrard's teeth. That was before Scott's polar party failed to come back.
★ 7.1
A Time of Gifts
1977 · 321 pages
At eighteen in 1933 Fermor set off on foot from Holland for Constantinople, sleeping in barns one night and in castles the next, and caught central Europe in its last clear light.
★ 7.1
Down and Out in Paris and London
1933 · 213 pages
Seventeen-hour shifts in a Paris restaurant kitchen, then the tramps' road between London workhouses. Orwell went into poverty himself and came back able to describe what hunger does to a mind.
★ 7.0
The Voyage of the Beagle
1839 · 432 pages
Five years at sea gave Darwin fossil giants in Patagonia, an earthquake lifting the Chilean coast, and Galapagos tortoises. He wrote it as travel narrative, and evolution grew out of these notes.
★ 6.9
The Road to Oxiana
1937 · 291 pages
Byron crossed Persia and Afghanistan in the 1930s hunting domes and minarets, and the diary he kept is funny, rapturous, and cruel about everyone he meets. Paul Fussell called it travel writing's Ulysses.
★ 6.8
The Travels of Marco Polo
1290 · 379 pages
Seventeen years at Kublai Khan's court, and Polo comes back describing paper money, black stones that burn, and cities richer than anything in Europe. Columbus annotated his copy and went looking for them.
★ 6.7
The Travels
1355 · 472 pages
Ibn Battuta left Morocco at twenty-one for the hajj and stayed away twenty-nine years, judging cases in Delhi and crossing the Sahara to Mali. He dictated all 75,000 miles from memory.
★ 6.7
Wind, Sand and Stars
1939 · 240 pages
Flying mail over the Sahara and Patagonia, Saint-Exupery writes about what the work did to the men who flew it. The pilot Guillaumet crashed in the Andes and walked out through the snow.
★ 6.6
Arabian Sands
1959 · 400 pages
Thesiger crossed Arabia's Empty Quarter twice with Bedu companions, on a pint of water a day. He loved that life, knew oil money would end it, and wrote this as its elegy.
★ 6.5
Christ Stopped at Eboli
1945 · 288 pages
Banished by Mussolini to a village in the Italian south, a Turin doctor found peasants convinced Christ had stopped short of them. The book made postwar Italy confront a region it had abandoned.
★ 6.5
Coming into the Country
1977 · 438 pages
Three Alaskas: a river trip above the Arctic Circle, the hunt for a new capital site, and the trappers of Eagle on the Yukon. Reporters have been studying McPhee's patience ever since.
★ 6.5
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
A Journey Through Yugoslavia
1941 · 1181 pages
Rebecca West traveled through Yugoslavia in 1937 and wrote eleven hundred pages. A lamb bled on a Macedonian rock and a Serbian poem of chosen defeat become her account of Europe's death wish.
★ 6.1
In Patagonia
1977 · 204 pages
Chatwin traveled Patagonia chasing a scrap of giant sloth skin from his grandmother's cabinet, and collected Welsh settlers, anarchists and Butch Cassidy. He remade travel writing into something as strange as fiction.
★ 5.6
The Snow Leopard
1978 · 368 pages
Months after his wife's death, Matthiessen walks deep into the Nepalese Himalaya with a biologist counting blue sheep, studying Zen as he goes and watching for a snow leopard he never sees.
★ 5.6
West with the Night
1942 · 293 pages
Raised barefoot in Kenya, Markham hunted with Nandi boys, trained racehorses, and scouted elephants from the air before flying the Atlantic alone. Hemingway said she made him ashamed as a writer.
★ 5.6
Arctic Dreams
1986 · 474 pages
Five years in the high Arctic, among narwhals and muskoxen and light that behaves like nothing further south. Lopez asks what Westerners have wanted from that country, and what the wanting cost.
★ 5.6
Honey from a Weed
1986 · 374 pages
Gray gave up an editor's job for stone quarries in Tuscany, Catalonia, Naxos, and Apulia, cooking wild greens, snails, and game over wood fires and setting down a Mediterranean already disappearing.
★ 5.3
Blue Highways
A Journey Into America
1982 · 448 pages
His marriage over and his job gone, Least Heat-Moon drove thirteen thousand miles of two-lane road in a van named Ghost Dancing and let Nameless, Tennessee and Dime Box, Texas do the talking.
★ 5.2