The best books about travel that are philosophical and funny

How can travel help us find the good life? The Art of Travel asks this question of artists such as Edward Hopper and Vincent van Gogh, with profound and amusing results. Why can anticipating travel be more pleasant than actually going away? What is the lure of the Bahamas, of the ‘exotic’, of open deserts? Throughout, De Botton invites us to pay better attention to the world around us. I especially enjoy his musings on the profundities of travel—on waiting at Heathrow airport, circling ring-roads, and dried ketchup of motorway service stations.

This entertaining book treats travellers who were also liars - people who went abroad, but ‘embellished’ their journeys on returning home. It includes the tale of John Byron “Foul-Weather Jack”, who circumnavigated the globe and reported meeting nine-foot giants in 1776 Argentina. In the 1690s, traveller Louis Hennepin’s lies dramatically altered the topography of New Mexico, introducing false rivers and land masses that appeared on maps for 250 years. In the 1560s, sailor David Ingram claimed to have trekked America—describing giant cities, ruby-adorned kings, and rivers flowing the wrong way. Adams thoughtfully reflects on why these travellers lied, and why people at home believed them. The answers lie in the goods and powers associated with travel: prestige, fame, money, and the difficulty of assessing claims about the faraway.

A Philosophy of Walking reads like strolling-paced poetry. It argues, for example, that walking allows for different silences. The silence of a woodland’s clumping trees is ‘tremulous, uneasy’. The silence of mountains under a hot sun is ‘blinding, mineral, shattering’. Amongst the benefits of walking, Gros includes freedom, peace, and space to think. He tells us that philosophers such as Henry Thoreau and Nietzsche found walking to provide cures for melancholy, and writer’s block. Rousseau used walking as a kind of mediation, covering ‘immense distances on foot’—due to poverty and inclination. For Gros, when we walk, we are put in touch with the world’s eternal, unchanging current.

Spinsters Abroad set out to celebrate Victorian women traveller such as Mary Kingsley, Amelia Edwards, and Isabella Bird. However, Birkett quickly discovered that these women were not straightforward role models. Yes, they travelled Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, braving hardship, and making all kinds of discoveries along the way. But it turns out, they managed that because their whiteness trumped their gender. Spinsters Abroad reveals the complexity of these women’s travels, and their lives and worlds. It reflects on their motivations for travel, as well as how Victorians conceived gender and race. The book is also jam-packed with anecdotes. Here is Edwards complaining about flies interrupting her watercolour painting of Egyptian ruins: ‘Nothing disagrees with them; nothing poisons them - not even olive-green’.

Travel writer Parker’s obsession with maps glows through every page. This comical, easy-to-read book celebrates maps by enquiring into their history, and the rich ideas in their makeup. It considers the political power of maps: the placement of borders matters, as does topography in wartime. It also considers the relationship between maps and sex, illustrated by English place names such as ‘Balls Hill’ and ‘Aunt Mary’s Bottom’. Map Addict offers many amusing cartographic tales, recounting the military origins of the Ordnance Survey. And how Phyllis Pearsall came up with the idea for the London A-Z one night in 1935, after getting lost and soaked on her way home from a party.