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This was a hard list to make because I've read a slew of brilliant books about people who travel. How do I choose the best ones? Should I pick books about famous explorers? Should I focus on traditional road trip stories where the characters travel by car? What about science fiction and fantasy? Do those count? How about outdoor survival stories? I've read a ton of those.

Maybe I should pick books that feature different modes of transportation? Walk, crawl, climb, horse, train, boat, car, spaceship?

Since I couldn't decide, I picked everything. Here are 10 awesome books where people travel somehow somewhere.

🛥  BEST TRAVEL BOOKS  ✈

Nonfiction

THE INDIFFERENT STARS ABOVE: THE HARROWING SAGA OF A DONNER PARTY BRIDE BY DANIEL JAMES BROWN

Adult Biography

In April of 1846, twenty-one-year-old Sarah Graves, intent on a better future, set out west from Illinois with her new husband, her parents, and eight siblings. Seven months later, after joining a party of emigrants led by George Donner, they reached the Sierra Nevada Mountains as the first heavy snows of the season closed the pass ahead of them. In early December, starving and desperate, Sarah and fourteen others set out for California on snowshoes and, over the next thirty-two days, endured almost unfathomable hardships and horrors.

In this gripping narrative, Daniel James Brown sheds new light on one of the most infamous events in American history. Following every painful footstep of Sarah's journey with the Donner Party, Brown produces a tale both spellbinding and richly informative.

Why I love it: You'll be grateful that you're sitting in a warm room while you read this book. It's the type of story you can't believe is true. It's too scary. Who wants to starve to death in the freezing wilderness with 80+ random strangers? Nobody! There are a lot of books about the Donners, but I recommend this one because the author doesn't just retell the familiar story that most Americans already know. He puts the story in historical and scientific context to help the reader understand how and why everything went wrong for the Donner Party.

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Wild: From Lost To Found On The Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

Adult Memoir

At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and she would do it alone.

Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.

Why I love it: The author writes about her life honestly. She doesn’t sugarcoat anything or pretend to be perfect. It is hard for the reader to feel sympathy for her at times, but I think it took a lot of bravery to tell this story.

I’m very interested in backpacking, so I’m probably preprogramed to enjoy these kinds of books, but there is a lot of content in this story that will appeal to non-backpackers. The majority of the plot focuses on the Pacific Crest Trail, but Cheryl doesn’t spend all of her time hiking. She occasionally gets off the trail and meets interesting people. There are also flashbacks to her childhood and her mother’s death from cancer. This is a memoir that has stuck in my brain for years. (Mostly because it made me desperate to hike the Pacific Crest Trail.)

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ENDURANCE: SHACKLETON’S INCREDIBLE VOYAGE BY ALFRED LANSING

Adult Biography

In August 1914, polar explorer Ernest Shackleton boarded the Endurance and became locked in an island of ice. Thus began the legendary ordeal of Shackleton and his crew of twenty-seven men. When their ship was finally crushed between two ice floes, they attempted a near-impossible journey over 850 miles of the South Atlantic's heaviest seas to the closest outpost of civilization.

In Endurance, the definitive account of Ernest Shackleton's fateful trip, Alfred Lansing brilliantly narrates the harrowing and miraculous voyage that has defined heroism for the modern age.

 

Why I love it: If you enjoy real-life snow survival stories, you need to read this one. It’s a classic, and it’s stunning. Shackleton and his crew were complete badasses. Everything went wrong on their mission, and they mostly just shrugged and rolled with it. I would have panicked and died. This book was first published in 1959, and the author conducted extensive interviews with the surviving members of Shackleton's crew. He also had access to the journals kept by the explorers. It’s interesting to read a detailed firsthand account of events that happened so long ago. Even though I knew Shackleton’s story before I started the book, I was on the edge of my seat. There’s so much tension!

 

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THE LOST CITY OF Z: A TALE OF DEADLY OBSESSION IN THE AMAZON BY DAVID GRANN

Adult Biography

What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z?

In 1925, Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization, hoping to make one of the most important discoveries in history. For centuries Europeans believed the world's largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands had died looking for it, leaving many scientists convinced that the Amazon was truly inimical to humans. But Fawcett, whose daring expeditions inspired Conan Doyle's The Lost World, had spent years building his scientific case. Captivating the imagination of millions round the globe, Fawcett embarked with his 21-year-old son, determined to prove that this ancient civilization (which he dubbed Z) existed. Then his expedition vanished. Fawcett's fate, and the tantalizing clues he left behind about Z, became an obsession for hundreds who followed him into the uncharted wilderness.

Why I love it: Mostly, this book taught me to stay out of the Amazon. There are too many bugs! Everything is gross and deadly. I'm too fluffy for that nonsense. Percy Fawcett was an intense dude with controversial ideas about ancient Amazon civilizations. Like many old-time explorers, he was exceedingly selfish. He just left his wife and kids and went gallivanting around the wilderness for years at a time without the ability to contact them. I wouldn't let my husband get away with that. Percy's disappearance is a compelling mystery that kept me flying through the pages. I appreciate the end of the book where the author talks about how our understanding of the Amazon has changed. When Percy Fawcett was exploring, many people thought his ideas about lost Amazon cities were ridiculous. Nowadays, we're not so sure. Maybe Percy was on to something . . . . (I'd search for El Dorado myself, but, you know, there's all that gross and deadly stuff. Maybe it's best to let the city be lost.)

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Touching The Void: The True Story Of One Man's Miraculous Survival by Joe Simpson

Adult Survival Memoir

The heart-stopping account of Joe Simpson's terrifying adventure in the Peruvian Andes. He and his climbing partner, Simon, reached the summit of the remote Siula Grande in June 1985. A few days later, Simon staggered into Base Camp, exhausted and frost-bitten, with news that that Joe was dead.

What happened to Joe, and how the pair dealt with the psychological traumas that resulted when Simon was forced into the appalling decision to cut the rope, makes not only an epic tale of survival but a compelling testament of friendship.

Why I love it: “Miraculous survival” is right. Dang, dude. There’s no way I could have done what Joe Simpson did.

This book has fewer than 200 pages, but it’s a powerful story about the will to live. It’s about how a person finds the strength inside himself to do something that seems impossible. The writing is melodramatic at times, but the plot is harrowing. I had no idea how Joe was going to survive. Life kept getting worse for him, and he kept coming up with new ways to deal with it. If Joe can fall off a cliff and spend three days dragging himself back to base camp, I can get out of bed and go to work in the morning.

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Fiction

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien

Young Adult Fantasy

Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely traveling any farther than his pantry or cellar. But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves arrive on his doorstep one day to whisk him away on an adventure. They have launched a plot to raid the treasure hoard guarded by Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon.

Bilbo reluctantly joins their quest, unaware that on his journey to the Lonely Mountain he will encounter both a magic ring and a frightening creature known as Gollum.

Why I love it: This might be a controversial opinion, but when someone says, "Travel book," The Hobbit is the first one that pops into my head. I read this book over, and over, and over as a kid. I adored Bilbo and his comfy lifestyle. I liked how he attempted to have a grand adventure, even though he's not really the adventurous type. As an anxious, introverted child, I could relate.

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LIFE OF PI BY YANN MARTEL

Adult Literary Fiction

When sixteen-year-old Pi Patel finds himself stranded in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with only a menacing 450-pound Bengal tiger for company, he quickly realizes that the only way to survive is to make sure the tiger is more afraid of him than he is of it. Finding strength within himself, he draws upon all of his knowledge and cunning, battling for food and shelter, overcoming storms and disasters, and, in the end, making a peace of sorts with both tiger and ocean.

Why I love it: That ending. You need to read this book just for the ending. It will leave you completely shocked. Also, tigers!

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PROJECT HAIL MARY BY ANDY WEIR

Adult Science Fiction

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and the earth itself will perish.

Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.

Or does he?

Why I love it: Read this book if you like plot twists because there are a lot of them. It's actually an impossible book to review because there are so many twists. Everything I want to say is a spoiler! The characters handle each twist with humor and optimism. It's kind of inspirational. These people are very, very determined to live. Every time they start to feel hopeless, they refocus and try a different way of solving their problems. Nothing is easy in space!

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Paper Towns by John Green

Young Adult Contemporary Fiction

Quentin Jacobsen has spent a lifetime loving the magnificently adventurous Margo Roth Spiegelman from afar. So when she cracks open a window and climbs into his life—dressed like a ninja and summoning him for an ingenious campaign of revenge—he follows. After their all-nighter ends, and a new day breaks, Q arrives at school to discover that Margo, always an enigma, has now become a mystery. But Q soon learns that there are clues—and they're for him. Urged down a disconnected path, the closer he gets, the less Q sees the girl he thought he knew.

Why I love it: Like many young bookworms, I went through a John Green phase in my late teens and early 20s. I was obsessed with everything he created, including this book. I loved the humor, the quirkiness, the mystery, and the fast-paced road trip. It also raises some thought-provoking questions. How well can you ever know a person? Are you imagining other people complexly, or are you trying to force them into a box that you created?

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Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech

Middle Grade Contemporary Fiction

Thirteen-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle, proud of her country roots and the "Indian-ness in her blood," travels from Ohio to Idaho with her eccentric grandparents. Along the way, she tells them the story of Phoebe Winterbottom, who received mysterious messages, who met a "potential lunatic," and whose mother disappeared.

As Sal entertains her grandparents with Phoebe's outrageous story, her own story begins to unfold—the story of a thirteen-year-old girl whose only wish is to be reunited with her missing mother.

Why I love it: We need to include one traditional road trip book on the list, and I chose this one because it's a childhood favorite. Sal and her grandparents are driving across the US to find Sal's mother, who left the family for reasons Sal doesn't completely understand. To pass the time, Sal tells stories about her eccentric friend, Phoebe Winterbottom. The intertwining stories are funny, sweet, complex, and completely captivating. I thoroughly enjoyed this book when I read it in middle school and when I reread it in graduate school.

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What's your favorite travel book?