Books of the year: Travel

Published on Friday 4 December 2009 18:35

LIFE is too short, and the world so vast, that even a Euromillions lottery win would leave you unable to reach its myriad corners in a lifetime. Readers may venture forth by proxy. This year's travel books (a better than usual crop), provide escape and, sometimes, inscape.

The outstanding read of the year is William Dalrymple's Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India (Bloomsbury, 20). Entirely absorbing and beautifully lucid, it follows the paths of nine modern pilgrims into the meaning of their quests, evoking the truth of present day India in its spiritual dimension. Dalrymple is cleverly unobtrusive yet enquiring, always absorbed and yet detached. The sub-continent rises, bemusing, bedazzling, a sensory tapestry crafted brilliantly by a writer who touches its texture as only Mark Tully has managed before him.

For clinical thoroughness, Peter Ackroyd's fact-packed Venice (Chatto & Windus, 25) brings this gorgeous Adriatic confection into focus as precious few predecessors have, but, though beautifully written, by the end its pulse barely races, its heart feels cold, and what we have is a masterful work of archaeology, not of love.

Jan Morris, whose earlier classic, Venice, once set the standard, charms us again with an ideal bedside companion, Contact (Faber, 14.99), recalling memorable encounters over a lifetime spent trotting the globe. It is wistful and witty, a box of small gems.

And yet another quick-fix read, yielding fine writing spiced with wit, adventure and wonder, is Michael Kerr's Last Call for the Dining Car (Aurum, 18.99), a compilation bringing to life rattling good railway rides and tall tales (all allegedly true) from the pens of such as Michael Palin, Tim Parks, Boris Johnson and PJ Kavanagh.

Not to be missed are Sara Wheeler's The Magnetic North (Jonathan Cape, 20), and William Blacker's rare glimpse of the antique ways of Romania in Along the Enchanted Way (John Murray, 20); both mingle history and climate, reflecting unfussily, yet poetically at times, on the costs of change and the value of holding to tradition, and, in Wheeler's case, bringing an open-eyed sense of salutary wisdom and timely protest to her view of the Arctic Ocean and its surrounds.

The pick of the picture books includes Paradise of Exiles (Frances Lincoln, 35) by Katie Campbell, Earthbound (Rough Guides, 20), and The Road Less Travelled (Dorling Kindersley, 25). Campbell takes us exploring Florence by way of its Anglo-American gardens, Earthbound whisks us around the planet in almost 300 stunning pictures, while The Road Less Travelled guides our path off the usual tourist trail with a sequence of sumptuous pictures, well informed text and a surfeit of practical information on how to get there and where to stay. If your ambitions stretch to improving your travel photography, pick up The Lonely Planet's Guide to Travel Photography (Lonely Planet, 14.99), a banquet for the eye that takes the reader around the world, and gives expert tips on how to make your snaps unforgettable.

Travelling by foot and closer to home, take off with the veteran Hunter Davies on A Walk Along the Wall (Frances Lincoln, 9.99). His personal testament and guide to Hadrian's Wall and its starkly beautiful environs makes you want to leap from your armchair, as does its companion piece, A Walk Around the Lakes. The Romans live on in The Empire Stops Here (Cape, 25) by Philip Parker, which covers their conquest from Hadrian's Wall to Egypt and Syria, and shrinks a thousand miles and two millennia into a riveting 500 pages. I couldn't stop reading.

A different conquest is beautifully charted in John Man's Xanadu (Bantam Press, 20), an in-the-footsteps-of-Marco-Polo journey through Europe to China which really makes you feel you are wearing Polo's threadbare, sweat-stained slippers as you go.

Other recommended reads are Blue Skies & Black Olives (Hodder & Stoughton, 18.99) by John and Christopher Humphrys, a slice of comi-tragic folly with Brits-abroad, located in sun-soaked, idyllic Greece; and Ian Thomson's The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica, a marvellous, revelatory trawl along the back roads and into the homes, kitchens and hearts of Jamaican all-sorts, leaving you steeped in the island's culture and conundrums. The classic reissue of the year is Norman Douglas's Old Calabria (IB Taurus, 12.99), a paradise found of a book, a time-capsule too, bringing rustic, ancient Italy to our 21st-century doorstep.