Books About Travel, Especially Travel in Asia

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6 books

To be a traveler means to be a foreigner—the first book on this list deals with the innate contradictions of this in a post-colonial world and before. The next four are travel books, in the old sense, accounts by reflective travelers in really interesting places. The last is an anthology of Westerners inventing and viewing a half-known East. These books have widened my horizons, and given me the pleasures of armchair travel.

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Airplane Mode

An Irreverent History of Travel

Shahnaz Habib, 2023

Habib (from Kerala, India, and now resident in New York) takes a far-ranging look at travel as both a Euro-American mode of consumerism and an ancient activity. Her interests range from a history of passports to her own troubles with visas to a family member who travels without venturing outside. A terrific and beautifully eccentric book.

The White Mosque

Sofia Samatar, 2023

This is a memoir by a wonderful writer—an American Mennonite with a father from Somalia—who travels to Uzbekistan, where German-speaking Mennonites in the late nineteenth century once decided to live, following a prediction that the Second Coming would happen there. Samatar joins a tour following the settlers, who established a village that lasted fifty years, and she explores a great range of characters, past and current. It’s a rare pocket of Central Asian history beyond the Silk Road, by a wise and sensible writer, and I couldn’t stop reading.

City of Djinns

A Year in Delhi

William Dalrymple, 2003

Dalrymple knows a huge amount about India (he’s famous for a trilogy about the East India company, and I love his film, Sufi Soul)—this is one of his earliest books detailing his enchantment with the city of Delhi. He’s a vivid writer, ready for anything, and the book is both personal and scholarly.

The Lady and the Monk

Four Seasons in Kyoto

Pico Iyer, 2011

I’ve followed Iyer’s books for decades and this is a favorite. It’s about his arrival in Japan as a young man interested in Zen Buddhism and traditional Kyoto and his surprising ties with a young married Japanese woman. Spoiler alert: Iyer still lives most of the time in Japan. He is always asking substantial questions, and he can write a scene like a novelist.

House in Bali

Colin McPhee, 1960

McPhee was a young composer, enchanted by a recording of Gamelan music, who spent a decade in Bali in the 1930s. He educates himself as fully as he can, exploring the culture (and Bali’s unique form of Hinduism) behind the music, dance, and temples he loves. It’s a really engaging book, a glimpse of Bali at a more sequestered time, with great photos, too.

The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds

Jonathan D. Spence, 1999

Spence was a great expert on China, and this is his compilation of foreigners’ responses to the country (often by people who never visited it), from Marco Polo to Jane Austen’s brother to Edgar Snow. It’s a long view of foreigners’ riffs on what they can see a little of and the some-time surprises of fact.