The Best Books to Read While Traveling?

Traveling in itself is an excitement and reading your next favorite book while traveling will surely add to the experience!

Similarly, if we talk about reading a book, which is purely therapeutic but reading with pretty sceneries around and beautiful landscapes out of the window will give you an escape from reality.

Thus, traveling + reading = a perfect combo!

P.S. It’s free, it’s easy and you can enjoy it in innumerable places.

For the wanderers and nerds at FAYVO, we bring the happy news. Sometimes, good news doesn’t come as an announcement, but as a list. So, today is the day when you’d discover the best books to read while traveling.

No matter the type of travel, be it a family trip, an adventure tour, a camping visit, or a solo vacation, you’ve got plenty of time on hand sitting on an airplane or cruising on the road.

Books make everything feel better. And sometimes, reading a really good travel book can be as transformative as the journey itself.

So, are you ready for a reading list that will change your travel ethics forever?

Here we go with the best of the best travel books, according to experienced globetrotters.

Note: Prepare yourself beforehand for a serious case of wanderlust.

#1 On the Road by Jack Kerouac:

This influential novel should be compulsory reading for all nomads, wanderers, backpackers and travel lovers. It is for all those who wish to live differently and want to live off the grid. In ‘On The Road’ you’d find 1950’s underground America as Kerouac confusingly goes backwards forwards across the states in search of ecstasy, Jazz, drugs, peace, and the meaning of life. The book will truly change you perspective of life and will become one of your favorite books to read while travelling!

#2 The Shooting Star by Shivya Nath:

For the travel craving buddies, an inspiration is all they need. So, here we have Shivya Nath who quit her corporate job at age twenty-three to travel the world. She was so confident of her decision that she gave up on everything including her home and the need for a permanent address. Selling most of her possessions, she embarks herself on a nomadic journey.

You’d love to read about her experiences that has taken her everywhere from remote Himalayan villages to the dense Amazon rainforests of Ecuador. On her way, she meets new people and lived with a native Mayan community in Guatemala. She became powerful to hike alone in the Ecuadorian Andes, got robbed in Costa Rica, swam across the border from Costa Rica to Panama, slept under the sky showing meteor shower, and learnt to conquer her deepest fears.

This is the true dream of every nomad and wanderer. With its enriched descriptions, cinematic landscapes, heart-rending encounters and inspiring adventures, The Shooting Star is a travel book that maps not just the world but the human spirit.

#3 The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende:

For those who are entering in the world of magical realism, this book is a great start. It takes you on the path to reading all kinds of South American literature, including something out of your favorite genre. The story of The House of the Spirits will keep you hooked and those landscapes around you will compliment it. Packed with everything from an otherworldly psychic to a beauty with green hair, the novel will keep you hypnotized on your journey.

#4 The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini:

The Kite Runner is a world-famous book and its story goes around two inseparable boys, Amir and Hassan. These two friends grow up together in Kabul, Afghanistan. The book has beautifully covered a period of change and destruction while focusing on the sincere relation of friendship.

If you have the book on your bookshelf, you’d feel lucky to read it on your tour. With over seven million copies sold in the U.S., the novel is translated into 42 languages which makes it worthy of keeping in your luggage to read while on vacation

#5 The Motorcyle Diaries by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara:

The book is about the time when Che left his family and hometown to ride a motorcycle across South America on a greatly inspirational trip with his friend Alberto Grenado. The sights that these two bikers come across, that of injustices done to exploited mine workers and ostracized lepers among others, is an important part of Che’s later life as he got moulded into the Marxist ideology. Great travelling experiences along with equally inspirational guidelines for life that comes along with travelling, that’s what this book has to offer you.

#6 Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer:

Every time a person talks about wanderlust and travel, it’s never late to introduce them ‘Into the Wild.’ Alexander Supertramp is a name that has become everyone’s favorite, even 20 years after his death. The writer Jon Krakauer starts us at the bus and takes the delightful journey from there.

We dive into McCandless’s life as he abandons his school, identity, family and spends the next two years wandering around his country. The issue remains the same with every book adaptation for a film, read the book before watching the movie as Krakauer refuses to pull punches on perhaps one of the most interesting nomads in literature.

#7 How to Be a Family by Dan Kois:

Ever dreamed about uprooting your family for one life-changing, globe-trotting year? Kois did exactly that, and lived to tell the tale. Disillusioned with the screen-heavy grind of parenting two pre-teen girls in Washington D.C., Kois and his wife spirited their daughters away to seek new kinds of togetherness in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and small-town Kansas. The product of their travels is this heartwarming memoir, wherein Kois meditates on parenting, community, and the parts of who we are that follow us, no matter how far we go.

#8 Stranger on a Train, by Jenny Diski:

“If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails,” Colson Whitehead wrote in The Underground Railroad. Diski puts this principle to the test in Stranger on a Train, a travelogue meets memoir about her experience of seeing the United States by AmTrak. In these meandering pages, Diski unpacks the decline of American railways, recounts fateful meetings with fellow travelers, and excavates the lingering wounds of her past, proving that wherever we go, there we are.

#9 Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

Half of a Yellow Sun is a spellbinding novel with all the hallmark features of what I define as a good book – wonderful, believable characters, delicious turns of phrase, a foreign landscape brought to life and sophisticated undertones of a factual geopolitical or social complexity.

Set within the Nigerian civil war of the late sixties, this novel introduced me to a whole horrific incident in history I knew nothing about. Brilliantly bringing into view the unfolding political events through the lens of the personal, the narrative of this novel is fictional, but the events on which it is based are certainly real. If a novel doesn’t make you ask questions, then it’s not worth reading and Half of a Yellow Sun, instantly sent me running to learn more from Wikipedia. Sadly they’ve made a movie out of this novel, which is awfully done, so please don’t watch it or let it spoil your perception. The reading of Half of a Yellow Sun is a brilliant journey – you don’t need anything else.

The Best Books to Read While Traveling