Finding the Best Travel Memoirs and Travelogues

I’m excited to announce the launch of our new webpage devoted to over 200 of the best travel memoirs and travelogues published between 1800 and 2021. While it’s fun to escape to remote destinations in novels, travel memoirs and travelogues chronicle the actual travels of real-life narrators. As such, they tend to interest avid travelers (both the actual and armchair varieties) as well as history buffs. What is special about our webpage is that the travel books are organized in 3 different ways to help you find the best travel memoirs and travelogues for your interests and needs.

1. A Handy List of the “Best of Best” Books

First, the webpage provides a handy list of all of the travel memoirs and travelogues that have been repeatedly identified as the “best” in the genre. You’ll find them grouped by century under the “Best of the Best” heading:

screenshot of webpage identifying the best books

If you’re looking for a special gift for someone, you should check out this section first to see if a popular favorite might resonate with the reader.

2. Destination-Specific Book Groupings and Labels

Second, the webpage makes it easy for you to find books about a specific destination. Unlike guidebooks, publishers of travel memoirs and travelogues are not always thinking about a book buyer’s interest in a particular geographical location when drafting evocative book titles or descriptions. Likewise, search engines repeatedly fail to identify books about a specific destination unless it is named in the book title. For example, online searches for “travel memoir Kenya” (without the quotes) did not pull up West with the Night by Beryl Markham.

Therefore, I have done my best to group books by travel destination (continent and/or country) if discernable from the publisher’s descriptions, the table of contents, or book reviews. Books involving travel over multiple continents, like “around the world” or ocean voyages, are also grouped together:

screenshot of webpage identifying books about multiple continents

Not only does the webpage group books together about the same destinations, but the webpage uses destination-specific labels when possible:

screenshot of webpage identifying the best books by continent

3. Travel Memoirs and Travelogues Published Through the Centuries

Third, for history buffs who love to travel, the webpage groups the books by century according to the date of the book’s first publication in reverse chronological order by year. Due to space limitations, however, I have only included breakouts for 19th, 20th, and 21st-century titles.

I actually got the idea to group travel books by century from a little pandemic project that I was working on this summer. Howie and I had to cancel our summer vacation plans to float down the Rhine, Danube, and Main rivers on a Viking River Cruise. Instead, my friend MaryKate McMaster, Ph.D., MLIS, CAGS, suggested that I read a 19th-century travelogue of letters written by a famous American author, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, that included a similar trip down the Rhine River.

I love reading, history, and travel, so my curiosity was definitely sparked. After hearing about her travelogue, I wondered who Catharine was as a person, her personal and professional background, and what she had to say about Europe (and America) in the 19th century. I decided to research and write a short biography of the author for MaryKate’s history website, which helps 21st-century people learn about and share the lives of the 1470 remarkable 19th-century women in A Woman of the Century (1893).

After finishing Catharine’s biography, I read through her travelogue with the goal of finding some illuminating book quotes about Catharine’s trip for MaryKate’s social media followers during the dog days of 2020. The resulting Facebook and Instagram posts are now part of a larger “Postcards from the Past” exhibit on the A Woman of the Century website.

portrait of Catharine Maria Sedgwick surrounded by pictures and postcards

One thing that I learned by doing the Postcards from the Past project is that we now have free access to digitized copies of most 19th-century travel books in the public domain (good for tablets). That means that you barely have to lift a finger to read about what the Roman Colosseum looked like almost 200 years ago. What is even more interesting, however, is that you can essentially hear the voice of a 19th-century traveler when you read a travelogue of their letters. To make them easier to find, I’ve added links on our webpage to free public domain versions of the books.

black and white image of a woman with a horse

If you’re interested in history and travel, too, check out the exhibit and follow the A Woman of the Century Facebook and Instagram accounts for future installments about Catharine’s trip. MaryKate is always looking for volunteers for her project including, but not limited to, current and former educators, historians, history majors, journalists, lawyers, publishers, and historical novelists. Please reach out to her at awomanofthecentury@gmail.com if you’d like to be a contributor.

If you’re interested in picking out the best non-fiction travel memoirs and travelogues that can inspire, inform, and entertain enthusiastic armchair travelers, please head on over to our new webpage. We plan to update the page frequently, so let us know if you have any book recommendations for us in the comments.

Happy Reading!

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