On the Road by Jack Kerouac: A classic of the beat generation, in this novel you’ll take a road trip with some artsy types back and forth across America.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: Check out this classic book to travel down the Mississippi.

Love in the Time of Choleraby Gabriel Garcia Marquez: This epic tale of patient love spans decades and provides an interesting peek into a city that is suggestively located in Colombia, where García Márquez spent his early years.

Like Water for Chocolateby Laura Esquivel: In this novel, readers can travel back to turn-of-the-century Mexico.

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles: In this well-known novel, a couple and their friend travel to North Africa, falling into trouble because they are unaware of the many dangers that surround them.

True at First Light by Ernest Hemingway: This fictionalized memoir has readers on a safari hunting for big game in East Africa with Hemingway and his wife.

The Beach by Alex Garland: Search for a utopian island off the coast of Thailand along with the main character in this intriguing and mysterious novel.

Siddhartha by Herman Hesse: This classic novel creates a fictionalized version of the life of the Buddha, taking readers on a spiritual and cultural journey.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy: Set in India, this award-winning novel is at once a mystery, a drama and a completely innovative work in the English language.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini: For those who know little of Afghanistan in the years prior to 9/11, this novel reveals a compelling history and a beautiful story of friendship.

Check out the full list of 100 book suggestions. What other titles would you add to the list?

On the Road by Jack Kerouac, 1957
When this semi-autobiographical work was published, the New York Timeshailed it as the “most important utterance” by anyone from the Beat Generation. Though he changed the names, the characters in the novel have real life counterparts. Salvatore “Sal” Paradise (Kerouac) from New York City meets Dean Moriarty (fellow beatnik Neal Cassady) on a cross-country journey fueled by drugs, sex and poetry The novel’s protagonists crisscross the United States and venture into Mexico on three separate trips that reveal much about the character of the epic hero, Moriarty, and the narrator.

Travels With Charley John Steinbeck, 1962
Near the end of his career, John Steinbeck set out to rediscover the country he had made a living writing about. With only his French poodle Charley as company, he embarked on a three-month journey across most of the continental United States. On his way, he meets the terse residents of Maine, falls in love with Montana and watches desegregation protests in New Orleans. Although Steinbeck certainly came to his own conclusions on his journey, he respects individual experience: He saw what he saw and knows that anyone else would have seen something different.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenanceby Robert M. Pirsig, 1974
A deep, philosophical book that masquerades as a simple story of a father-and-son motorcycle trip, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenanceis Pirsig’s first foray into philosophy writing. Their motorcycle trip from Minneapolis to San Francisco is also a trip through Eastern and Western philosophical traditions. His friend, a romantic, lives by the principle of Zen and relies on mechanics to fix his motorcycle. Pirisg, on the other hand, leaves nothing up to chance and knows the ins and outs of maintaining his bike.

Blue Highways by William Least Heat-Moon, 1982
After losing his wife and job as a professor, William Least Heat-Moon sets out on a soul-searching journey across the United States. He avoids large cities and interstates, choosing to travel only on “blue” highways—so called for their color in the Rand McNally Road Atlas. Along the way, he meets and records conversations with a born-again Christian hitchhiker, an Appalachian log cabin restorer, a Nevada prostitute and a Hopi Native American medical student.

See the entire list of 11 books in the full story. What titles would you add to this collection?

As a writer, Riel has a painter’s eye for the color and mood of life on the road. Here, for instance, is his description of an African sunset: “It began with streaks of light shooting down from thick clouds. As if the heavens had opened and hundreds of golden Masai spears were thrust down into the pale green dusk of the plain. Then a sunset exploded across the sky in streaks of mango and purple.”

As a result, veteran travelers will enjoy revisiting favorite places through his prose, while other passages can serve as a primer for your wish list of destinations. A freelance writer and consultant, Riel lets his own story unfold slowly through the book, which correspondingly ‘grows’ on you with a series of anecdotes and vignettes. If you love that sub-genre of armchair travel that involves stories of everyday adventurers circling the globe, then Two Laps Around the World is a keeper.

You can see the entire review here, and read more about my book, including some sample chapters, here.

In your latest book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, you retraced your 1973 Great Railway Bazaar journey. What changed between trips?

“Even a rickshaw wallah has a cell phone,” an Indian said to me. In 1973 I tried to make two phone calls in four and a half months—one, from Japan, succeeded, the other, from India, failed. Cheap watches and blue jeans were almost unknown in the wider world in 1973, but everyone has them now, in Americanized cultures. In 1973, China was undergoing the Cultural Revolution—the whole of China disrupted with mass hysteria—and now, of course, the Chinese manufacture most of our goods.

What’s stayed the same?

Undoubtedly village life in rural India—the pattern of harvest, or drought, debt, hunger, and the pieties of Hinduism. This in great contrast to parallel developments in information technology.

What surprised you?

The forgiveness in Vietnam. After we dropped over seven million tons of bombs, 13 million gallons of Agent Orange, and killed millions of their people, Americans are greeted politely, welcomed, urged to have some noodles. It’s a great lesson to anyone familiar with other wars and atrocities.

If you could retreat from the life you live now, what would you do—and where?

I have spent my whole life searching for the best place to live. I spend the summer on Cape Cod, where I spent my happiest childhood days. I spend the winter in happy Hawaii, bathed in marine sunlight. I make forays to the coast of Maine. These are sun-kissed days. Why retreat?

One quality I’ve always admired about your writing is your ability to tap into the personality of a country. What advice do you have about tapping into the essence of a place?

Places are like people, with personalities just as distinct, and a travel writer, of course, is someone who aims to create not just a photograph of a place but a portrait. My advice would be to walk and walk and walk, as soon as you arrive, when the place is still new to you and every perception is fresh–the mind has not yet begun to settle into prejudices or arguments.

Take down everything and remember that anything (an Internet cafe, a Golden Arches, a shop selling TVs) is interesting, and revealing of the society around it. And try, wherever possible, to remember that you’ve come all this way–even if it’s only to another state–to enter a foreign state of mind, a different sensibility. The joy of travel is not being reminded of your assumptions, or being confirmed in your beliefs, but in being led out of them, to something utterly other and, perhaps, unfathomable.

As much as traveling can create the sense that one is connected to the world, it can also create the feeling of being unsettled. What do you do to stay grounded and keep track of yourself in the process?

I tend to be too settled, so I seek out being unsettled–at the very least, that can test the ground I have. Everywhere man is settled, as Emerson says, and only insofar as he unsettled is there any hope for him. I hope I have solid ground within me–I do after all spend two months a year in a monastery, and eight months in a monastic life in Japan (a two-room apartment without cellphone or printer or World Wide Web or car or bicycle), and I have been living in these simple cells now for more than 16 years, so I feel that I am rooted, as much as I need to be, in what is real and stable.

But to stay too long in these places that I know as well as my heartbeat would be to risk complacency, blindness and inertia. So I try to force myself out of my grooves, feeling that groundedness is what I have, unsettledness what I need.

Is there a piece of travel wisdom someone told you that you took to heart? What was it?

The Dalai Lama always suggests that there’s no virtue in looking backward–the future is what we can change–and I suppose that is what has guided me in my traveling life. Most of the travelers I love and learned from are in some ways journeying back into the past, to explain the present; I, by making most of my central travels to places like Los Angeles Airport or the state of jet lag (or even to the monastery) have always pointed myself towards the future. My interest is not in what the world has been but what we can make of it, especially those 21st century citizens who are, to some degree, children of possibility (alarming or pretentious as that phrase might sound to some).

There is much more from Iyer in the full interview. Check it out.

How did you get started traveling?

By the time I was a teenager, we were taking a five- or six-week road trip every summer. Our family wasn’t one of those happy, totally in-sync Brady Bunches, but my parents did a remarkably good job of teaching my four siblings and me how to travel. We went all over the continent, from the Arctic Circle to the southern border of Yucatan…

I don’t know how my mother felt about it, but my father hated planning, and he liked getting lost. I picked up both those attitudes. He also refused to stop at any attraction kids like. There were no Treasure Caves, Mystery Spots or Reptile Farms for us, though he did break down once and take us to Wall Drug. Otherwise, it was Yellowstone, Mesa Verde, Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion, Yosemite, the Great Smokies, and every historic town, village, national monument and battlefield in between.

Every trip was a crash course in geography, history, culture, anthropology, religion, even local politics. In the car, kids were assigned to take turns reading aloud to the rest of the family about the places we were coming to. Wherever we stopped, we had to go out in teams – big kids watching little kids – and find things out. In Mexico, for example, my parents routinely sent us off into crowded public markets to shop for food, and we learned first-hand how kind people could be, even when they’d never met us before and couldn’t understand what we were saying.

What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?

The world. The whole, damned, beautiful, complicated, aggravating, incredible world. And the freedom that comes with it. I feel most alive when I am out there, on the road, meeting people, asking questions – not just for myself, but on behalf of readers. I’m a better traveler when I keep my audience in mind: They help me be braver, more curious, my best self – because I’m traveling for someone besides me.

The story is fun to read and has the added benefit of wonderful prose and interesting insights into Italian life. A sample of Doerr’s writing about Rome:

Every time I turn around here, I witness a miracle: wisteria pours up walls; slices of sky show through the high arches of a bell tower; water leaks nonstop from the spouts of a half-sunken marble boat in the Piazza di Spagna. A church floor looks soft as flesh; the skin from a ball of mozzarella cheese tastes rich enough to change my life.

And an observation about Italians:

“Italians,” our friend George Stoll says, “will stop anything for pleasure.” And the longer we’re here, the more we feel he’s right. Espresso, silk pajamas, a five-minute kiss; the sleekest, thinnest cell phone; extremely smooth leather. Truffles. Yachts. Four-hour dinners.

I’m always amazed when writers catch my eye with just the poetic power of their prose, and I love to discover random nuggets of cultural insight buried in manuscripts about other topics. On both of these counts, “Four Seasons in Rome” was a good read.

What major changes have you noticed in travel in general?

Electronic communication has radically transformed the travel experience. Fourteen years ago I took my first vagabonding trip, eight months around North America. That was before the ubiquity of email and cell phones; communication meant sending a postcard or jamming quarters into a pay phone, which meant I was usually out of touch with family for weeks at a time. Five years later, I was paying $15 an hour to send emails from a slow dial-up connection in Luang Prabang, and it seemed like a communication miracle. By contrast, just last month I was traveling with an AT&T BlackJack in East Africa, and I could use it to call home or check my messages in Juba, Sudan. This wasn’t just a one-way thing: The people in Juba may not have much in the way of indoor plumbing, but they love their cell phones, too; I lost track of how many little thatch-roofed kiosks I saw selling phone credits.

So that’s the main transformation I’ve seen. There have been other big developments in the past decade, including the boom in online travel-planning resources and the rise (and possible fall) of cheap airfares. But communication technology stands out. 

The new challenge here, of course, is learning how to wean yourself off this new technology as you travel. The charm of leaving home has always been that it transports you into new places and vivid moments; it makes you slow down and take note of your new surroundings. This can be hard to do if you’re always checking your inbox or texting your friends back home. If you can actually do that—if you can cut the electronic umbilical cord and embrace the moment on the road—travel can still be as amazing as ever.

The most striking change you saw?
Without question, Vietnam. From a country that was a muddy, flattened, bloody, beleaguered hell hole … to the country it is today: flourishing, forward-looking and, almost incredibly, forgiving.

How tempted were you to try to retrace your 1973 route through Afghanistan?
After I read about the numerous abductions and killings of Western wanderers like myself in Afghanistan, it was an easy decision to detour through Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan — some great train rides in those countries. And lately they have been in the news, so I think I was lucky in my timing.

Do you agree with The Guardian‘s description of you as “the Indiana Jones of American literature”?
Very nice. I’m flattered. But I have only been shot at three times: twice in Africa, once in the Philippines. I have been bitten by snakes, and once by bats in an outhouse one night in Central Africa. I think Indy can top those.

Any advice to travelers?
If you’re planning to write something about your travels, go alone, go overland, go cheap, and leave all electronics behind. To all travelers, I urge patience.