World Hum’s Top 30 Travel Books

May 2006 marked World Hum’s five-year anniversary. To celebrate, we asked some of our favorite writers and contributors to help us come up with the top literary travel books of all time—the kind of books that transcend travelogues, that inspire distant wanderings, that change lives. Each day we posted one travel book, complete with excerpts and commentary. Here’s the final list. To read our commentary on a particular book, click its title below:

No. 1: “Arabian Sands” by Wilfred Thesiger
No. 2: “The Road to Oxiana” by Robert Byron
No. 3: “The Great Railway Bazaar” by Paul Theroux
No. 4: “The Soccer War” by Ryszard Kapuściński
No. 5: “No Mercy” by Redmond O’Hanlon
No. 6: “North of South” by Shiva Naipaul
No. 7: “Golden Earth” by Norman Lewis
No. 8: “Video Night in Kathmandu” by Pico Iyer
No. 9: “The Innocents Abroad” by Mark Twain
No. 10: “In A Sunburned Country” by Bill Bryson
No. 11: “The Snow Leopard” by Peter Matthiessen
No. 12: “The Songlines” by Bruce Chatwin
No. 13: “Travels with Charley” by John Steinbeck
No. 14: “Riding to the Tigris” by Freya Stark
No. 15: “Europe, Europe” by Hans Magnus Enzensberger
No. 16: “City of Djinns” by William Dalrymple
No. 17: “A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush” by Eric Newby
No. 18: “All the Wrong Places” by James Fenton
No. 19: “Hunting Mister Heartbreak” by Jonathan Raban
No. 20: “River Town” by Peter Hessler
No. 21: “Road Fever” by Tim Cahill
No. 22: “When the Going was Good” by Evelyn Waugh
No. 23: “Behind the Wall” by Colin Thubron
No. 24: “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere” by Jan Morris
No. 25: “A Time of Gifts” by Patrick Leigh Fermor
No. 26: “Baghdad Without a Map” by Tony Horwitz
No. 27: “The Size of the World” by Jeff Greenwald
No. 28: “Facing the Congo” by Jeffrey Tayler
No. 29: “Venture to the Interior” by Laurens van der Post
No. 30: “A Turn in the South” by V.S. Naipaul

These books inspired a lot of readers—and a lot of debate. Writers like Pico Iyer has weighed in. Read everyone’s comments and the entire list, and be sure to let us know your favorite.