Best Travel Books: 29 Picks Recommended by CEOs

At fifty-eight, John Steinbeck drove across the United States with his French poodle to see again the country he had written about, eating with truckers, meeting bears at Yellowstone and noting the kindness of strangers. Tim Ferriss calls it hilarious, and Richard Branson says it opens eyes to small pleasures.

Investor Jim Rogers and his fiancee spent three years driving a yellow Mercedes through 116 countries, crossing war zones, deserts and jungles, while he read each economy and political system from what he saw on the ground. Codie Sanchez has it on her list of money books.

Gloria Steinem traces a life on the move to childhood autumns spent driving across the country with her father, then to decades traveling as a journalist, organizer and speaker, with taxi drivers and feminist stewardesses among her characters. Emma Watson has it on her book club list.

Bruce Chatwin spent six months in Patagonia from late 1974, framing the trip as a hunt for a scrap of giant sloth skin and gathering stories of Welsh settlers, outlaws and anarchists in 97 short sections. Richard Branson has it on his list of books to read in a lifetime.

Kevin Kelly spent almost five decades travelling to the ends of roads across Asia, from Turkey to Japan and Siberia to Indonesia, photographing costume, architecture, festivals and daily life, and gathered 9,000 captioned images in three oversize volumes. Tyler Cowen calls the set expensive, mostly photos and worth it.

Ernest Hemingway recorded a month of big game hunting in Tanganyika in late 1933 with his wife and a competitive friend, testing whether a true account could match a novel and mixing the hunt with talk of Tolstoy. Josh Waitzkin calls it one of Hemingway’s most underrated books.

Jim Rogers, the investor who co-founded the Quantum Fund, rode a motorcycle through fifty-two countries over twenty-two months and used what he saw along the way to judge where national economies and foreign markets were heading. Marvin Liao has it on the reading list he shared in an interview.

Ted Simon spent four years of the 1970s riding a Triumph motorcycle around the world, through breakdowns, a spell in prison, wars and revolutions, meeting people who saw him as a spy or even a god. Joan Boixados points out that he rode alone.

Mark Vanhoenacker, a British Airways 747 pilot, wants air travel seen as a feat again rather than a routine of security lines and delays, and uses history, geography, weather and physics to show what happens between departure and arrival. Jason Fried finds it poetic about the wonder of flying.

Travel writer Rolf Potts argues for taking six weeks to two years off to travel independently overseas, and explains how to pay for it, where to go, how to work on the way and how to readjust at home. Joel Gascoigne likes its case for staying weeks in one place.

Jimmy Cornell plans long ocean passages step by step, weighing routes across the Indian, Pacific and Atlantic by season, wind, currents, ice and piracy, along with repairs, provisioning, health and safety. Antonio Eram keeps it as a practical guide for the day he sails around the world.

Tim Ferriss writes mainly about lifestyle design and cutting work hours, and travel enters through mini-retirements, overseas virtual assistants and a plan to run a business from anywhere. Jack Canfield calls it an overdue manifesto for a mobile way of living and working.

Robert M. Pirsig’s fictionalized account of a 17-day motorcycle trip with his son, from Minnesota to Northern California, is mainly a philosophical inquiry into what Quality means, delivered in talks between stretches of road. Brad Feld thinks every entrepreneur or aspiring one should read it.

Jon Krakauer joined a guided Everest expedition for Outside magazine in 1996 and survived the storm that killed eight climbers, and the book is mainly about that disaster and how competition between guiding companies weakened safety. Holger Seim names it as an adventure story he loves.

Alfred Lansing’s account of Shackleton’s 1914 Antarctic expedition is mainly a survival story: a ship crushed by pack ice, 28 men living on drifting floes, and an open boat voyage. Morgan Housel sees it as the clearest case of how hard people can be pushed under high stakes.

Travel writer Eric Weiner visits Athens, Hangzhou, Florence, Vienna and Silicon Valley to ask why genius flowered in particular places, so the book is mainly about creativity, told through travel. Walter Isaacson describes it as history and wisdom dressed up as a lively travelogue.

Jonathan Swift’s satire, written as a parody of travellers’ tales, follows a ship’s surgeon on four voyages, starting with a shipwreck that leaves him a prisoner of the tiny, quarrelsome people of Lilliput. Neil deGrasse Tyson counts it among the books every intelligent person should read.

Andrea Wulf’s biography of the Prussian naturalist is mainly about his idea of nature as one connected system, but it follows his travels across Europe and Latin America, where he climbed Chimborazo, and his visit to Thomas Jefferson. Neil deGrasse Tyson values reading about the cultural side of scientists.

Stefan Zweig’s biography of the Portuguese navigator tells the first voyage around the globe like an adventure novel, from winning a fleet from the Spanish king to mutiny, cold, hunger and faulty charts. Ryan Holiday recommends it to anyone curious about what makes someone an explorer.

Barry Lopez’s essays mix travel, argument and memory, taking him to Hokkaido, the Galapagos and Bonaire and around the world on air freight flights carrying anything from penguins to pianos. Tim Ferriss counts it among his favorite reads of 2021.

The philosopher Frederic Gros looks at pilgrimages, strolls, protest marches and rambles in nature, and at the thinkers for whom walking was central, from Rousseau and Nietzsche to Thoreau and Kant. Austin Kleon liked it while noting that nearly all of its thinkers are men.

Jules Verne’s novel opens in London in 1872, where a rich and exacting gentleman bets half his fortune at the Reform Club that a new Indian railway allows a circuit of the globe in 80 days, and leaves with his valet. Cristina Riesen calls it probably her first favourite book.

Jon Krakauer reconstructs the life of a young man from a comfortable family who gave away his savings, hitchhiked to Alaska in 1992 and walked alone into the wild, and uses it to examine the pull of wilderness on Americans. Holger Seim names it as an adventure story he loves.

Terri Morrison and Wayne A. Conaway profile more than sixty countries for people doing business abroad, summarizing each one’s cultural outlook, business customs, protocol and holidays, with quizzes; it is a guide to etiquette rather than to travel itself. Tudor Teodorescu recommends it.

Biologist Thor Heyerdahl and five companions set out from Peru in 1947 on a balsa-log raft to show that ancient Peruvians could have reached Polynesia, spending about three months among storms, whales and sharks. Ovidiu Drugan recommends it alongside other expedition stories.

Jack Kerouac’s novel, drawn from his own trips, follows Sal Paradise, who meets the free-spirited Dean Moriarty after his divorce and takes to the road on a run of cross-country trips in the late 1940s. Bogdan Iordache calls it his favourite and says it helped him simplify his life.

Thor Heyerdahl recounts building a papyrus boat copied from pharaonic wall paintings and sailing it from North Africa toward South America, a first attempt ended by a storm and a second made by seven men in Ra II. Ovidiu Drugan recommends it alongside other expedition stories.

Former New York Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton lists the dishes, ingredients and restaurants she rates best worldwide, from saffron buns in Stockholm to Senegalese food, with notes on where to try each. Nassim Nicholas Taleb praises her as a critic who visits countries and argues with locals.

Mortician Caitlin Doughty travels from rural Indonesia to La Paz and Tokyo to watch how other cultures look after the dead, and argues that the American funeral industry feeds a fear of death. Dylan Thuras calls it a very funny travelogue as well as a moving book about death.