100 Best Wanderlust Books of All Time

Nancy GoldstoneI found the narrative honest and riveting. The author used the journey through the hiking trail to work out her problems. (Source)

Daniel EkIt was fascinating to talk to [the author] about how this book came to be such a hit—he never backed down, and he allowed people to read it for free in order to then boost sales—much like how Spotify’s freemium model was perceived in the early days. (Source)

Eric RipertSpeaks of everyone having an ultimate goal in life, but most of us are too afraid to pursue it. The encouragement to fulfill your dreams is very inspirational! (Source)

Brené BrownThere's a great quote in [this book]: When you're on the right path the universe conspires to help you! (Source)

Holger SeimWhen it comes to adventure stories, Into the Wild. (Source)

Chelsea FrankI read everything with an open mind, often challenging myself by choosing books with an odd perspective or religious/spiritual views. These books do not reflect my personal feelings but are books that helped shape my perspective on life, love, and happiness. (Source)

Gabriel CoarnaI started reading "Eat, Pray, Love" as soon as I finished watching Elizabeth Gilbert give this talk. (Source)

Eric Weinstein[Eric Weinstein recommended this book on Twitter.] (Source)

Tim DraperWith this kind of time management and focus on the important things in life, people should be able to get 15 times as much done in a normal work week. (Source)

Marvin LiaoSUCH a hard question to answer because there are so MANY favorite books of mine. For Business, i'd say either 80/20 Principle (Koch) or 4 Hour Work Week (Ferriss) for the principles it teaches on how to optimize work & life. (Source)

Richard BransonI wanted to include an older book that has been on my bookshelves for decades, and is a less obvious example of reading to lead. John Steinbeck took a road trip with his dog Charley for company across the length and breadth of the US, and recorded what he saw, who he met and what he learned. With his inimitable charm, it opens your eyes to the small pleasures of life, and the great wonders of... (Source)

Bogdan IordacheMy favourite book is "On the road" by Jack Kerouac. Apart from being probably one of the best well written books in the world, I appreciate Kerouac's philosophy to dedicate himself entirely to what was important to him, something that I have applied in my life as much as possible. I've simplified my life in many ways, and stay focused on what I think it's really important. For Jack it was the... (Source)

Joel GascoigneTravel is something we've found to crave and seek out within the team, and the fact we're set up as a distributed team gives us all a lot of freedom to explore the world. Vagabonding is one of the best books out there to think about travel in a whole new way. Rather than going to places for just a few days and cramming in seeing all the sights, it suggests that if we can we should spend weeks or... (Source)

Brad FeldI think every entrepreneur or aspiring entrepreneur should read the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was written in the 1970s by a guy named Robert Pirsig. It was his first book, it's kind of a hippie philosophy treatised journey. The word that sort of came out of it was Chautauqua, he's like having a conversation with his son as they do a motorcycle trip across the country, and... (Source)

Drew Houston[There are] engineers who [dismiss] all these things that can’t be fit into an algorithm, or that don’t have some kind of mathematical rigor underpinning them, [this book] is about that question. (Source)

Tyler CowenHonorable mentions: Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Joy of Sex, all given to me by my mother. I believe they helped inculcate some of the 1960s-70s ethos of individual freedom into my thinking. (Source)

Richard BransonToday is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. (Source)

Katie Phang@AshaRangappa_ @yashar It’s an amazing book! (Source)

Holger Seimeval(ez_write_tag([[250,250],'theceolibrary_com-large-mobile-banner-2','ezslot_6',164,'0','1'])); When it comes to adventure stories, I love Into Thin Air. (Source)

Richard BransonToday is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. (Source)

Josh WaitzkinOne of the most beautiful novels I found. Just a ecstatically beautiful book. (Source)

Irina MarinescuI am always eager to learn how people think and form friendships, how they deal with life's challenges and still remain human. This book delivers that and even more! Shantaram takes you on an incredible journey and you return a changed person. (Source)

Cat BartonThis is a great book to read on the beach, and it’s much better than the film. It’s an interesting pop-culture musing on the idea of backpackers travelling around in search of unspoilt beaches. It deals with themes many people are likely to think about when travelling around the region. For example, is it possible to find an unspoilt beach? And what do backpackers do to the societies we visit?... (Source)

Thom and Beth AtkinsonShe says that ‘to trace even an imaginary route is to trace the spirit or thought of what passed there before’. (Source)

Priscilla PilonI just voted for Outlander (Series) #VOTEOutlander! https://t.co/MM628DhkE9 Because @Writer_DG is a flipping genius. I dare you to read the first book and not fall in love with the series. Be forewarned, you’ll lose sleep because you...can’t...stop...reading! (Source)

Richard BransonToday is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. (Source)

Cressida CowellThe Hobbit is such a richly imagined fantasy that, especially as a child, you can live in it. It is so completely immersive. (Source)

Lev GrossmanFirst up, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, by JRR Tolkien. But you knew I was going to say that. This one book, which was published in 1937, defined so many variables for the fantasy tradition that are still in place today. Tolkien’s extraordinary achievement was to recover the epic landscapes of Anglo-Saxon myth, bring them back to life, and then to take us through them on foot, so we could... (Source)

Laura Dassow WallsThe book that we love as Walden began in the journal entries that he wrote starting with his first day at the pond. (Source)

Roman KrznaricIn 1845 the American naturalist went out to live in the woods of Western Massachusetts. Thoreau was one of the great masters of the art of simple living. (Source)

John KaagThere’s this idea that philosophy can blend into memoir and that, ideally, philosophy, at its best, is to help us through the business of living with people, within communities. This is a point that Thoreau’s Walden gave to me, as a writer, and why I consider it so valuable for today. (Source)

Emily ThomasIt’s a thoughtful account of de Botton’s engagement with artists about travel. He focuses on painters and novelists with a view to asking what light they can shed on why we travel, and picking up titbits from them for our own travels. One of my favourite examples he discusses is Edward Hopper. (Source)

Mohsin HamidWe think of Hemingway as an American writer, but much of his writing is set outside of the United States, just as much of his life was set outside of the United States. (Source)

Janine di GiovanniThe fact that Hemingway writes it as an old, rather bitter man trapped in his Idaho home with a bullying wife while he dreams of his youth in Paris with his first wife and child is so touching to me. (Source)

Wai Chee DimockThis is a memoir by Hemingway about his time in Paris, which includes sketches of people like F Scott Fitzgerald. (Source)

Robert MacfarlaneAbbey is full of passion, fury and contempt – a fiery fighter to shake up the sometimes over-tranquil atmosphere of nature writing. (Source)

Hari KunzruHe has a deep love for this place and he’s amusing to read because he’s such a strong personality. His writing is extraordinary. (Source)

George RavelingOne that I read twice. (Source)

Ed StaffordAn honour to be asked to do an impromptu little talk tonight after #christophermcdougall. Great to see the big man in the flesh in the UK. #BornToRun was a book that definitely changed the path of my life. #legend @vivobarefoot #barefootrunning https://t.co/3QgVKZ0OQ4 (Source)

Turia PittIf [people are] interested in running, I give them [this book]. (Source)

Fabrice GrindaI have lots of books to recommend, but they are not related to my career path. The only one that is remotely related is Peter Thiel’s Zero to One. That said here are books I would recommend. (Source)

Wai Chee DimockMany people don’t appreciate what a big commitment writing this novel was for Hemingway. He was used to writing short stories. It meant he had to spend a lot of time on one book that could have been spent more profitably writing short stories. Like many of Hemingway’s later novels, it is stitched together from shorter pieces – in this case, what he’d already written about Pamplona. (Source)

Evan Spiegel[Evan Spiegel said this was his favorite book.] (Source)

Iulia GhitaI like Milan Kundera’s books with his philosophical digressions that sometimes remind me of my own dilemmas, with The Unbearable Lightness of Being as my favourite. I find Kundera’s stories awfully sad, but yet so real, so close to human nature. I admit, I’m not a fan of happy endings, I prefer thought provoking endings. (Source)

Carlos EireThe title, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, comes from the main character’s obsession with the fact that all we have is the now, nothing else except the ever-moving now. (Source)

Adam SavageAtlas Obscura. Go to the site. Buy the book. Seriously great content. My favorite way to travel (this endorsement based only in love) @atlasobscura https://t.co/zLMm126yXD (Source)

David PlotzI'm here to solve your holiday gift buying problems! Today we release the Second Edition of the No. 1 bestselling Atlas Obscura book, with 100 new wondrous places, 12 city guides, a foldout map. It's gorgeous and fun and an amazing gift. https://t.co/ids7kNjImW https://t.co/95ULoJOKJg (Source)

Craig BarrettThis book didn’t really change my mind, but rather reinforced the concept of the power of the individual. At a time when we depend more and more on big institutions to solve our business and social problems the real solutions are crafted by individual actions and initiative. This is true in the business world, where ideas from individual researchers or entrepreneurs can create mega companies... (Source)

Dan Christensen@EconTalker @cable_co1 The Martian... hey it can’t all be economics and it’s a great book (Source)

Patrick Chovanec@acgleva The book was great. (Source)

Alice LittleThe author uses language that is very, very rich and colorful. [...] You can really immerse yourself into that world and kind of get a sense of what things were like, at that time. (Source)

Jennifer SteilGreg Mortenson has changed literally thousands and thousands of lives. (Source)

Nicholas KristofI think Greg does a very good job of providing a more nuanced portrait of the Islamic world and what is possible in it. (Source)

Gretchen PetersI went to a refugee camp after 9/11 where people were living in tents and boiling grass to make tea and at least one family offered to let me sleep in their tent. (Source)

Colin ThubronThis is the first volume of his journey in 1933-34 from the Hook of Holland, as he called it, to what he insisted on calling Constantinople (Istanbul). It was to be in three volumes. This one takes him beyond Vienna. The second volume, Between the Woods and the Water, takes him through Hungary to the Balkans. The third volume was going to get him across Romania to Istanbul, but he never wrote it.... (Source)

Quentin Hardy@parul_sehgal @DwightGarner @jenszalai Excellent list. "This Boy's Life" pairs well with "The Duke of Deception," brother Geoffrey Wolff's boyhood with their con man father. Also "A Time of Gifts" is a memoir as well as a great travel book, particularly when the way it came about becomes part of the tale. (Source)

Alastair HumphreysTracks is just fantastically well written. (Source)

Brigid KeenanThis is about everything that can go wrong when you are in another country and faced with another culture. It’s about a family – primarily it centres on a father and his four daughters – who move to the Congo from America as missionaries. The book is tragic because the father has the best intentions of making a good life for his family, but he’s too closed-minded and set in his American ways. I... (Source)

Michelle Jana ChanIt’s quite an old-fashioned story of sin and redemption, yet a hugely ambitious tale for Kingsolver to take on. It’s about filial responsibility as a wife and as daughters and sisters; it’s about guilt, bitterness and revenge. (Source)

David DownieThat is a book I read when I was young – in my teens – and it really marked me. (Source)

Roman KrznaricOrwell is one of my great empathic heroes. He went tramping in east London, trying to empathise with people who lived on the social margins. (Source)

David KramaleyI really enjoyed Down and Out in Paris and London. I think it’s meant to be a semi-autobiographical novel by George Orwell. I liked it because it was one of those books that had a big influence on the way I perceive and think about the world. Highly recommended. (Source)

ZoeThis series really stood out for me. The writing is exceptional and the story really grabs your attention and holds it. (Source)

Josh WaitzkinIf we go back to when I was seventeen, Jack Kerouac has had a huge impact in my life on the road. His books tapped me into the idea that life could be ecstatically beautiful. (Source)

Simon WinchesterA short, silly and utterly charming book which a generation of children, particularly American children, have enjoyed. (Source)

The Jupiter GirlThe Lost City of Z (I have the book and it remains unread in Australia) is an odd little film, it's really more about the father-son relationship rather than what motivates Fawcett. It's a slow and dreamy film about a dreamer searching for some great achievement in his life (Source)

Ted TurnerWhen I got to college, I was a classics major, and that was mainly the study of Greek - and to a lesser extent Roman - history and culture, and that fascinated me: the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid by Virgil. (Source)

Max PorterI still have an image of Odysseus in my head from when I was a child – he’s very Anglo-Saxon and stubbly, a bit like Michael Fassbender (Source)

Janine di GiovanniThe thing I loved about Ulysses was that he’s so in love with adventure and with love. (Source)

Beth ShapiroHe describes in this book not only the beauty of these animals, but the human landscape they live in and what a disastrous time he has getting to these locations. (Source)

Mark LynasFor me, Last Chance to See is a real eye-opener, with the idea that you can take a depressing subject – species on the verge of extinction – and present it in a way which is so engaging, so funny and so humane. (Source)

Gaia VinceThis is a book obviously for readers but it’s also a book for writers of science to understand how to capture the imagination of readers. (Source)

Ovidiu DruganExpedition books from north pole to across the oceans with ships or rafts. (Source)

Nick PyensonThe book stands apart and it remains fresh because of the ways that Matthiessen weaves his exploration of the outer world with his own inner one. (Source)

Wai Chee DimockThis book is told in the first person, in the voice of Hadley. In that way it’s a good complement to Monique Truong’s book, which is told in the voice of the cook. Paula McLain did a good job in terms of historical research, and in fleshing out Hadley’s psychology. (Source)

Richard BransonToday is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. (Source)

Colin ThubronThis struck me as a rather different way of travel writing. It is very individual, with stark, short passages….His research isn’t a history of that area, it’s all about the strange inhabitants of it, and the weird leftovers. Anything that was incongruous he loved – a Welsh community in southern Argentina, that sort of thing. It was a world of oddities, of leftovers, of communities that had been... (Source)

Cristina RiesenChronologically, my first favourite book probably was Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days. (Source)

David MaranissShe’s always been attracted to flying and space, she grew up near O’Hare Airport. (Source)

Cal Fussman"I [note: Tim Ferriss] asked Cal, "If you were a billionaire and could give 2 to 3 books to every graduating high school senior in the country this year, what would they be?" His answer (updated since the podcast) is: "For everyone: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. For females: West with the Night by Beryl Markham. For males: The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. That's a good... (Source)

Charles GlassIn 1867, Mark Twain accompanied a group of American Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. As part of this excursion, they also enter Russia and various places in and around continental Europe. In this book, he sends them up marvellously – their pretensions, their messianic belief that they were better than anyone else in the world and their inability to understand what was going on around them.... (Source)

Bill EarnerMy favorites [novels] are 100 Years of Solitude, All the King's Men, The Last Samurai, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (Source)

Matthew O’BrienIt’s one of my favourite books and probably my favourite Las Vegas-related book. Hunter S Thompson came out here in the early 70s to cover the Mint 400 off-road race for Sports Illustrated. He ended up writing a 10,000-word riff on his visit. In 1971, Jann Wenner ultimately published two long sections of it in Rolling Stone. Those two stories were the foundation for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (Source)

Tracy Chou@nelson @CrazyRichMovie yay i’m so glad you got to enjoy it!! lots of singaporeans do speak hokkien and eleanor does in the movie, i can’t remember if she does in the book (Source)

Cat Williams-TreloarA couple of years after moving to Singapore I read Kevin Kwan's first book "Crazy Rich Asians". I've never laughed so much in my life and have been an advocate of the entire series. To this day, whenever someone has a copy in hand at the airport or in our regular store, I tell them how amazing the books area. Kevin is a genius, and his books are full of beautiful cultural insights from across the... (Source)

Jennifer SteilThe Sex Lives of Cannibals. I’m not sure the book legitimises the title and, in any case, it’s such a funny, engaging book that it doesn’t need a title like that. It’s the funniest of all the books I read. It’s about this guy, the author J Maarten Troost, who’s in his early 20s, hasn’t developed a career yet, hasn’t launched into a job after university, and how his girlfriend gets a job with an... (Source)

Brigid KeenanAn incredible introduction to Africa, and I read the book when I needed it most. (Source)

Helena Frith PowellI found the book itself inspirational, and I found the fact that a woman had written it doubly inspirational. (Source)