30 Books To Inspire Your Next Vacation

This book has inspired thousands of visits Savannah to experience it’s gentile, Southern facade.

Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil breaks down the facade—a bit. It brings you behind the doors of the city’s stately homes.

It introduces you to its many varied characters and denizens while also chronicling a controversial shooting that reverberated through local Society. 

A Walk In The Woods invites you to virtually hike the Appalachian Trail with middle-aged, out-of-shape Bryson and his more-out-of-shape companion Katz.

Bryson is one of my favorite non-fiction writers. He does a good job of weaving the trail’s facts and history with the highs and comical lows of their time backpacking on this iconic path. 

Pat Conroy’s books are always packed with drama and often epic. But he loves the South Carolina low country, and I dare you to read this book without wanting spend time there.

In Beach Music, a man flees to rome to try to cope with the suicide of this wife. But he is called back to South Carolina by further family tragedy, which he eventually comes to terms with.

The Little House series pulled my city-dwelling third-grader into the sprawling plains of the Midwest and had her pretending she lived on the prairie, even if that prairie probably looks quite different these days.

In particular, The Long Winter has some good lessons for those of us living in unexpected extended solitude.

My mother, my husband, my tween and I have all let country veterinarian James Herriot bring us along on his visits to farms and villages across the Yorkshire Dales in the years leading up to WWII.

All Creatures Great & Small is is funny and surprisingly relatable. And if you like it, he follows it up with four more memoirs that are equally good for the most part.

In this follow up to Midnight, John Berendt unveils intriguing and hard-to-know Venice for us.

The mystery at the heart of City of Falling Angels is a fire at a famous opera house, but along the way he introduces us to some of the finest palazzos and most entertaining denizens of this wonderful canaled city.

This mystery series featuring two girls at an English boarding school starts with Murder Most Unladylike. It heavily influenced our last trip to the U.K.

Teen detectives Hazel Wong and Daisy Wells take tween readers to the Deepdean School and beyond to Cambridge, London, Hong Kong, a Nile cruise and the Orient Express (the last two are homages to Agatha Christie).

It certainly inspired our tween’s interest in afternoon tea, cream buns and amateur detectives.

Tip: Try to buy the original U.K. prints and not the U.S. versions; they have better titles and plenty of British vernacular, which is way more fun.

In Whisperer, written by Lawrence Anthony and Graham Spence, Anthony works to bond with a herd of wild elephants he has agreed to allow into his preserve.

Kitchen is written by  Katja Willemsen and Anthony’s Parisienne wife Francoise Graham Spence. In it Spence struggles to keep the Thula Thula preserve open after she’s widowed in 2012. 

Dark Star Safari follows Paul Theroux’s journey across Africa from Cairo to Cape Town.

Jacquie Hale Flashpacking Family says, “It’s one of my favorite travel reads and inspired my love of the African continent.”

She continues, “It’s also the reason I did my own overland journey through Africa. His journey is so descriptive, you can’t help but fall in love with Africa.” 

Part adventure, part STEM narrative.

The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind is the story of William KamKwamba’s effort to build a windmill in his Malawi village to stave off the drought that is sweeping his region. Improbably, he succeeds.

Tip: You can listen to this book for free with an Amazon Audible trial.

A fictionalized account of the first Englishman’s to visit Japan. Cathy Winston of Mummy Travels says “It’s an incredible introduction to the country’s history and culture (and a cracking story!).”

It has all the hallmarks of a good historical fiction saga, including a love triangle between the Englishman, A Japanese warlord and a local woman.

Winston adds, “I re-read it every few years, including during my trip to Japan, where I got to see some of the places in the book first-hand.”

In A Suitable Boy Vikram Seth takes readers to India in the early 1950s, post-Independence and post-Partition.

Winston says, “It’s another book I re-read regularly. I learned more Indian history reading this than I did at school, for sure.”

She explains, “But it’s the richness of the descriptions, the characters, and how they portray different aspects of India a point where the country was changing dramatically. Everything from the spices to the colors to the squalor seems to come alive.”

Like Water For Chocolate is a beautiful book. It has love, heartache, family, food and magical realism on a Mexican hacienda in the early 1900s.

Savor the recipes along with the characters and their story.

I loved this book.  It shows a side of Mexico we seldom see and it packs a lot into a short novel.

I read a lot of Ann Patchett. Her books always have just enough well-written drama to keep you pulled along, without being heavy reads.

State of Wonder takes us on a Heart-of-Darkness-like journey up the Amazon River. This time, a doctor is on the hunt for her missing mentor who was researching a promising new drug. 

I’ve been “reading” more audio books lately and a book like State of Wonder makes for an especially good listen.

In the late 1700s England had far more petty thieves than it had room for in its prisons. When it could no longer send them to the American colonies it began exporting them to Australia, a land about which it knew absolutely nothing.

The hubris that went into settling the first Australian penal colony, the titular Commonwealth of Thieves was astounding.

More amazing were the the prisoners who actually pieced together new lives for themselves and laid the foundation for a new country.

This narrative history has a enough detail and the right pace to make you feel like you’re right there with them.

Red Rocks delves into the Celtic roots of New Zealand’s citizens with. In the story a boy named Jake accidentally acquires a selkie’s seal skin, leading to adventure and magic on the island’s Wellington coast.

Selkies are shape shifters who slip between human and seal form by slipping outof their sealskins. They can be men or women and are enchanting in human form.