Sometimes, The Best Trip Is The One You Take From A Chair

Not every way of traveling requires a passport. Reading about a place is a way into it, and for many people it is the main way. A good book about a country will show you what a short visit cannot, because the author had time to notice what it’s impossible for anyone to in a week. Armchair travel has a long tradition for a reason. If this is your way of traveling, everything you need is on this page: reading lists organized by country below, and a set of bookstores for finding travel books that may be closer to home than you think.

If you do travel, the question becomes what to read before a trip, and when. Some people read everything they can find before a trip, so they arrive knowing the history and the politics of the place they are about to walk through. Others read a little before and keep a book going during the trip, while the experience is still fresh.

And some people prefer to arrive knowing almost nothing, letting the place make its first impression without another writer’s interpretation in the way, and then read after they return. Reading after a trip works like a second visit. If this is you, one piece of advice matters more than any other: buy some books while you are there. Many of the best books about a country were published inside it and might not be for sale in your home country.

Reading Lists from Scott Monaco

Scott Monaco publishes curated reading lists organized by country and region: ten to twenty-five books per list, mixing history and fiction with memoir, reportage, and travel writing to build a complete picture of a place through its literature. Current lists cover:

• Read Your Way Through the American Road Trip
• Read Your Way Through Cuba
• Read Your Way Through Hong Kong
• Read Your Way Through India
• Read Your Way Through Japan
• Read Your Way Through London
• Read Your Way Through Singapore
• Read Your Way Through Sweden
• Read Your Way Through Thailand
• 25 Books That Will Change the Way You See the World

The full archive of reading lists lives at Book Recommendations and continues to grow as Scott Monaco covers new destinations.

Bookstores For Planning The Trip

If you are dreaming of a trip, or content to stay in the armchair, these are the bookstores Scott Monaco considers the best travel bookstores in the world:

Stanfords, London, United Kingdom — The world’s largest map and travel book retailer, founded in 1853 in Covent Garden, with guidebooks, travel writing, and cartography for nearly every country on earth. Since 2015, it has run the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards.

Daunt Books, London, United Kingdom — The original shop on Marylebone High Street shelves its entire stock by country, guidebooks sitting beside each place’s novels, histories, and memoirs. Daunt has since grown to nine more locations across London.

Librairie Ulysse, Paris, France — The world’s oldest travel-specialist bookstore, opened on the Île Saint-Louis in 1971 by Catherine Domain, who has visited over 150 countries. It stocks around 20,000 new and secondhand books, maps, and journals.

Powell’s Books, Portland, United States — The largest independent bookstore in the United States, with over a million titles filling a city block. New and used sit together, so whatever is still available on a destination is here, in or out of print.

Strand Books, New York, United States — Eighteen miles of new, used, and rare books in Greenwich Village, founded in 1927. The used and rare floors carry titles on nearly every country decades past their print runs.

A Few Bookstores Worth Building A Trip Around

These are bookstores worth traveling to in their own right, and each carries books you will have a hard time finding once you are home:

El Ateneo, Buenos Aires, Argentina (Grand Splendid location) — A 1919 theater converted into a bookstore in 2000 with its ceiling frescoes and opera boxes intact and a café on the former stage. Buenos Aires has more bookstores per capita than any other city in the world.

Cafebrería El Péndulo, Mexico City, Mexico — A bookstore and café where trees grow between the shelves, with locations in Condesa and Polanco. National Geographic has ranked it among the finest bookstores on earth.

Bahrisons Booksellers, New Delhi, India — Opened in Khan Market in 1953 by Balraj Bahri Malhotra, a Partition refugee who raised part of his starting capital by selling one of his mother’s gold bangles. The same family runs it today.

Librairie Avant-Garde (先锋书店), Nanjing, China — A vast bookstore inside a repurposed underground parking garage, windowless and regularly named among the most beautiful in the world. Readers cross China to visit it.

Diwan, Cairo, Egypt — Zamalek’s landmark independent bookstore, opened on International Women’s Day in 2002 by sisters Nadia and Hind Wassef. Nadia Wassef’s memoir about building it, Shelf Life, is highly recommended.

Clarke’s Bookshop, Cape Town, South Africa — A Long Street shop specializing in Africana, stocking new, secondhand, and antiquarian books on southern African history, politics, art, and literature across two floors.

Where To Go Next

New stories from Scott Monaco are published weekly, and the reading lists grow with every destination covered.

If the books have already decided your next destination, tell Scott Monaco where you want to go, and the planning starts there.

More Ways to Travel

Explore how Scott Monaco travels: Food & Cuisine · Safari & Birding · Cultural Immersion · Photography · Cycling & Hiking · Solo Travel · Art & Artisan Craft · Books & Bookstores — or see all Ways to Travel.