Readers will have their own favorite chapters, based on their own starting points. Being somewhat of a reluctant traveler myself, I especially enjoyed the chapter in which Theroux summarizes “notable sojourns from the longest to the shortest.” These include Sir John Mandeville’s thirty-four years of wandering in the fourteenth century; Stephen Crane’s day and a half in “The Open Boat” off the Florida coast; and Kipling’s stay in Mandalay, which was non-existent, resulting in what Theroux calls “obvious howlers” in the poem of that name. In another favorite, “Fear, Neuroses and Other Conditions,” Theroux tells of Richard Henry Dana who took a sea journey resulting in Two Years Before the Mast because poor eyesight prevented him from attending Harvard. And then there is Geoffrey Moorhouse who tried to treat his agoraphobia by crossing the Sahara Desert from west to east.

Theroux claims that “the nontraveler seems to me to exist in suspended animation, if not the living death of a homely routine or the vegetative stupor known to the couch potato” (p. 158). But in his “Staying Home” chapter, he expresses true regard, not contempt, for writers on a narrow-ranging path: Thoreau, Fielding, Emily Dickinson, Xavier de Maistre and my favorite, the twelfth century Japanese artistocrat Kamo-no-Chōmei who lived in a hut ten feet square by seven feet high. Perhaps in the end, Theroux’ deepest respect is reserved for the writer, rather than any mere adventurer. As he quotes from David Livingstone, “it is far easier to travel than to write about it” (p. 49).

Just as a journey is more than a compilation of events, a true commonplace book is more than the sum of its parts. To my mind, The Tao of Travel meets this condition because of the forthright nature of the selections and the generous personal commentary.

Several chapters examine travel as it appears in literature, not just literature of travel. In “Classics of a Sense of Place,” Theroux makes his personal recommendations of books providing “an intense experience of a particular place” (p. 238), including Thoreau’s The Maine Woods, Italian Hours by Henry James, and Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli. There is a chapter on “Imaginary Journeys,” often “elaborate fictions created by writers who have ranged widely” (p. 171), including Samuel Butler, Miguel de Unamuno, and Italo Calvino.

Another chapter deals with “Writers and the Places They Never Visited.” Theroux has no patience with a species of writer who “is not only self-deluded but deeply insulting to those travelers who actually troubled to go there” (p. 213). Saul Bellow comes in for the greatest attack; Henderson the Rain King, Theroux claims is Bellow’s “weakest, and perhaps because of that, his most revealing: slack writing is full of disclosure” (p. 226). Such strongly worded opinions would have no place in a typical anthology; here, they heighten interest, much as ordeal, seen later, does to travel.

The chapter on walking and its often spiritual substratum was particularly delightful to me. Xuanzang walked alone for seventeen years in the seventh century, collecting Buddhist manuscripts. In the seventeenth century, poet Matsuo Bashō walked nine months, seeking enlightenment. Rousseau, Wordsworth, Thoreau, Muir, Peter Matthieson: all walkers, but my romantic favorite is Werner Herzog, walking five hundred miles from Munich to Paris, certain that Lotte Eisner on her deathbed, would survive until his arrival. The resulting book, Of Walking in Ice, is now on my list to read.

The chapter “Travel as an Ordeal” collects those journeys of greatest interest to Theroux, who believes that an ordeal “tests the elemental human qualities needed for survival: determination, calmness, rationality, physical and mental strength” (p. 108). These edge phenomena trigger “instances of near madness, hallucinatory episodes, weird fugues, and near-death experiences.” As Theroux also acknowledges, such experiences “bring out the wit in a traveler.” That some element of ordeal is present in most great travel books helps us “begin to understand the person traveling, the real nature of the writer of the book, tested to his or her limit” (p. 109). On my list for further reading from this chapter is Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World (1922). His name had appeared in an earlier chapter: the man with extreme myopia and clinical depression who nevertheless went to Antartica for two years.

The chapter “Travel Feats” lists more of Theroux’ candidates for travel stardom. Italian WWII prisoner Felice Benuzzi and two others made a temporary escape from prison in order to climb Mount Kenya. They did not make it to the top, but achieved their more important goal, “to reclaim their humanity” (p. 153). Latest in this pantheon is Jessica Watson who at the age of sixteen sailed by herself around the world. She has not written a book on the adventure, but in keeping with the times, kept the world apprised of her ordeal by posting videos and updates on her blog.

In “The Things That They Carried,” we learn the quirky practical: Laurens van der Post went to Central Africa “with a stick of scarlet sealing wax in one hand and a copy of George Meredith’s Modern Love in the other” (p. 81). V. S. Naipaul required an elaborate wardrobe, including “Smedley shirts 2.” Pico Iyer carries a “Lonely Planet guide to get angry with and bitterly repudiate” (p. 84). Even more practical are “Murphy’s Rules of Travel,” a chapter presenting the distilled wisdom of this Irish “wanderer in the oldest tradition” (p. 42), as Theroux calls her. Among her other pungent recommendations, Murphy says: “Choose your country, use guidebooks to identify the areas most frequented by foreigners — and then go in the opposite direction.”

The book concludes with Theroux’ own set of travel guidelines: “Leave home; Go alone; Travel light,” ten aphorisms concluding with “Make a friend” (p. 275). More striking, I think, is the previous chapter in which he lists five personal “Travel Epiphanies,” all touching upon an interpersonal moment or a quintessentially personal glimpse of mortality.

Just as a journey is more than a compilation of events, a true commonplace book is more than the sum of its parts. To my mind, The Tao of Travel meets this condition because of the forthright nature of the selections and the generous personal commentary. Theroux never hides nor does he feel obliged to tip his hat to any author or to be “correct” in his assessments. “All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting,” he quotes himself (p. 9), and he’d probably extend that to “and if you can’t visit them, the next best thing is to read what I’ve written about visiting them.” Fine with me. The Tao of Travel as presented by Paul Theroux is an ideal lens through which to consider travel as a metaphor for living.