As the holiday season rushes towards us a whole host of new travel books are appearing any one of which could find a useful place in your backpack or luggage.

This collection — with an introduction by Michael Palin — is a fundraising project for Oxfam. But that being said, the compilation is a superb one. Here you will find a collection of complete pieces and excerpts from bigger works. each of the contributions vividly brings alive the experience of travelling and the range of experiences featured here are very different. This is a book to dip into, no chapter too long to not be able to read in one go. There is some profoundly beautiful writing here. Some of it is quirky. Some of it is from some of the most respected writers of their generation. Some of it is from promising new talent that I have not come across before. Some of the stuff is very, very, special indeed.

The established writers include Nicholas Shakespeare, John Julius Norwich, Dervla Murphy, Chris Stewart Jason Webster and Rory McLean. New talent includes Jasper Winn, Sara Wheeler, Tim Butcher and Sonia Falerio — great writers who are a pleasure to get to know. (At least these writers were new to me).

The superstars of travel writing include Paul Theroux, Colin Thubron, William Dalrymple ad Jan Morris.

And then there is the final bonus which is worth the price of this book alone. Patrick Leigh Fermor is for me the best travel writer of the 20th Century. The last volume of his London to Constantinople walk may never see the light of day as Fermor died a few months ago. But, here we have a story from the last part of the journey, from the book that may never see the light of day.

Definitely worth reading this summer Ox Tales will not only entertain but give you some new names to search out. Even when I’d read the stories before I found I didn’t mind that much — only great stories are here and like all great stories they benefit from telling more than once!

By definition almost, all of you who follow this site are travellers. And this is the ONE book that you should read this year!

Paul Theroux is one of the finest living travel writers working in English. but this book is not a travelogue it is a attempt to distill the heart of travel, and to consider the philosophy that underpins travel and  — because this is a book — those who write about it.

To distil the philosophy the underpins travel may seem like a rather ambitious undertaking but this is a thoroughly satisfying read — informed, charming, funny, provocative and challenging.

The scene is set with the first Chapter, The Importance of Elsewhere. Theroux announces his intentions in dramatic fashion. He is nothing if not ambitious, sharing sentiments that I know will resonate with a lot of you.

“This book of insights, a distillation of travellers’ visions and pleasures, observations from my work and others’, is based on many decades of my reading travel books and travelling the earth. It is also intended as a guidebook, a how-to, a miscellany, a vade mecum, a reading list, a reminiscence. And because the notion of travel is often a metaphor for living a life, many travellers, expressing a simple notion of a trip, have written something accidentally philosophical, even metaphysical. In the spirit of Buddha’s dictum “You cannot travel the path before you have become the path itself’, I hope that this collection shows, in its approaches to travel, ways of living and thinking too”.

Theroux shows us, in the early chapters, that is he is no mean entertainer. Here the quotes and contributions and short and punchy with many of them being quips of the superior kind. Many of the comments here are from his own books and it is fascinating to see how the same issues and themes are dealt with in different places or at different times in the author’s life. Those that are not from Theroux are simply little gems. These earlier chapters have the effect of sucking the reader into the book. Reading it at first is pure joy as you can just dip in and dip our, but as we progress the pieces become more thoughtful, longer and altogether more satisfying.

Here are some of the Chapter Headings:

The Navel of the World; The Pleasures of Railways; Murphy’s Rule of Travel; How Long Did the Traveller Spend Travelling? Travel Wisdom of Samuel Johnson; The Things they Carried; Fears, Neurosis and Other Conditions; Travel as an Ordeal.

These are a little mis-leading as each Chapter contains a mass of variation and ‘Side Trips’.

Here is Theroux on cities:

My ideal of travel is just to show up and head for the bush, because most big cities are snake pits. In the bush there is always somewhere to pitch your tent.

Big cities seem to me like destinations, walled-in stopping places, with nothing beyond their monumental look of finality breathing You’ve arrived to the traveller.

“Athens is a four-hour city,” one man said, meaning that was all the time you needed to see it in its entirety. That hourly rate seemed to me a helpful index for judging”.

Here is Theroux on adventure:

Adventure travel seems to imply a far-off destination, but a nearby destination can be scarier, for no place is more frightening than one near home that people you trust have warned you against.

For me the best sort of travel always involves a degree of trespass. The risk is both a challenge and an invitation. Selling adventure seems to be a theme in the travel industry, and trips have become trophies.

And:

“Travel is at its most rewarding when it ceases to be about your reaching a destination and becomes indistinguishable from living your life”.

You get the idea! If I keep reproducing any more of this stuff I will get into trouble.

There is a lot here. Much of it is very profound and thought provoking while never seeming to be heavy or preachy. I’ve always found Theroux to be a bit grumpy when he travels but somehow that grumpy old man approach really suits this kind of reflective mussing.

This book is a little gem.

This is a book that I’ve been wanting to read for a while. A couple of months ago I clicked on the Amazon link to say I’d like this on a Kindle and then a few weeks ago Amazon told me it was to be available shortly. I must have pre-ordered it because last week I was surprised to find that it just arrived on my machine! Still, I am glad that it did!

Isolation Shepherd is the story of four years that Thomson spent as a shepherd in Strathfarrar in the Scottish Highlands. Thomson was there at the end of the fifties, living with his young family on an isolated estate on the banks of Loch Monar; their only neighbours were to the South on the opposite side of the Loch at Pait Lodge.

This is a fascinating story and historical document. the way of life experienced by Thomson was more or less the same as it would have been anytime from the clearances on. While this isn’t the best prose i’ve read recently the content is, in the main, fascinating. Thomason walks us through life in the glen and on the loch. There are stories of the changing seasons, working with sheep dogs, the rearing and caring of sheep, life in the glen as well as accounts of stalking deer, catching foxes and so on. This was clearly a harsh and hard life, but it was led within the rhythm of the seasons and the land. The only concession to modernity here seems to have been the outboard engines on the small boats that provided the crucial link to the main Glen to the East.

The continuity of life on the Loch has an almost surreal effect at times. Thomson can be talking about, say, an incident when out rounding up sheep or hunting deer. He’ll then refer to another great story of the glen which sounds contemporary but which features incidents and characters from several generations before. But the certainty of the seasons and the continuity of tasks means that these reminiscences remain as relevant as if they had only happened the year before. And while the life was hard there’s a lot of joy here as we get to know the tiny community that live around the Loch.

As a result we not get a fascinating account of life at the end of this period of tradition but we get a wonderful pen picture of historic life in this isolated part of the Highlands although, of course like elsewhere in the Highlands, these areas were more heavily populated than we can imagine before the coming of the sheep.

Sometimes this book feels dis-jointed and the author lost me but inevitably I found that dragged me back with the next section. This book will appeal to anyone who loves the highlands and especially to anyone who has ever walked the paths and the hills in this area.

Tomson was there until the end. The construction of the dam at the East of the Loch — and the creation of the reservoir — spelt the end of this way of life. The neighbours over the water at Pait left first with Tomson and his family leaving just as the dam was completed.

The dam raised the level of the Loch by 100 metres of so. The small croft that was home was demolished before being flooded, a fate shared by many of the other places referenced in the book although Pait remains though now much closer to the water line.

There is much to admire about this timeless account of a more genuine and innocent time. I guess it will be in print for a long time. Recommended.

Jan Morris reckons that Colin Thubron is the best travel writer alive and as one of the twentieth centuries best writers of ‘place’ she should know what she is talking about. I reckon she’s right. Each new travel book by Thubron is special but this one is simply superb.

Thubron started his travelling, as a young man, in the post war years. His early books involved a young man travelling around the middle east and the Mediterranean, usually on foot, camping high and wild — very much the stuff that would be appreciated by those who love trekking and the great outdoors. Incidentally, these early books are worth searching out not least because such travel in Syria, Lebanon and the other places has not been so viable for a long time now.

Over the years Thubron developed a philosophy that sought to exclude himself from the story telling as much as possible. Other prominent writers integrated themselves into the story. Bruce Chatwin famously invented his own, exotic character. Paul Theroux moans, whinges and grumbles his way across countries and continents. Thubron prefers to give the space to allow local people to tell the story of both themselves and their land.

As his career developed Thubron moved away from the backpacking image of his younger days. Nevertheless, the books he came up with were super as he explored Russia as it began to open up and China in the aftermath of the cultural revolution. His recent books have explored the Silk Road and the lesser known and mainly Muslim nations of the ex-Soviet Union. Oh, and there is a pretty good book on Siberia as well.

But with ‘To a Mountain in Tibet’ Thubron has gone back to the walk or the trek, walking to Mount Kailas in tibet, which is one of the most sacred of the world’s mountains, a regular place of pilgrimage for both Hindus and Buddhists.

Thubron undertook this walk after the death of his father, the last family member of his generation i think. As a result there is more of Thubron himself in this book than we have experienced before. But it is the life of the local people’s that still shine through. Thubron’s own personal reflections serve mainly to contrast with the lives of the local Tibetan and Nepalese people, whether in traditional settings or in newer and urban environments. I think Thubron gives us the best feel yet for those who’s livelihood is now centred around the western traveller. His writing on local customs, on the mystical beleifs of the pilgrims he meets, and on the local families that support him is unparalleled in my view.

This book is wonderful, achingly beautiful and a joy to read. You won’t read a better book all year. Go treat yourselves.