With prose, they explore the world

“I rarely read travel books myself; I prefer to travel,” foreign correspondent Martha Gellhorn writes. To me, that’s unthinkable. If I forbade myself the pleasure of sinking into an armchair with a book about travel, I wouldn’t get around half as much as I do; reading the best of them is as good as taking a trip.

Besides, I otherwise wouldn’t know Gellhorn’s “Travels With Myself and Another: A Memoir,” a marvelously ill-tempered book about terrible trips.

Lately, I have stood in front of the shelf devoted to general travel writing at the American Library in Paris, where I could have found something wonderful to read just by closing my eyes and pointing. Instead, I sat at a table in the reference section, drawing up this list of my favorite travel books:

“Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes,” by Robert Louis Stevenson. Many of the travel books by great novelists bore me; I get the feeling the writers thought they were slumming. But Stevenson’s little book about a 12-day walking trip in the mountains of south-central France is an exception, researched and written when he was in his 20s, long before “Treasure Island” and “Kidnapped.”

It has an earnest, youthful quality, descriptions without cynicism or pedantry. At the time, the Scottish writer was reassessing beliefs inculcated by his staunchly religious father and wrestling with his love for an older, married woman. So, during his 120-mile walk through the Cevennes mountains, a region of France still somewhat off the beaten track, supported by a cantankerous donkey named Modestine, he examined his heart. Walking tours, the book reminds us, are especially good for that.

Stevenson shows us what can be gained by traveling light, camping out and relying on the kindness of strangers. “I travel for travel’s sake,” he writes in an oft-quoted section of the book. “The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of life a little more nearly; to get down off this feather bed of civilization and to find that the globe is granite underfoot.”

“Maiden Voyages: Writings of Women Travelers,” edited by Mary Morris. I’ve read more than a few anthologies of travel pieces by female writers, but this is the best, ranging from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu on Turkey in the 18th century to Dervla Murphy on Madagascar in the 20th. In making her selections, Morris, a contemporary American fiction and travel writer (author of “Nothing to Declare,” about her edgy solo travels in Central America), combines a critic’s eye for good writing with a traveler’s savvy.

Actually, the best thing in the book is Morris’ introduction, contemplating how women travel differently from men and confirming the existence of the deep, rich itinerary that is the inner trip. For those exceptional female writers who weren’t constrained by convention, “the inner landscape is as important as the outer,” Morris writes.

“The White Nile” and “The Blue Nile,” by Alan Moorehead. These companion volumes concern places that were as mysterious in the 19th century as Mars is now. Moorehead wrote in the early ‘60s about the rush to find the source of the Nile and to trace the precipitous course, through Ethiopia and the Sudan, of the tributary that meets it at Khartoum. The stories are full of wonders -- crocodiles, mile-deep canyons and polygamous kings. If you can find illustrated editions, all the better. What I take from them isn’t that every nook and cranny of the world has already been explored, but that every trip I embark on is potentially a great adventure.

“The Towers of Trebizond,” by Rose Macaulay. The first line -- “ ‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my aunt Dot as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass”-- sets the tone of Macaulay’s satirical novel about a clutch of English eccentrics on a trip to Turkey during the ‘50s. Confusions abound, and Laurie, the narrator, realizes that the stock Turkish greeting she’s memorized actually means, “Please phone at once to Mr. Yorum.”

It’s meant to point out the ironies of travel and to remind us that we all carry the excess baggage of prejudice on the road.

“Miss Rumphius,” by Barbara Cooney. This picture book, about a librarian who travels widely in the 19th century, remains my great inspiration. Cooney’s grandmother was the model for its protagonist, who “climbed tall mountains where the snow never melted ... went through jungles and across deserts ... saw lions playing and kangaroos jumping ... and made friends she would never forget.”

Most important, an elderly Miss Rumphius sowed lupines all over the coast of Maine, thereby fulfilling every traveler’s mandate: to go home and make the world more beautiful.

“Travels With Myself and Another: A Memoir,” by Martha Gellhorn. Gellhorn, who married Ernest Hemingway in 1940, divorced him five years later and spent the rest of her life trying to get out of his shadow, was a fearless journalist who covered most of the 20th century’s hottest war zones. She was beautiful, witty, intrepid -- and honest, which is what makes “Travels With Myself and Others” so entertaining.

“I was seized by the idea to write this book,” she says in the first chapter, “while sitting on a rotten little beach at the western tip of Crete, flanked by a waterlogged shoe and a rusted potty.” From that low point, the rest of the trips chronicled in the book devolve.

Gellhorn knows that travel can put you in a bad mood. But, as she goes on to say, “Stop traveling? Come, come, millions of other travelers set forth with high hopes and land symbolically between a waterlogged shoe and a rusted potty. I was not unique, singled out for special misfortune. Besides, I was in the same position toward travel as a leopard is toward his spots.”

*

Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read at latimes.com/susanspano.