The Best American Travel Writing (2009)

Synopsis
A collection of 25 of the best pieces of American travel writing in 2009.

My thoughts
I love all forms of traveling, from armchair to actual. I have a bunch of these travel anthologies and I'd actually read a few of the pieces in this one before I decided to take it on a trip with me and read it cover to cover. It includes one of my all-time favorite travel pieces, Seth Stevenson's hilarious "The Mecca of the Mouse." Stevenson has been featured in other editions of the Best American Travel Writing series, but this piece remains my favorite.

2008 must have been a particularly strong year for travel writing because this book is chock full of absorbing writing. Strangely, there's a lot of water in this anthology, from a long-distance swimmer flailing around in frigid polar waters to a daughter wading through the river that her father fictionalized in Deliverance, from luxury transoceanic cruises to a maddening trip down the Mississippi River on a homemade raft. There are also excellent pieces on areas of the world that are off the normal tourist's radar - Sudan, Lebanon, Nigeria - and two other stand-out pieces deal with emerging tourist markets - ecotourism in Honduras and safaris in Rwanda. One of the things I love about this series is that the editors make a point of including a diverse array of pieces about all parts of the world from a variety of publications.

My favorites are the ones that make me laugh, and there are some real laugh-out-loud pieces in this collection. "The Mecca of the Mouse" is one, but Chuck Klosterman's "Who is America?" packs a lot of giggles into just a few pages. He asked students at the University of Leipzig to write an essay about which 20th-century American they found the most interesting. "I used to think Richard Nixon and Ryan Adams had nothing in common, but I now realize I was wrong - they both share an equal potential to be randomly fascinating to Germans," Klosterman writes.

Calvin Trillin, superb as always, contributes a piece on the unknown Texas BBQ joint that came out of nowhere to take the top spot in Texas Monthly's coveted rankings. Not being a huge fan of BBQ, I was indifferent when I first started reading, but Trillin hooked me three paragraphs in with his assessment of exactly how hard this shook the world of Texas BBQ: "I felt like a People subscriber who had picked up the 'Sexiest Man Alive' issue and discovered that the sexiest man alive was Sheldon Ludnick, an insurance adjuster from Terre Haute, Indiana."

There were a few misses, though. One writer managed to use the word "dissemble" a record number of times in his retelling of a trip to his old neighborhood in Rome. The piece on James Bond might have been interesting if I had more than a passing interest in James Bond. And I could have done without the piece on airline terminals entirely.

Bottom line
There's something for everyone here.

Fine print
The Best American Travel Writing 2009, edited by Simon Winchester
Genre: travel
Photo by Goodreads
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