The Best American Travel Writing 2016

Guest editor Bill Bryson, in his introduction to The Best American Travel Writing 2016, writes about learning about a mysterious lighthouse on a remote outcropping in the Scottish Hebrides, and after that immediately wanting to go there, even though it was quite difficult to do. I remember that feeling when I read about the Dry Tortugas and Fort Jefferson of the coast of the Florida Keys, which wasn't all that difficult to do but I understand the impetus. Finances and jobs and all that have limited my wandering for many years, but it's fun to be an armchair traveler.

This volume of the series was just okay, though. There weren't a lot of places written about that I would want to go to. There's even an article about North Korea (it may be my imagination, but it seems like there's one in every one of these collections) and a film festival there (Kim Jong-Il was a big fan). There are two articles about life above the Arctic circle, which is intriguing but I'll leave it to others to go there.

Frankly, most of the articles here are about the difficulty of traveling. Steven Rinella writes about various bacteria and parasites consumed in "Little Things That Kill You," and Michael Chabon writes humorously about getting lost in Morocco: "Nothing moves me more profoundly, I hasten to add, than discovering the extent of my own ignorance." A few of the articles are about environmental concerns, especially William Vollman's "Invisible and Insidious," about the radiation effects in Japan after the tsunami, which will convince most of us not to go there. Andrew W. Jones writes of a perilous journey from the Ukraine into Romania in "The Marlboro Men of Chernivitsi," when he and his girlfriend were persuaded to smuggle cigarettes.

The articles that had me thinking I'd like to go there were few and far between. I did like Patrick Symmes' "Peak Havana," about the Cuban city that I've always wanted to visit. I like his attitude: "But travel is best in the cracks, in the unexpected encounters between appointments, in the crucial subtleties revealed when—according to our expectations and schedules—nothing is happening."

The best written pieces aren't necessarily about places--Pico Iyer's "The Foreign Spell" expounds on the nature of being a foreigner. He notes: "the number of people living in lands they were not born to will surpass 300 million in the next generation." And Thomas Chatterton Williams writes eloquently about black Americans' experiences in Paris in "In Another Country." As usual, Patricia Marx is very funny as she looks at the plastic surgery craze in South Korea: "If you want to feel bad about your looks, spend some time in Seoul. An eerily high number of women there—and men, too—look like anime princesses."

Two pieces are about following in the footsteps of writers. Jeffrey Tayler does the Dostoevsky thing in St. Petersburg in "Fyodor's Guide," and the best article in the book is Paul Theroux's "Return of the Mockingbird." Theroux wrote a book about travels in the American south, and this part is focused on Monroeville, Alabama, the hometown of Harper Lee, who turned it into Maycomb in her book To Kill a Mockingbird. Theroux is generally regarded as the best travel writer in the business and this is evidence why. "In the Deep South, and Alabama especially, all the back roads seem to lead into the bittersweet of the distant past." He talks to many people who knew Lee, but he does not wish to disturb her (she was alive at the time of his visit).

So, I haven't made any imaginary travel plans based on this book. With Trump in office I no longer know if I can even visit Cuba legally, so Havana may have to wait. I want to have a drink at El Floridita, where Hemingway drank.