My friend and colleague Thomas Swick, travel editor at the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, lamented this fact in his column last Sunday:

A few weeks ago the Modern Library came out with its list of the 100 best nonfiction books of the 20th century and -- whaddya know -- travel writers were hard to find. No V.S. Naipaul, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux -- to mention a few of the better-known names -- not even any Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, or Lawrence Durrell, novelists whose greatest nonfiction works were books of travel. Naipaul and Theroux were handicapped by the fact that they are still alive (most of the writers who made the list aren't), but membership among the departed did not help Norman Douglas, Gerald Brenan, or Robert Byron -- three of the century's finest writers who, one gets the impression from literature's new synod, had the misfortune to specialize in travel.

As Swick points out, only four books that seem even tangentially related to travel made it to the Modern Library list: Rebecca West's book on Yugoslavia, "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" (38), George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" (42), Isak Dinesen's "Out of Africa" (58) and Beryl Markham's "West With the Night" (85).

Swick goes on to redress this absence with his own lists of the top 10 "sedentary" and "itinerant" travel books of the century. His column inspired me to think about my own list -- and I'd like to invite you to do the same. E-mail me your choices for the top 10 travel books of the century.

Putting this list together was an extremely pleasant task, forcing me to rummage through memory and then through assorted boxes and bookshelves. As I pulled the books out -- their dusty mustyness filling the air -- I felt as if I were opening doorways into the past.

The underlined passages in one book brought me back to my old office at Athens College in Greece. I remembered the creaky desk chair I sat in when I underlined them, the way the sunlight slanted through the green vines that curled outside my window and the dry, baking heat and flat Attic light that awaited outside.

The wine stains in another book conjured the six-table restaurant in Paris where I used to feast on steak, fries and the house red wine -- surreptitiously surveying the couples who cuddled in candlelit corners while I read and dreamed. I could hear the violinist on the sidewalk outside, could picture the flame-eater drawing crowds in the middle of the block and the streetlights shimmering on the surface of the Seine.

Each book called forth fresh new scenes, until the world seemed infinitely tender and confusing, a jostling combination of goals achieved and wayward dreams.

In the end, I came up with a highly subjective list, shaped by the crevasses in my own reading and by the circumstances under which I read and remembered some of these works. (And inevitably, there were repetitions between this list and a selection of six great travel books I had recommended in a summer reading column two years ago.) For better or worse, here are my own choices for the top 10 travel books of the century.

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