Every trip starts with a book. Travel guides for the places we go, beach reads for the hammock, and yes, even textbooks: we get all of ours from BooksRun. You can buy, rent, or sell your old books back for cash, which is how we make room on the shelf for the next trip.
Here are our picks for every stop on the blog, plus a few easy reads for the plane.
Nicaragua & Central America
- Lonely Planet Central America on a Shoestring: the backpacker bible for Nicaragua and its neighbors, with border crossings, buses and cheap eats.
- Lonely Planet Costa Rica: the border is a short drive from San Juan Del Sur, so a side trip is easy.
- The Jaguar Smile, by Salman Rushdie: a short, sharp account of his 1986 trip through Nicaragua.
- Blood of Brothers, by Stephen Kinzer: the best background on the country’s modern history, from a reporter who lived it.
Ireland
- McCarthy’s Bar, by Pete McCarthy: a laugh-out-loud road trip that stops at every pub with his name on it.
- Round Ireland with a Fridge, by Tony Hawks: he lost a bet and hitchhiked the whole coast with a fridge. Perfect plane read.
Kona, Hawaii
- Hawaii The Big Island Revealed: the guidebook everyone on the Big Island carries, with beaches, snorkel spots and back roads.
Big Sur
- Big Sur, by Jack Kerouac: Kerouac’s cabin-in-the-canyon novel, set right on the Big Sur coast.
Surf, sand & salt
- Barbarian Days, by William Finnegan: the Pulitzer-winning surf memoir. Read it before your first session.
- The Beach, by Alex Garland: the backpacker-paradise thriller, for the hammock.
Easy plane reads
- In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson: funny, light and impossible to put down.
- The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho: short enough to finish before you land.
- Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain: for anyone who travels for the food.
For the wanderlust
- Vagabonding, by Rolf Potts: the how-to for taking real time off to travel.
- The Motorcycle Diaries, by Ernesto Guevara: a young doctor’s road trip across Latin America.
- The Old Patagonian Express, by Paul Theroux: by train from Boston to Patagonia, right through Central America.
- Wild, by Cheryl Strayed: 1,100 miles alone on the Pacific Crest Trail.
Looking for something else? Search any title, author, or ISBN on BooksRun to buy, rent, or sell.
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