In The Geography of Bliss, NPR foreign correspondent Eric Weiner travels the world to find happiness. Is that so different from what the rest of us are doing?

Well, yes and no. Wiener makes a science of it. He goes about it with more deliberation than most of us wanderers.

Before he takes on the geography angle, he runs down the findings of the field (yes, Virginia, there is a discipline called “Happiness Studies,”except they PhD it up and call it Subjective Well-Being, or SWB). The SWB experts have happiness stats both surprising and obvious, like that optimists are happier than pessimists, rich people are happier than poor ones (but only slightly), people with a college degree (BA) are happier than people with a high school diploma, but people with advanced degrees are less happy than those with just a BA. (Forget grad school! Just go traveling!)

But the “what kinds of people are happiest” question is just a prelude to the meat of the Geography of Bliss, which is, of course, geography, or rather blissography: where in the world are people the happiest? And if I go there, can I get me some?

So begins our whirlwind tour of the soul of ten countries:  the Netherlands, Switzerland, Bhutan (where they measure not the Gross National Product but Gross National Happiness), Qatar, Iceland, Moldova (infamous as the unhappiest country in the world), Thailand, Great Britain, India, and the U.S. He stays only a few weeks in each place, something that doesn’t seem egregious when he connects with a place and its people (Bhutan and Iceland, for instance) but causes problems in places like Qatar, where he can’t get any Qataris to talk to him. “The usual journalists’ trick of interviewing the cabdriver wasn’t working,” he writes.  “He was invariably from India. Nor could I interview my waiter (Filipino) or the manager at hotel reception (Egyptian).” In fact, more than 90% of people working in Qatar turn out to be from somewhere else—which adds to Weiner’s difficulty in getting a read on the culture of this oil-rich nation.

Whether the natives are cooperating or not, Weiner spins a good tale. He’s is a clever kvetcher, and I mean that as a compliment. Clever kvetching has become its own genre—think David Sedaris—and I’m glad. How can you not smile when you read: “I desperately wanted to see the world, preferably on someone else’s dime. But how? I had no marketable skills, a stunted sense of morality, and a gloomy disposition. I decided to become a journalist.”

That gloomy disposition is, of course, the motivation for his project: to find the places in the world where people are happiest. And though, as Eric Hoffer says, “The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness,” Weiner has that covered: “That’s ok,” he says. “I’m already unhappy. I have nothing to lose.”

And we, the readers, have everything to gain from this very funny and thought-provoking book about what happiness is and where people find it.

Funny that the best travel writers seem to be cranks, curmudgeons, or kvetchers. Paul Theroux is surely one of the great curmudgeons, but with his latest book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of The Great Railway Bazaar, his rough edges seem to have smoothed out a bit.  I’m not sure if that’s such a good thing.

He’s been writing for decades, novels and essays as well as travel books, and I encourage you to dive deep into his work. His latest book (which came out in paperback this summer) retraces the trip he recounts in his first book, The Great Railway Bazaar, about a 1973 journey by train across Asia. The author was in his early thirties, and it was the book that made his reputation.

This time around, he’s in his late sixties, and more thoughtful and reflective. He’s a little less apt to skewer an entire country with one well-turned and often thrillingly offensive phrase (Salvadorans, he claimed in the Old Patagonia Express, suffer from “little-country loyalty and violent nationalism”), and it seems on this trip he’s more cognizant that what he brings along in terms of psychic baggage is at least as important as what he sees out the train window. In other words, he has learned that we see the world not as it is, but as we are.

Then why do I like The Great Railway Bazaar better than Ghost Train? Well, of course there’s joy in the apt insult and in well-expressed misery–he did seem prodigiously unhappy in The Great Railway Bazaar, and in later interviews Theroux confirmed that indeed he was.  But my preference for the young crank over the older and kinder writer also makes me wonder if middle-aged spread affects not only the body but the mind as well. Do we become wider but also shallower and less tumultuous, like an old river? Tumult can be pretty exciting.

And maybe only the young can get away with grand (but revealing) generalizations such as are expressed in this passage from The Great Railway Bazaar:

The trains in any country contain the essential paraphernalia of the culture: Thai trains have the shower jar with the glazed dragon on its side, Ceylonese ones the car reserved for Buddhist monks, Indian ones a vegetarian kitchen and six classes, Iranian ones prayer mats, Malaysian ones a noodle stall, Vietnamese ones bulletproof glass on the locomotive. And on every carriage of a Russian train there is a samovar. The railway bazaar, with its gadgets and passengers, represented the society so completely that to board it was to be challenged by the national character. At times it was like a leisurely seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that it was like being jailed and then assaulted by the monstrously typical.

Even more than The Great Railway Bazaar, I loved The Old Patagonian Express: By Train Through the Americas, maybe because I know the Americas better than Asia and have visited (and lived in) many of the countries he travels through. In this book, he starts in Massachusetts and ends at the tip of the South American continent, traveling by train all the way.  Each of the 22 chapters is named for a train line, from Boston’s Lake  Shore Limited, through the 7:30 to Guatemala City and the Passenger Train to Machu Pichu, all the way to Tierra del Fuego’s Old Patagonia Express.

Besides the telling detail and the history lessons, I like when he ruminates on solo travel:

Travel at its best is a solitary experience: to see, to examine, to assess, you have to be alone and unencumbered. Other people can mislead you; they crowd your meandering impressions with their own; if they are companionable they obstruct your view, and if they are boring they corrupt the silence with non-sequiturs, shattering your concentration with Oh look, it’s raining. And You see a lot of tress here. Traveling on your own can be terribly lonely (and it is not understood by Japanese who, coming across you smiling wistfully at an acre of Mexican buttercups, tend to say things like Where is the rest of your team?).

But whatever the order of my preferences, Theroux is the real thing, a travel writer who makes you proud to be one. Bottom line: his books elevate the whole genre. Find them. Read them.

The Second Journey: The Road Back to Yourself
by Joan Anderson

The good:

–While not strictly about travel, Anderson’s book uses the metaphor of the journey to good effect in her discussion of midlife women ready to “navigate the rapids of change” in their lives.

–The book is small and fits nicely in your hand (in this world of digitized everything, I like to remind myself of why I love actual books).

–The tone is casual, personal, and the book is a fast read.

–There’s an abundance of good travel and personal growth quotes, like Jean Shinoda Bolen’s: ‘When a woman is at a crossroads, the heroine wants to make her own decision, while the nonheroine wants it made for her.’

The not-so-good:

–The writing often seems formulaic, with the author trying too hard to make insignificant things highly significant. For example, in Chapter 7, “Unfamiliar Territory,” Anderson hires a local fisherman to take her out to the beach that, years before, prompted her to write her best-known book, A Year By the Sea. The fisherman mentions that they’ll have to work with the tides, and that the tide cycle sets his whole week. “How coincidental,” writes Anderson. “His days are controlled by the tide cycles and my thoughts have been about life cycles.” Is it just me, or does this not seem so very coincidental? All of life is about cycles, especially if your work involves nature.

–I often felt excluded from her generalizations about women and their life cycles. She is a white, heterosexual, 60-something woman who has kids and sees her own life in mythic terms. If you are pretty much the same, what she says will speak to you. If not, well, you’ll have to be content with the odd insight that applies to everyone, not just to people like her.

–Another formula that didn’t work for me was her “ten phases of a woman’s life” chart, which she introduces by intoning (I can almost hear Linda Hunt doing the voice-over): Since the beginning of time, women’s lives have been divided into phases…. The since-the-beginning-of-time phases purportedly include:
–Ages 21- 28: Being affirmed by a man—the desire to procreate
–Ages 28-25: Birthing, mothering, caretaking, putting others first
–Ages 25-42: Leaving self out but occasionally looking beyond
There are, of course, millions of women in the world leading lives on schedules very different from what this chart describes. Anderson does her readers a disservice, assuming that we all share the same basic life story. We don’t.

–Some of the book seems like an advertisement for her business of leading women on retreat. Walking the beach in Chapter 8, Anderson reflects on “all the weekend women I have brought out here”– the stutterer who returned from her weekend “bold enough to sing about herself.” The widow and mother of three boys who “released her grief in order to rejoin the human race.” And the anorexic who “buried her scales and stopped measuring her worth by lack of weight.”

For my tastes, these thumbnail case studies claim too much credit, and ring untrue if only because the transformations all supposedly took place within two days. And the hubris of the claims makes me think back on other parts of the book and wonder if they, too, were inflated in some way.