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.