Graham Greene, My Plane and Train Default Author

Graham Greene, the late, masterful British novelist and well-rounded man of letters, is the writer I most enjoy reading when I'm on the road. I'll be taking two Greene novels with me on my upcoming trip to Sweden and Finland: "A Burnt-Out Case'' and "No Man's land.''

Greene was also superb at crafting non-fiction. One of my favorite travel narratives is his "Journey Without Maps'' (the Vintage Classics edition). When I'm on a plane or long-distance train, Greene is my default author. He's whip-smart, a gifted descriptive writer and accomplished storyteller. Greene's books run like well-oiled, beautiful machines. The characters in his novels - think of "The Quiet American'' or "Our Man in Havana'' - always seem to be in over their heads, enmeshed in complexities they don't understand.

In "Journey Without Maps,'' Greene's first travel book (1936), Greene, himself, is in over his head. In Liberia for a month-long walkabout in the backcountry, he is woefully unprepared. In a sympathetic but clear-eyed preface, Paul Theroux observes that Green was afraid of moths and birds, didn't know how to drive a car and didn't know how to read a compass. He also, as the old journalism saw has it, didn't let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Exaggerated or not, this darkly humorous account of rugged walks in the bush, drunken European expats, unfamiliar tribal customs and local despots is an addictive read. Greene may not have known how to read a compass, but he could read people, and he is a lodestone for travelers.

A Taste of Graham Greene: On Travel

The late British world traveler, memoirist, screenwriter and novelist Graham Greene is my default author when I'm on a long-haul airplane or long-distance train. Greene was one of the best at blending literary quality and accessibility and his books are set in far-flung, often colorful locales.

In the midst of a smooth, six-hour flight on Virgin America (www.virginamerica.com) from New York to California yesterday, I opened Greene's 1982 novel "Monsignor Quixote.'' A ruminative, often-funny entertainment, the book tracks a road trip around Spain by a communist mayor and a priest - who, in a nice fictional touch, is a direct descendant of Cervantes' Don Quixote. This modern Quixote isn't on horseback. Instead, the priest drives a broken-down old car he names Rocinante.

"Father Quixote was glad to have a room to himself, minute though it was,'' Greene writes in one road-wise passage. "It seemed to him that his journey had already extended across the whole breadth of Spain, though he knew he was not much more than 200 kilometers from La Mancha. The slowness of Rocinante made a nonsense of distance. Well, the farthest his ancestor had gone from La Mancha on all his journeys had been the city of Barcelona, and yet anyone who had read the true history would have thought that Don Quixote had covered the whole immense area of Spain. There is a virtue in slowness which we have lost. Rocinante was of more value for a true traveler than a jet plane. Jet planes were for businessmen.''