Books like Lost on Planet China by J. Maarten Troost

Peter Mayle shares the joys and quirks of settling into a 200‑year‑old stone farmhouse in the Luberon, Provence, exploring local customs, seasonal rhythms, and the region’s culinary delights.

A true‑life comedic travelogue of J. Maarten Troost’s two‑year adventure in Kiribati’s Tarawa, detailing his struggles with heat, unreliable electricity, limited food, and eccentric locals in the South Pacific.

Bill Bryson retraces a journey across Britain, from Bognor Regis to Cape Wrath, uncovering the country’s quirks, charms and changes with humor and keen observation.

Travel memoir of Rory Stewart’s 2002 journey across Afghanistan, showing how tradition, ideology, and allegiance shape life among its people.

Bill Bryson revisits life in America—its quirks, customs, and absurdities—after 20 years abroad, drawing on his Appalachian Trail adventures and Mail on Sunday columns for witty, observational commentary.

The author recounts how he cast aside a stressful Fourth of July family get-together for a trip to Great Britain, during which he confronted offbeat politics and eccentric characters in the nation's pubs, countryside, and cultural locales.

Mary Hunter Austin's first book focuses on the arid and semi-arid regions of California between the High Sierras south of Yosemite, including desert, Death Valley, Mojave Desert, and towns like Jimville, Kearsarge, and Las Uvas.

Charles Dickens’s 1841–42 American journey, as recorded in "American Notes," chronicles his travels from the eastern seaboard through the Great Lakes states, offering his observations on slavery, customs, and the social life of the United States.

A stunningly witty exploration of the American landscape -- not to mention a brilliant comic's mind -- this diary is chock-full of everything you ever wanted to know about Eric Idle, Monty Python, America, and sleeping on a bus. In these pages, the sixth-nicest Python is cheeky, touching, and funny when recounting the riotous tales of his beginnings, his affectionate reminiscences of his fellow Pythons, traveling the world, and taking us backstage at the smash Broadway hit Spamalot.Fascinating, moving, at times even amusing, this book will dramatically improve your sex life, will make you feel intelligent and charming within the first several pages, and after a few chapters, will permanently eliminate all your personal or health problems. So come experience eighty days, 15,750 miles, and forty-nine cities as you never have before!

Annie Hawes and her sister, on the spot by chance, find a stone house in the Italian Riviera and discover that they're here by accident.

Annie Hawes travels through Italy, encountering an irresistible man and trying to adapt to Ligurian culture.