The past few years a number of writers, including theologians as important as Shirley MacLaine, have published books about pilgrimages to such places as Santiago de Compostela in Spain or Canterbury in England. A serious example, not at all MacLaine-like, is Kerry Egan's Fumbling: A Pilgrimage Tale of Love, Grief, and Spiritual Renewal on the Camino de Santiago (Doubleday Canada, $32.95), but it's the exception.

Few if any of these writers were themselves actual pilgrims; they were only pilgrimage re-enactors--trekkers really. The genius of Katherine Govier's book Solo: Writers on Pilgrimage (McClelland & Stewart, $24.99) is that she hasn't asked assorted literary figures to affect any degree of devotion or spirituality whatsoever. She simply wants them to write of destinations they've always wanted to get to and have now finally experienced. Although one contributor, American nonfiction writer Mark Kurlansky, does set out for Santiago, he does so only to hear the music at the other end.

More typical are Margaret Atwood, who gets to Beechy Island in the Arctic to gaze at the famous Franklin Expedition graves, and the Czech novelist Ivan Klima, who revisits the site of the Nazi concentration camp where he grew up. The latter illustrates the fact that the arduousness of some of these secular pilgrimages is more psychological than physical. Douglas Coupland goes his own bizarre way as usual. As though deliberately misunderstanding or rejecting the point of the exercise, he writes not of a destination or even a journey but of his boyish love of air travel generally.

For Govier, a novelist with a range of several fictional octaves, Solo follows naturally on Without a Guide: Contemporary Women's Travel Adventures, an anthology she edited a decade ago. Both books seem to invite comparison with the activities of Travelers' Tales, the San Francisco travel-book publisher whose various little specialties include "spiritual travel" and women's travel. The company, founded and run by James O'Reilly and Larry Habegger, who've been collaborating on a syndicated weekly travel column for nearly 20 years, also deals in food-related travel, travel humour, travel narratives, travel classics, and travel guides. But its best-known brand is the Travelers' Tales series.

The latest volume--Travelers' Tales India (distributed by Publishers Group Canada, $29.95)--is typical. It's edited, as many of them are, by O'Reilly and Habegger. Its audience is Americans who wish to travel in India but aren't prepared to read a number of books that might prove long or difficult. The result is a fat hodgepodge of excerpts, with such useful apparatus as a bibliography and a glossary but also an overabundance of sidebars whose annoyance factor is approximately that of pop-ups on the Net. The writers are authors and journalists, past and present, famous and obscure. But the roster does include some of the finest practitioners of travel narrative.

There are four bits, for example, from the work of the Scots travel writer William Dalrymple, author of such important books about India as City of Djinns, From the Holy Mountain and The Age of Kali, all published in the 1990s. There's also a passage from A Goddess in the Stones, one of the last published works by a monumental figure in travel writing, Norman Lewis: the only book I know on India's minority tribal peoples. Bringing such writers to people's attention is a worthy effort. But the rest of Travelers' Tales India is largely magazine and newspaper journalism.