Prague's transition In the early 1990s, young North Americans flocked to Prague for the authentic Bohemian lifestyle-the chance to live on the cheap in one of the most beautiful cities in the world. Since then, however, rampant westernization has replaced most of the romance.

Jeffrey Tayler's Glory in a Camel's Eye: A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert (Houghton Mifflin) tells how he became intrigued by the romance of Islam's rich cultural past in general, and by the Bedouin and the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula in particular.

Many are touting Suketu Mehta's Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (Knopf Canada, $39.95) as a potential classic. Mehta spent his early childhood in Bombay but left at 14 for the U.S., where he's now a much-decorated journalist and writer of short fiction. Returning 21 years later (to "Mumbai"--he sees the name change as a purely political ploy and so refuses to play along), he finds himself in the place he's no longer of. This at times slightly surreal situation calls to mind V. S.

Simon Winchester's book about Calcutta is actually titled Simon Winchester's Calcutta ($20.95), such is Winchester's reputation as a travel writer and historian of the bizarre. This is an anthology of excerpts, part of a new Lonely Planet series set up to compete with the popular Travelers' Tales one (to which Winchester also contributes). The pieces chosen are mostly by names you would expect to see: Rudyard Kipling, Paul Theroux, V. S.

On first sight, the 400-page The Canada Chronicles (Summit Studios, $50) seemed like one of the last things I would want to lug around if I were ever to hitchhike across this country.

Don't consider packing Lonely Planet's The Travel Book ($56.95) on your next trip--it's better suited for a coffee table than a backpack. Subtitled A Journey Through Every Country in the World, this is the perfect Christmas present for world-traveller wannabes.

Roger Took's Running With Reindeer: Encounters in Russian Lapland (McArthur & Co., $18.95) is of interest because few of us have ever read a book on this subject. The same might be said of The Fellowship of Ghosts: A Journey Through the Mountains of Norway, by Paul Watkins (Simon & Schuster Canada, $36).

Since the centenary of the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-'99, books continue to appear, recounting the experiences of people trying to re-create the incredible journey made by 100,000 or so stampeders. In River Time: Racing the Ghosts of the Klondike Gold Rush (NeWest Press, $29.95), John Firth, a prominent figure in Whitehorse, made the trip with his nephews, following the path of his own grandfather.

Australians, generally speaking, are some of the world's most prolific travellers. One of the craziest travel adventures hatched from Down Under can be found in Off the Rails (Penguin Australia, $24), in which Tim Cope and Chris Hatherly describe their experiences cycling 10,000 kilometres across Russia, Mongolia, and China.

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.

A guide to New York City is only ever useful in the way that a guide to pregnancy is useful: it allows the comforting illusion that you might actually be able to control the experience.

Most people who write travel books about famous authors' homes believe, mistakenly, that authors are celebrities. Or, at the very least, they value writers' life stories more than their works. Art Seamans is different, and that's what's special about The Dead One Touched Me From the Past: A Walk With Writers Through the Centuries (Breakwater Books, $18.95).

Retirement in Fort St. James doesn't really have a ring to it. There is nothing relaxing, after all, about being housebound due to weather day after day as you endure television reruns and the odd power outage, "when once again a loaded logging truck slides into the power pole at the corner of Loop Road in Vanderhoof...and plunges [you] into hours of chilly darkness." No, Northern B.C. winters aren't exactly Club Med.

Grand Centaur Station by Larry Frolick (McClelland & Stewart Ltd., $26.99) is a combination mystery and travel book Its subtitle is Unruly Living With the New Nomads of Central Asia, but as common sense should have told Frolick, and as he discovers, there are no such people. The mystery is "What is this book actually about?"

Finally, someone has produced a series of pocket guides that actually fit in the pocket. Luxe City Guides, concertinas of stiff card currently covering Hong Kong, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore, Bangkok, and Bali, collapse to a mere 7.5 by 15 centimetres. They're designed to be worn in the shirt pocket, logo outward, to show you're not one of the herd.