A delightful collection of unusual travel stories. Many timely. ( )

The game ended as sunset approached and church bells struck seven. I'm pretty sure we didn't play for a regulation 90 minutes. The thin air at seven-thousand-feet-plus was rough on us boys from the low plains. And we lost decisively – Mexico City 5 (I think), Omaha 2 – but we scored, twice, playing their national pastime on their street. We were breathless, sweaty, filthy, bloody, bruised and totally, deeply, existentially gratified.

I obtained this book as a downloadable freebie from a card I picked up in Starbucks freebie, and then it stayed in iBooks on my iPad for a long time, as I prefer to read ebooks on my Kindle. Finally, however, I was challenged to read and review for the Go Review That Book! group, and I decide to read it on holiday this summer.

Lonely Planet's decision to ask fiction writers to contribute non-fiction travel tales to a book has worked out really well, and I found this book so much better than I had expected! I was hooked from the very first story, a wonderfully nostalgic tale of a road trip to Mexico with a group of friends the summer between school and college, during which they made an unexpected connection with the locals after giving a boy a lift.

There are stories that take place in all corners of the world, ranging across every continent, including Antarctica, and even one place that has never existed. There are encounters with witches and beggars, with criminals in and outside prison, and memories of trips taken long ago with former friends and lovers.

There may have been the odd story that didn't resonate with me, but the vast majority did, and I will end with another of my favourites, a story of a day spent exploring an old mine in Ireland, easily accessible then but long ago blocked off by barbed wire.

I saw light ahead and went towards it. It was falling from up high onto a rock wall, a bright triangular patch of sunlight that threw the jags of rock into high relief. I turned off the flashlight and approached with awe. A green cave landscape was illuminated, a copper lake of turquoise water that glinted in the sunshine, a small shaly beach, a far-flung outcrop of rock, almost white in the glare. You could get to the outcrop by going round the side and crouching low where the rock hung out over the water, but the ground there was scree-like and sloping and the water looked deep.
I was underneath one of the big open shafts. The walls glittered. The water flowed out of the lake, round the rock and away down a channel about three feet across, meandering towards a grand arched darkness in the distance. I'm bad at judging distances, but you could have swum in the lake, rowed a boat. ( )

A 50/50 mix of enjoyable and quickly pass through stories. The topic of travel is a central theme. ( )

Really enjoyed the variety of stories in this book not exactly what I expected. ( )

There are lots of places on the planet that I'd love to visit. I most likely won't make to many, if not most, of them. There's just not the time or the money to see all I'd like to see. And that's where books come in. I've traveled all over the world between the pages of a book and if it's just a vicarious experience, it's been a delight anyway. Don George has collected true travel stories from many of today's highly acclaimed fiction writers in his collection, Better Than Fiction, a collection that allows readers to travel widely through the pens and eyes of their favorite current writers.

As is almost always the case, some of the stories were stronger than others and some of them were of more interest to me as a reader than others. The notion of travel and the destinations were wildly varying as well. Written by fiction writers rather than travel writers, it was surprising to see that some of the offerings were quite weak in narrative structure, coming across as meandering anecdotes with no clear story to them. Some of the stories were very personal, such as Isabel Allende's tale of visiting India and finding the inspiration to celebrate the memory of her daughter by creating a much needed charitable organization. Some of the stories told of traveling into not a different country but a different state of being, such as Joyce Carol Oates' story of a tour through San Quentin. Many of the stories, though, did capture the writers' journeys into cultures not their own and the adventures they stumbled on or, in some cases, caused to happen to them in these foreign places. Because the stories are relatively short, readers can dip into the book when they only have a brief amount of reading time There's no reason to read the tales in order either. It is most assuredly a sampler.

While it was interesting to be introduced to the different writers' voices in these brief snapshots, I'm not certain I've added to my list of places to see before I die nor was I inspired to search out the fiction of anyone I hadn't already read, which was a disappointment but perhaps not wholly fair either since non-fiction travel tales are not the general métier of the selected authors. In general, it was a pleasant and occasionally diverting read but not quite all I expected. ( )