I almost never read books that sit in the travel writing section of a bookshop, yet many of those I love share a sense of place – in particular the mystique of places beyond wherever one happens to be from. How nice to be a reader of books, so that one can indulge a lifelong wanderlust without even bothering to get out of bed.

One lustful and wandering writer who did get out of bed was Henry Miller. For those in need of literary vitamin D to counter the winter gloom, I recommend his sun-blessed The Colossus of Maroussi. At the onset of the second world war, Miller found himself in Greece – a period of his life that left him spiritually transformed. Reading his account of those few months is like bathing in supernal light. Everything resplends. He doesn’t even bother to chuck in the sex scenes that made his other books notorious – there’s too much going on in the Aegean sky, the wine-dark sea and the Homeric landscapes.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘A strong desire to wander’ … Bashō, painted by Hokusai. Photograph: The History Collection/Alamy Stock Photo

Three hundred years before Miller and the Beat writers he inspired, the Japanese haiku poet and dharma bum Bashō was possessed by a very On the Road kind of inspiration. “I myself have been tempted for a long time by the cloud-moving wind – filled with a strong desire to wander,” he writes in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, before roaming the wilds of 17th-century Japan and rendering all he sees as elegant haiku.

Here at the fag end of modernity, the wilds are no longer quite so wild. Not only are the world’s beauty spots black with tourists clutching their phones, experiences too – even the experience of wanderlust – feel inevitably well trodden. The young female travellers in Lucy Sweeney Byrne’s recent story collection Paris Syndrome, who wander about in Mexico, Texas and elsewhere, are as hungry for authentic experience and meaningful connection as they are for exotic landscapes. Another recent book, Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse, follows the author through Paris, Tokyo and Venice as she examines art and literature to understand how women such as Virginia Woolf, George Sand and Jean Rhys related to the cities they inhabited.

Arguably the finest and unquestionably the funniest book ever written about travel, Geoff Dyer’s Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, so extravagantly upends all expectations one might have about travel writing – and, indeed, about any other genre – that it breaks off to form its own singular, endlessly revisitable literary island. I’d quote the best bits, only that’s the thing: Yoga consists purely of best bits – a journey on which you’re always where you want to be.

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And how can I avoid the obvious choice: Friedrich Nietzsche. Wanderlust may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of the philosopher, yet his books abound with imagery of nature and wandering: clear skies, open seas, bracing winds and – above all – mountains. With their cold and exalting air, mountains provide a recurrent metaphor for the scary heights of his thought. The Nietzsche of Human, All Too Human, though, is not scary but wounded and tentative, and he proffers some evocative wanderer’s prose. Check out aphorism 628: it’s one of the loveliest things in all of literature.

• Threshold by Rob Doyle is published by Bloomsbury on 23 January.