With a few exceptions,

I have found travel books tedious.
The few good ones tend to be by people with an anthropological sensibility,
or actual anthropologists such as Colin Turnbull and Nigel Barley.
Often they are just a chronological list
of White Mens' experiences in exotic places.
But in one such book (by William Dalrymple)
I came across this wonderful paragraph:

Good looks have been shared out unevenly among the Turks. 
Their men are almost all handsome, with dark, supple skin and strong features:
good bones, sharp eyes and tall masculine bodies. 
But the women share their menfolk’s pronounced features in a most unflattering way. 
Very few are beautiful. Their noses are too large, their chins too prominent.
Baggy wraps conceal pneumatic bodies.
Here must lie the reason for the Turks’ easy drift out of heterosexuality.