Paul Theroux celebrates 50 years of reading and travel in this inspired and generously illustrated miscellany -- a ready and compulsively readable guide to great authors, great places and, naturally, his own work. He shows off with chapters variously titled: Writers Who Wrote About Places They Never Visited, Travel As An Ordeal and Memorable Descriptions From Travelers. Theroux mixes excerpts from the best of his own work with selections from fellow travelers including Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Johnson, Evelyn Waugh, Susan Sontag, Charles Dickens, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Bruce Chatwin, Freya Stark and Graham Greene. Thereoux calls it a vade-mecum: a "book for ready reference; a useful object, constantly carried on one's person."  (TVL513, $14.95)