Jan Morris’s Venice is the first travel book we’ve encountered on the Reading group – and one of the few books we’ve read that isn’t a novel. Aside from an enlightening look through The Doors of Perception, and a few encounters with memoir, we’ve concentrated on fiction. And while just about everyone commenting so far seems to have been won over by Morris’s sumptuous descriptions of La Serenissima, there has been some resistance. It’s come from a surprising direction. Some people have expressed a flat dislike of “travel books”.

It had never occurred to me that it might be possible to dislike all travel books. Isn’t it akin to saying you don’t like puddings, or music played on the guitar, or – I don’t know – houses? I can just about understand not wanting to read a Rough Guide for pleasure, although I’ve personally spent many happy, anticipatory hours reading them before loading them into my rucksack. But I hadn’t anticipated an aversion to a tradition of writing stretching from Xenophon to Dave Gorman: one that takes in such diverse ramblers as Marco Polo, William Cobbett and Iain Sinclair.

Now that I’ve encountered the problem, I’m finding it tricky to think of a way round it. I could suggest very good reasons to read, say, Patrick Leigh Fermor or Jonathan Raban, but defending travel writing as a whole is a far trickier proposition. In mulling over the issue, though, I’ve revisited a few of my favourite travel writers and there are some things they can do more easily than writers of fiction. It gets very interesting when an authorial imagination collides with the concrete, physical world.

Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush is all the more delightful because the author and his equally mad companion actually did try to climb one of the world’s toughest and most inaccessible mountains after just one week’s climbing training in Wales – and damn near succeeded. They really did bump into the explorer Wilfred Thesiger, and he really did call them a couple of pansies for sleeping on airbeds.

Bill Bryson’s joke “Bradford’s role in life is to make every place else in the world look better in comparison” is all the funnier because, alas, Bradford. Likewise his laments for his friend Katz in A Walk in the Woods are all the more heartbreaking because we assume he really did have such a wonderful and troubled friend.

The other side of the coin is that good travel writers can also change the way you look at reality. Here, Jan Morris is master. She takes you through her subjects, with all their accreted layers of history, and pops you out on the other side looking at them anew, transformed by a wand-sweep of imagination. This magic act is all the more enjoyable for the knowledge that these newly resonant objects are actually out there, and that you can see them for yourself.

A prime example comes in her descriptions of the vaporetto passenger bus service in Venice. You may think these boats among the most mundane subjects in that city of wonders: they are workmanlike, utilitarian, dumpy even, slow-chugging carriers of bags and tourists. When I first went to Venice, once I’d got over the craft’s surprisingly good value and, you know, the fact that it was a bus on water, I had next to no thoughts about the vaporetto. I was all taken up by what I could see through its salt-flecked windows. I can still barely manage a paragraph …

… But when Jan Morris zeroes in on the vaporetti she takes pages - and makes them seem like the most fascinating things. “The prime passenger carrier of Venice is the water-bus,” she writes. “The first steamboat appeared on the Grand Canal in 1881.” Notice how that “appeared” makes the boats seem near miraculous.

This flourish is quickly amplified with an evocative history explaining that seven “tall-funnelled sister ships” sailed “from the Seine, around the toe of Italy” and were “the first mechanical transport service Venice had ever known”. So she has us thinking of how marvellous the boats must have first appeared – and how strange was that previous quiet world of oars and wood. She fills us in on the old service (“a long communal boat” which was, wonderfully, “not unlike a Viking longship”). She shows gondoliers “plunged” (could there be a better word?) into “alarm” at the coming of steam and going on strike. Even today they maintain a shrine “thanking the Holy Mother for her kindness in ensuring that they were not entirely ruined by the steamboats”.

Already we’ve had a paragraph of strange and exotic history, and she’s barely touched on the boats. After a brief, cheeky aside about nationalisation and the growth of the fleet, we get this:

“Except for the very latest vessels, the whole fleet has been successively modified, redesigned, rebuilt, re-engined, so that each craft, like a great cathedral, is the product of generations of loving hands and skills – a steam-cock from one period, a funnel from another, a wheel-house from a third, all embellished and enhanced by some very fine early twentieth-century life-belts.”

Get me back to Venice so I can look at these marvels! Probably all the vessels today are among those “very latest” – but no matter. It’s enough to know that they were there, these beloved cathedrals, bearing their generations of craft and workmanship.

There’s more to see too. After necessary and interesting practicalities about those surprisingly cheap fares, Morris shows “a vaperetto ignominiously towed towards the shipyard by the stripped and gaunt old steamboat that serves as a tug”. To relieve this sadness comes a lovely human detail. She shows an official on duty gently ensuring, with “a slight downward pressure of his hand and the distant suspicion of a wink”, that a child doesn’t measure too big against the one-metre gauge mark and so escapes paying a fare.

Finally, she shows what I missed on my first visit to the city, but understood after reading Venice: that there is “even a beauty to these vaporetti”. So long as – and I now perish the thought – “you are not inalienably attached to the pictureseque”, you will see the “fine rollicking spirit” that “compels these little ships, when they plunge into the lagoon on a bright windy morning, wallowing deep and threshing hard, with the spray surging about their stems and the helmsman earnest in his little glass cabin”.

It’s glorious. And that’s just the public transport – she does even more with the rest of the city. She helps you see everything anew. And this is what good travel writers can offer. They give you the gift of their eyes, to see the world afresh.