“Ghost Train to the Eastern Star,” by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008, 496 pages, cloth $28.00, ISBN-978-0-618-41887-9)

When my copy of Paul Theroux’s new travel book, “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star,” arrived in the mail, I thought: Oh god, can’t this guy do anything in this world but ride around on trains and write books? If you look over the list of Theroux’s endeavors, you’ll count 14 books of nonfiction, one book of criticism and 27 books of fiction. This is an astonishing list, and a little creepy too. How can this man have time for anything in his life except writing? How can he possibly have time to sit around and drink beers with his friends? Do the dishes and mow the lawn? Eat? An encounter with the work of Paul Theroux is a bit like watching the Williams sisters play tennis — I’m more than a little bored watching them win.

But this book — “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” — I loved it, beyond my better judgment. It’s been a long time since I read anything for pleasure. Usually I read for study, and I read with a pen, marking passages and ideas I can’t live without, which I usually forget before bedtime. And I read ploddingly, drifting off to sleep and waking with the book closed on my chest. I read Theroux’s new book with a pen, too, marking passages I can’t live without, but I raced through it all with speed, and I did it for pleasure. I have a whole stack of other books I should have been reading instead of this one, and work to do, which I avoided, in order to sit down in a good chair and ride the rails with Paul Theroux.

In “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star,” Theroux retraces a journey he made thirty years ago and published as “The Great Railway Bazaar.” He started in England and made a long loop through Eastern Europe heading south, across the middle east, through India, Sri Lanka, then on to Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, into China, up to Japan and over the Trans-Siberian railway back home. Astonishing. Most people who dream of such a journey get one shot at it, or no shot at all — and here Theroux has gone and done it twice (not to mention the dozens of other epic journeys he’s made in his life).

I love the opening pages in which Theroux offers some of the philosophy and patterns of the traveler’s life, ideas he has accumulated across a life lived on the road. Travel is one of the “laziest ways on earth of passing the time,” he tells us, and travelers amount to little more than “fugitive freeloaders.” They are (we are) the “greediest kind of romantic voyeur,” and suffer, pathologically, from “vanity, presumption, and mythomania.” You’d think with all this bad press, travelers would shy away from travel, and certainly shy away from travel literature — but no.

Somehow a life on the road, faced with such fringe and useless qualities, is all the more attractive. Theroux gives at least a partial answer when he admits, too, that at its best, “travel seems to exist outside of time, as though the years of travel are not deducted from your life,” and it holds the “magical possibility of reinvention.” You get to imagine, he tells us, that you are “different from the person you are . . .” Who can deny the seduction of travel when it is both the fountain of youth and an opportunity to become anyone you want to be.

I have two complaints about this book, which are hardly worth mentioning. The first is that Theroux embarks on this journey to follow the ghost of his younger self. He lists the many great travelers who never retraced their old routes — Thesiger, Darwin, Greene, Conrad, Chatwin, Stevenson, Twain and others — and urges that they should have, for they would have discovered “a different place, with ominous changes, and a new book.” The focus, however, is mostly on the here and now, and Theroux rarely gets around to looking back at that old self flanking him. Besides, that everything will be different on this second journey is obvious, is it not? It takes Theroux nearly 500 pages to conclude that not only had the places changed, but he had too. Is that a revelation? He also states that he realized on this journey that travel is “a way of living [his] life,” which I imagine he knew before he went. Does a writer as fine as this, and writing as fine as this, need such a hollow framework? I don’t think so. If the subtitle were as honest as: “yet another book traveling around on trains,” I think his readers would still go with him.

Secondly, Theroux spends all his energy on the places lining the southern part of his journey (the first 459 pages). When he arrives in Vladivostok and boards the Trans- Siberian Express, he races back home, covering 6,000 miles in only 36 pages. This is precisely the part of his route I wanted to read about most. Perhaps, as others have said before, I will have to travel that road for myself.

The point is though, if you’re a traveler of any sort and you care about the world and its people, “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star” is a book you should read. Even better, it’s a book you should collect and shelve next to all your other books by Thervoux. The way I see it, this man is a phenomenon, and you may as well get to know him while he’s still here.

Kurt Caswell won the 2008 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize for “An Inside Passage,” due out from the University of Nebraska Press. He teaches creative writing and literature in the Honors College at Texas Tech University.