Book review: The New York Times, 36 Hours, World (3 /36 /365)

When travelling on a tight schedule, one of the biggest challenges is deciding how to spend your precious time in each destination. How do you see Paris in just two days, for example? The answer is: you don't. Instead, your best option is to rely on a credible friend or guide to suggest a few ideas to capture the feel of the place.

Enter The New York Times' three-volume 36 Hours box set, which, following from its regional Taschen travel guides, is the paper's latest and most comprehensive to date. Edited by Barbara Ireland, it pulls together the best of the newspaper's 36 Hours columns, which have been providing curated guides to spending 36 hours in a city since 2002. Three volumes span 365 destinations around the globe - the idea being to have enough inspiration for each day of the year.

These guides are not intended to be exhaustive lists of key tourist attractions. Instead, seasoned travel writers offer their personal suggestions, be it a local bar, a hidden park or the one gallery not to be missed. This gives them a clear focus, unlike other generic guides on the market, which aim to cover a bit of everything and inevitably fail.

The soft-cover books are both tactile and visual - brought to life with fresh illustrations and vivid photography. Their alphabetical ordering by city is not immediately intuitive, meaning you'll stumble from Abu Dhabi to Agra, Biarritz to Big Sur; perhaps a deliberate effort to help us discover places we weren't looking for. However, index tabs make for easy page flipping and a regional index gives you the option to map out longer itineraries.