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Travel is often a means of escape, and this year's travel books offer plenty of it. Failed relationships, dead-end jobs and other disappointments infest the current crop like bedbugs in a youth hostel, driving their authors around the globe in search of transformation. The seekers range from bored young drifters to anxiety-stricken middle-agers, motivated by the quixotic hope that cutting loose will stimulate the mind and heal the soul. ''I was ready for Paris,'' Bryce Corbett announces at the beginning of A TOWN LIKE PARIS: Falling in Love in the City of Light (Broadway, paper, $12.95). ''Ready for a change of scene and the shedding of some emotional baggage.'' After a breakup with a longtime girlfriend, the 28-year-old Australian quits his job at Sky News in London and boards the Eurostar for a new life. What follows is a refreshing variation on a shopworn theme: the Anglophone at large in the French capital, coping with the language barrier, inaccessible Gallic women and bad plumbing. Corbett finds a job he isn't ''qualified for, much less interested in,'' lands a hideously furnished flat in the Marais and joins a circle of partygoing fellow expatriates, whom he annoyingly calls the ''Paris Posse.'' It's not quite ''A Moveable Feast,'' and the tone can be smugly self-satisfied, but Corbett's sharp observations lend the tale a dash of elan. Lamenting the decline of Shakespeare and Company into a Left Bank tourist trap, he notes that its ''literary credibility'' has ''long since been replaced by the distinct aroma of upper-middle-class America -- a mixture of Snapple Ice Tea, sweaty Teva sandals and Tommy Hilfiger cologne.'' When Corbett abandons his quest for a French girlfriend and falls in love with an Australian nightclub entertainer he calls ''the Showgirl,'' you can't help wishing him bonne chance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]