Books set in places where we have traveled and read solely for that criterion.
Lacey
809 books
14 friends
14 friends
Saturday's
2250 books
67 friends
67 friends
Andy
70 books
16 friends
16 friends
John
82 books
2526 friends
2526 friends
Themis-Athena (Lioness at Large)
546 books
365 friends
365 friends
Jenny
76 books
16 friends
16 friends
Sarah
13856 books
227 friends
227 friends
Sally
6489 books
519 friends
519 friends
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I started voting on this list, but I've given up. I've travelled to quite a few places, but I don't know that I've ever read a book solely because I've travelled to the place in which it was set. Also, I've been to a few places partly because I've read a book set there (for example, Lyme Regis in Dorset) but even then I can't say that I've travelled somewhere solely because it was the location of a book I've read.
Yes, it's certainly a bit blurred at the edges -- or gets to be that if you don't take the "solely" part strictly literally. For the moment I'm limiting myself to:* reads that were directly inspired by travel to the location of their setting ... as in "read because I knew I was going there" (e.g., Lampedusa's Leopard and Siren, which I started shortly before and finished during a trip to Sicily, Henry James's Europeans, which I read during a trip to Boston, Quindlen's Imagined London, read during a trip primarily devoted to visits to London's literary locations, Matt Ruff's Fool on the Hill, read immediately prior to a 1-year stay in Ithaca, or Connelly's Angels Flight, read on the flight which initiated a lengthy stay in Los Angeles),
* books actually bought at the place where they are set and read shortly after the purchase (e.g., the Brontë, Chatsworth/Devonshire and Wordsworth bios, Austen's letters [bought in Bath, which a fair bit of her correspondence actually deals with], and Robertson's And the Land Lay Still),
* books whose first read was directly inspired by a (then-)recently-concluded trip to their respective locations (e.g. Brontë's Shirley, Scott's Kenilworth or Woolf's Orlando),
* or books otherwise discovered primarily because they are set in a location I love and have traveled to more than once (e.g., Tony Hillerman's mysteries, Sacred Clowns was the first of which I read, or Caleb Carr's Italian Secretary).
If I started to include rereads occasioned by travel or books that I happened to already have read by the time I went to visit the location where they are set, or books set in locations I'd visited previously but which I would have read anyway, regardless where they are set, I'd probably despair fairly soon as well ... but I have a feeling that is NOT what this list is intended for in any event!
I could probably expand my list on that analysis, TA. Let me think ... I read Steinbeck's "Cannery Row" after I went to Monterey and Caleb Carr's "The Alienist" after buying it in NYC. I also started reading S.J. Rozan after buying one of her books when I was in New York. This year I read Shakespeare and Company and A Moveable Feast before a visit to Paris and Mary Stewart's Madam, Will You Talk? before I went to Provence. I also bought a copy of Memoirs of Hadrian in the gift shop at Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli. And in the past, like you, I bought Jane Austen's letters (and, if I remember correctly, Claire Tomalin's biography of Austen) when I was in Bath.
Sounds like a plan ... (but then, I didn't create this list -- now I'm really curious to find out whether Lacey says this is all in keeping with what she had intended)!I envy you for having read A Moveable Feast directly in connection with a trip to Paris -- that's how it should be experienced! I read it on a trip to the German North Sea coast ... which did make for a bit of an incongruous experience, though fortunately it marred neither the pleasure of the trip nor that of the read. :)










ETA: Also, fiction only, or is nonfiction welcome as well?