“They are recording the effects of places or movements upon their own particular temperaments - recording the experience rather than the event, as they might make literary use of a love affair, an enigma or a tragedy.” “The best travel writers are not really writing about travel at all,” Morris observed. One is the physical and intellectual trip, of course, the journey through Poland or Greece or Venice, and through the history of those places. The works of classic travel writers, people like Jan Morris, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Theroux, Rebecca West and Herodotus, take readers on two trips at once. (How thrilling to walk the real Chancery Lane after reading it so memorably portrayed in “Bleak House.”) Traveling to London after reading Dickens is great fun, not just for his writing but for his geography. What better way to enhance your trip to Morocco than by seeing it through the experienced eyes of Paul Bowles, and what better opportunity to understand the origins of modern Italy than by reading Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s “The Leopard”?Īnyone thinking of hiking in the wilds of Western Australia - or any woman wanting to make the trip by herself - would only be inspired by first reading Robyn Davidson’s “Tracks,” about her epic excursion from Alice Springs to the coast, accompanied by a dog and four camels. I applaud them, and if I were less haphazard, I would do it, too. Other travelers like to match the material to the trip. My husband feels that his vacation reading - ideally done while stretched out on a chaise by a gentle body of water - is the only time he can really sink into a book without guilt. Not everyone thinks of a book as a security blanket. We took turns reading by flashlight - Michelle read a chapter, and then I did, passing the book back and forth as we sprawled out in the interstices between the luggage and the bags of groceries in our little no-seatbelt fort in the very back of the car. “The Silver Crown” is the story of a girl who receives a shimmery crown on her 10th birthday and is then pursued by mysterious figures with nefarious intent. Reading that book in that car at that time transformed one of the worst parts of traveling - the actual traveling - into an interlude of delight.
What saved us was the single book Michelle produced from her bag, in a hail-Mary literary move: “The Silver Crown,” by Robert C. We were beset by ennui in the way of the sisters in Nancy Mitford’s “Pursuit of Love,” endlessly speculating about what time it was. There were no cellphones to amuse us back then, and the darkness prevented us from flirting with cute boys in other cars. The end of a vacation is an occasion for sadness. Mine was formed at the end of a holiday weekend in middle school in the 1970s, when my friend Michelle and I pretzeled ourselves into her parents’ station wagon for the long, dull ride to New York from Massachusetts. Everyone has their own idea of what it should look like. Now that some of us are planning to travel again, however tentatively, it’s time to consider the delicious question of vacation reading.