Literary Guides

One of the things I like to do when I am planning a trip somewhere is to immerse myself in the place through reading. I sometimes use the fiction itself as guidebooks for specific places I want to visit in a country or region. Where was that hillside field in A Room with a View or the cave in A Passage to India?

And we were surely one of the first to blaze the Mayle Trail with our dog-eared and highlighted dummy copy of Peter Mayle's autobiographical A Year in Provence that our editor friend Dona gave us to read for our trip to the south of France before the book had even been published! The afternoon we spent lunching at L'Auberge de la Loube is still one of our favorite culinary memories.

I also like to read novels set in my destination while I am actually traveling there. It helps to keep you in the moment and fills the void while you are sitting on a train or ferry or waiting on line to get into a museum. I remember being on a train going through Germany reading The Eagle has Landed and being so consumed by the intrigue that when the conductor knocked on the car door to collect my ticket I jumped up half expecting him to be in the uniform of the Gestapo.

Bodmin Moor in Cornwall

England of course is the perfect literary guidebook destination. Being a huge fan of English literature anyway, I often travel there solely to visit the scenes in the books I love and once I get there I can simply reread the novels of Austen, the Bronte sisters and Du Maurier, Christie and EF Benson on the very grounds they immortalized in print.

But I especially like to read historical fiction. You get geography and history all in one package. James Michener is perfect for that. I read his Hawaii while in Hawaii and his Alaska in - you guessed it! One of my all-time favorite books is Michener's The Source which I read long before I went to Israel. It probably is single-handedly responsible for my fascination with archaeology. But I loved it even more when we actually visited Tel Megiddo which served as the book's inspiration while touring the Holy Land last October.

I was given a few books by knowing friends before I moved to South Africa such as The Fate of Africa and Mandela's A Long Walk to Freedom. And I just joined a book and movie club which concentrates on stories about and/or set in South Africa. But it was on an expat blog that I was reminded of the next book I plan to read. It is set in South Africa and written by none other than my favorite historical novelist James Michener. It is called The Covenant.

Amazon's synopsis is as follows, "Adventurers, scoundrels and missionaries. The best and worst of two continents carve an empire out of the vast wilderness that is to become South Africa. For hundreds of years, their rivalries and passions spill across the land. From the first Afrikaners to the powerful Zulu nation, and the missionaries who lived with both--all of them will influence and take part in the wars and politics that will change a nation forever."  Sounds good!