Cait recently posted a very valid and not at all sarcastic list of the dire risks of reading too much. She's right, people, being a bookworm is dangerous. As well as giving you issues such as thinking too much and having opinions, it prompts you to SPEND ALL YOUR MONEY ON BOOKS, or if not on books, book-related activities.
As for me, I get terrible bookish wanderlust.
Because ten is a nice round number ... Ten Places I'd Eat My Head to Go, Because of Books.
[Images are not mine, obviously, because I haven't visited most of these places. Cry.]
1. NEW YORK
[source] |
Well, this one is pretty obvious. I have actually been to New York twice! The first time I was seven and I remember nothing. The second time I was twelve and I:
a) went to the Bronx Zoo,
b) went into the Met but left when we saw we needed to pay, and
c) spent ages queuing outside Hollister and got a dress and a jumper.
I WAS LITERALLY ON FIFTH AVENUE AND I WENT TO HOLLISTER.
I DIDN'T GO TO THE MET.
I WASTED TIME IN A ZOO.
I'm so so so so ashamed.
Recently watching Friends, Penelope and What a Girl Wants has reinforced my desperate desire to live in New York for a little while. But also BOOKS.
Central Park South // [source] |
I walked east to the library (the lions! I stood still for a moment, like a returning solider catching my first glimpse of home) and then I turned up Fifth Avenue -- streetlamps on, still fairly busy, though it was emptying out for the night -- up to Central Park South. As tired as I was, and cold, still my heart stiffened to see the Park, and I ran across Fifty-Seventh (Street of Joy!) to the leafy darkness. The smells, the shadows, even the dappled pale trunks of the plane trees lifted my spirits.
//
Everything blazing, everything sweet. They were playing old Bob Dylan, more than perfect for narrow Village streets close to Christmas and the snow whirling down in big feathery flakes, the kind of winter where you want to be walking down a city street with you arm around a girl on an old record cover.
~ both from The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Often have I attempted to explain the brilliance of The Goldfinch; always have I failed. You guys know how much I love that book, because after all I never shut up about it, do I? One of its myriad beautiful qualities is the wonderful, vivid settings. New York, New York.
I love New York. You can pop out of the Underworld in Central Park, hail a taxi, head down Fifth Avenue with a giant hellhound loping along behind you, and nobody even looks at you funny.
~ Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian by Rick Riordan
I have a proper thing for characters who love their hometowns -- it really endears me to them -- and one of my favourite things about the Percy Jackson series is how much he loves New York.
2. PARIS
Hotel de Ville // [source] |
One of my (many) favourite things about Les Mis was how awfully much Victor Hugo loves Paris. Just as I love characters who love their cities/countries/homes, I love to read authors writing settings that they clearly love themselves. He loves every inch of Paris, the people, the streets, the sewage system ...
Paris is a sum total. Paris is the ceiling of the human race. All this prodigious city is an epitome of dead and living manners and customs. He who sees Paris, seems to see all history through with the sky and constellations in the intervals.
3. FINLAND
Pispala, Tampere // [source] |
This is the newest addition to my list, brought to my attention by Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami.
There were forests on both sides of the highway. He got the impression that the whole country was covered, from one end to the other, by a rich green. Most of the trees were white birch, with occasional pines, spruce, and maples. ... The air felt purer here than in Helsinki, like it was freshly made. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves of the white birches, and the boat made an occasional clatter as it slapped against the pier. Birds cried out somewhere, with clear, concise calls.
I went into this book fully expecting to get wanderlust for Japan, where it's mostly set, but the descriptions (or rather, bland non-descriptions) of Tokyo and Nagoya had no effect on me. I think that was maybe the point. In contrast, Tsukuru's trip to Finland was vivid and beautiful and I want one.
4. LONDON
Trafalgar Square // [source] |
Along with New York this is the place on this list I've visited. Like New York, I'd love to live there for a bit. Unlike New York, I actually made the most of my time there (you can read about my most recent exploits here and here).
I think the first books that made me desperate to visit were the Threads trilogy by Sophia Bennett (which I LOVE). They're set in London. The main characters just casually meet up in the V&A! My V&A dreams were realised once in 2012 when I visited an exhibition of ballgowns (I died. Repeatedly) but I want to go again and again and again!
More recently JK Rowling's crime series, the Cormoran Strike novels, have incited my London love. Cormoran loves London a lot and the settings are so vividly described. Take me there.
5. PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND
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You know, because I frigging never shut up about them, that I'm obsessed with I really love the Anne of Green Gables series by LM Montgomery. And, amongst the trillion reasons to love them, the setting towers!
[source] |
Montgomery loves PEI. Anne loves PEI. The descriptions of the scenery are stunning. I have heard Canada is an amazingly beautiful country and I want to go there so badly.
It was a shore that knew the magic and mystery of storm and star. There is a great solitude about such a shore. The woods are never solitary -- they are full of whispering, beckoning, friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul, forever moaning of some great, unshareable sorrow, which shuts it up into itself for all eternity. We can never pierce its infinite mystery -- we may only wander, awed and spell-bound, on the outer fringe of it. The woods call to us with a hundred voices, but the sea has only one -- a mighty voice that drowns our souls in its majestic music. The woods are human, but the sea is the company of the archangels.
~ Anne's House of Dreams
6. AMSTERDAM
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I was too disoriented by my surroundings to listen very closely and with almost painfully heightened senses I stirred at the potato mess with my fork and felt the strangeness of the city pressing in all around, smells of tobacco and malt and nutmeg, cafe walls the melancholy brown of an old leatherbound book and then beyond, dark passages and brackish water lapping, low skies and old buildings all leaning against each other with a moody, poetic, edge-of-destruction feel, the cobblestoned loneliness of a city that felt -- to me, anyway -- like a place where you might come to let the water close over your head.
[source] |
Bells, bells. the streets were white and deserted. Frost glittered on tiled rooftops; outside, on the Herengracht, snow danced and flew. A flock of black birds was cawing and swooping over the canal, the sky was hectic with them, great sideways sweeps and undulations as a single, intelligent body, eddying to and fro, and their movement seemed to pass into me on almost a cellular level, white sky and whirling snow and the fierce gusting wind of poets.
~ both from The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Well, if you thought we'd get through a post with only one mention of The Goldfinch, YOU WERE MISTAKEN! Basically I want to visit all the European cities. But, Amsterdam, man.
7. BARCELONA
La Rambla // [source] |
I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the early summer, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Mónica in a wreath of liquid copper.
The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón is a really great book and it very much put Barcelona on my radar. I've been to Spain twice, once to Madrid -- a short and exceptionally badly organised school trip, but enough to make me desperate to go back -- and once to the beautiful coastal town of Roses. We flew to Barcelona for that holiday ... but driving out of the city by night does not count.
Barcelona Cathedral // [source] You guys know I'm a tad obsessed with cathedrals. |
Anyway, Shadow is a wonderful gothic novel set in 1945. Whilst I cannot visit that Barcelona, I'd love to see today's city of art, architecture and culture.
8. WALES
Barmouth // [source] |
This is a weird one, because who wants to go to Wales, right? No one, that's who, it's wet and full of sheep. In Britain it's considered the boring tiny part of the UK that we don't really talk about. At least, that's what I thought ... until I read How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn.
In and out of the sunlight, under the shadow of the trees, into their coolnesses, where leaf mould was soft with richness and held a whispering of the smells of a hundred years that had grown and gone, through the lanes of wild rose that were red with blown flower, up past the flowering berry bushes, through the pasture that was high to the knees, and clinging, and that hissed at us with every step, up beyond the mossy rocks where the little firs made curtseys, and up again, to the briars, and the oaks, and the elms, where there was peace, and the sound of grasshoppers striking their flints with impatience, and birds playing hide and seek, and the sun blinding hot upon us, and the sky, plain bright blue.
This is one of my all time top 5 favourite books, though I feel like I rarely talk about it. It's unreasonably beautiful and wonderful and passionate and compelling and all the adjectives, OK? OK.
There is a look in the eyes of a man in love that will have you in fits unless you are in love yourself. If you are, you will feel something move inside you to be of help to him, to try and have him happy even if there is no chance for you.
This look was in his eyes. You will see part of it in the eyes of sheep fastened to the board and waiting for the knife. The other part you will only see in the eyes of a good man who has put his heart in the hands of a girl. It is a light that is rarely of the earth, a radiance that is holy, a warming, happy agony that do shine from inside and turn what it touches into something of paradise.
That one wasn't even about the scenery. Couldn't resist. I have an intense craving to reread this book.
9. THE AMAZON
Sacha Lodge, Ecuador // [source] |
Do we have any Eva Ibbotson fans in the room? She was one of my favourite authors when I was younger -- HER BOOKS ARE SO GOOD -- and Journey to the River Sea is an adventure along the Amazon. I can't remember that much about the book, except desperately wanting to make the journey myself. As of February I am a denizen of South America (I went to Chile), but I want to go back and go everywhere!
10. VENICE
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Prague sits at the very top of my European Bucket List (and just general travel bucket list, in fact), but Venice is a close second. For one thing I'm obsessed with the idea of Italy, especially ITALIAN ART HOLD ME (and Italian FOOD hello), and Venice is a city built on water. !!!
Bridge of Sighs // [source] |
But even before I was wise about Venetian art and culture, I read The Thief Lord by Cornelia Funke, and it was incredible (cannot wait to return to her books this year!). This may be the book from this list I read longest ago, so I think it's fair to say Venice is my original Bookish Wanderlust destination.
If only I had an unlimited budget, eh?
~***~
What's been on your travel bucket list for longest? Did a book do it to you? Are there any places you've visited because of books? Tell me your stories!