Preview Your Destination with a Good Book

Thinking about a trip somewhere? Whether you’ve already booked a long weekend away or are in the early stages of planning a multi-week trip to the other side of the globe, reading fiction set in your destination can give you a the flavor of the place before you even leave home. You can read before you go, or stockpile books and read them during your actual trip.

I always get a kick out of driving through a place just as I’ve reached mention of it in book I’m reading. The first time I remember this happening was on my first international adventure, a guided camping tour of Australia that I took soon after graduating from college. We of the Never Never, by Mrs. Jeannie Gunn, tells the story of a white couple managing an enormous cattle station in the rugged outback landscape 300 miles south of Darwin, Northern Territory at the turn of the 20th century. Reading the story as the gravel highway between Darwin and Ayers Rock unrolled beneath the bus tires transported me out of my plush seat in the climate-controlled vehicle right into the arid, dusty land zooming past outside the windows.

Audiobooks are another great way to get into a new place. On the last few driving trips I’ve taken through the American Southwest, I’ve been sure to pack along a couple of audiobook versions of Tony Hillerman’s wonderful mysteries. His series features Navajo Tribal Policemen Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee, and he uses myriad telling details to evoke the setting with such intensity that I can smell the rain falling on the parched desert of Navajo Country even when I’m holed up in my fog-shrouded house on the coast of northern California.

In 2007 I toured Mesa Verde on my own, then met up with my archaeologist friend Erica at Chaco Canyon. When I packed for the trip, I was disappointed that my local library didn’t have an audiobook of Nevada Barr’s Ill Wind, a Ranger Anna Pigeon mystery set in Mesa Verde that I had read several years before, for me to take along for the Mesa Verde National Park portion of the trip. But they always have a Hillerman on hand, and I had the great luck to find A Thief of Time, one of my favorites of his, in which a woman archaeologist working at Chaco goes missing. Reading about fictional pothunters destroying the picturesque, peaceful ruins with backhoes gave another layer of meaning to my own wanderings through the ruins of the store rooms and living floors and great kivas. As I admired and photographed the amazing stonework of the prehistoric complexes and contemplated the people who built and then walked away from them hundreds of years ago, I understood what might drive a modern-day researcher to try to trace one ancient artist’s work through time and space.

Has the setting of a story you’ve read ever inspired you to take a trip? Do you tap into fiction when you’re in the planning stages, or do you take along fiction set in your destination?

I had so much else going on when I was getting ready for my February 2008 trip to Maui that I didn’t get a chance to look for fiction to read ahead of time or even take along with me. I went to the Borders Express bookstore in Kiehei soon after I arrived and scanned their shelf of “Local Authors.” There wasn’t much fiction, and I found only one mystery: Murder on Molokai, by Chip Hughes. I’ll review it in my next post.