{"id":1845,"date":"2014-04-27T10:53:13","date_gmt":"2014-04-27T14:53:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1845"},"modified":"2014-04-27T10:53:13","modified_gmt":"2014-04-27T14:53:13","slug":"backpack-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1845","title":{"rendered":"Backpack Books"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Dickens\"<\/a>

Dickens’s writing retreat in Rochester, England (photo: vweisfeld)<\/p><\/div>\n

Books written in exotic locales have a zing of extra appeal. What would Elizabeth Catton\u2019s The Luminaries<\/a><\/em> be without Hokitika, Graham Greene\u2019s The Quiet American<\/a><\/em> without steamy Saigon, or Dickens’s Oliver Twist <\/a><\/em>without London? If we\u2019ve read these books, we\u2019ve been<\/em> to these places, at least in our imaginations. And, sometimes, only in our imaginations. The late Gabriel Garcia M\u00e1rquez created such a detailed portrait of the fictional town of Macondo, every one of us who read One Hundred Years of Solitude<\/a><\/em> feels down in our bones that we\u2019ve been there. And, none of us want to visit the bleak Mexican borderland of Cormac McCarthy\u2019s The Crossing<\/a><\/em> or, God save us, Blood Meridian<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

When sense of place is absent in a novel, we miss it. When place details are wrong, we notice. A few years ago, I read the thriller Gorky Park<\/em> and enjoyed the first half a lot. It\u2019s set in Moscow and created a vivid mental picture of the city. Then the action moved to New York, and the details were just . . . off, in ways I don\u2019t remember now. Finally, the picture of New York became so discordant it threatened the credibility of the Moscow scenes.<\/p>\n

Brooklyn-based publisher Akashik Books celebrates the importance of setting with its anthologies of place-based noir stories<\/a> (Brooklyn Noir, Boston Noir, Trinidad Noir, Delhi Noir, Copenhangen Noir<\/em>, and so on), new original writing set in distinct locales. A requirement for Akashik\u2019s Mondays are Murder<\/a> flash fiction series\u2014\u201cto get your week off to a dark start\u201d\u2014is that stories \u201cbe set in a distinct location of any neighborhood in any city, anywhere in the world, but it should be a story that could only be set in [that] neighborhood.\u201d Such focus is essential for writers and brings their stories to life. Paradoxically, by being specific about places and people, writing becomes more universal, a point made by Donald Maass in his helpful Writing 21st Century Fiction<\/a>. Generic places and stock, stereotypical characters don\u2019t engage readers.<\/p>\n

When I travel I take along books set in the place, hoping to intensify and enrich the travel experience. A time or two, that has backfired. The biography of Vlad the Impaler I carried with me to Romania last fall was I must say too<\/em> intense and specific in its gruesome details, so that I abandoned it, half-read. Traveling in New Mexico and binge-reading a suitcase full of Tony Hillermans revealed such a repetitive story arc that I never picked up another. This was not something I\u2019d ever noticed reading one or two a year.<\/p>\n

An entertaining guidebook for place-based reading, or for armchair travelers wanting to steep themselves in a locale or rekindle memories of past visit is Nancy Pearl\u2019s Book Lust to Go: Recommended Reading for Travelers, Vagabonds, and Dreamers (2010).<\/a> Pearl recommends both fiction and nonfiction books for territories as wide as Oceana and as focused as her home town, Detroit. Alphabetically, she roams the world from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. It will help me pick books for two trips to Canada this summer!<\/p>\n

And, if you\u2019re really into it\u2014check out the Geoff Sawers\u2019s literary maps<\/a> of the U.S. and U.K., showing who writes where.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Books written in exotic locales have a zing of extra appeal. What would Elizabeth Catton\u2019s The Luminaries be without Hokitika, Graham Greene\u2019s The Quiet American without steamy Saigon, or Dickens’s Oliver Twist without London? If we\u2019ve read these books, we\u2019ve … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[62,122,174,60,78,29],"tags":[31,30,28,414],"class_list":["post-1845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-authors","category-book","category-first-draft-blog","category-storytelling","category-travel","category-writing","tag-author","tag-novel","tag-writers","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-tL","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1845"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1850,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1845\/revisions\/1850"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}