Great information about visiting the birthplace/ official museum/ favorite bar of literary icons such as Austen, Shakespeare, Poe, Christie and more. I was able to add some interesting side trips to a visit to New York. ( )

An excellent and engaging guide for the bookish traveller. Hopefully, this will be expanded upon, though. ( )

When I first received "Novel Destinations", I wasn't sure what to expect. Being a Sherlock Holmes fan, I've seen many of the books that trace the steps Sherlock would have taken both during his time, and in current day. Because of this, I wasn't sure if the book would cover the travels of our favorite literary subjects, or those of their authors. Maybe both. Just to let you know, if you haven't already read this book, it is the travels of the authors that is covered.
This is a reference book that you are much more apt to browse on occasion rather than read cover to cover. A lot of information is packed in here, and it doesn't lend itself to straight through reading. Included are listings for authors houses, favorite vacation spots, and even bars and clubs that were frequented by the literati. You'll find hours of operation, e-mail addresses, web sites and phone numbers. Unfortunately, what you won't find, unless changes have been made between the reader's copy and the final result, is a lot of organization and quick accessibility.
Obviously there are far too many authors to be able to do justice to them all, so it appears the authors of this book may have picked the ones they enjoyed most, and chose to center on them. I don't know this is the case, but while there is a lot of information for Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway and Edith Wharton; there's not as much as I would have expected for Conan Doyle, Stephen King, and some of the more contemporary authors. Again you can't cover everyone, so I guess you can't please everyone.
The book is broken into two main sections. The first is a look at various places in America and Europe associated with different authors. Part two deals with ten locations and the ten authors most closely associated with them. This in itself seems to create some confusion since the ten authors in part two are also seen in various sections of part one. Even within part one, there are subdivisions for mystery, poetry, horror and literature and some of the authors have different information in more than one section. This does not make gathering all of an authors information easy, and the reader's copy had no sign of an index.
It was great to have the information regarding these destinations available, but the ability to easy use the information is equally important, and unfortunately, this is an area that I didn't feel was successful. Even assuming an index is added to the retail version of this book, I might continue looking for literary travel books that might have a bit more organization. ( )

This book is a great idea executed only about a third as well as it deserves.

On the positive side, it's a valiant effort to cram in mentions of every sort of book-related holiday activity possible. There are museums, authorial birth- and burial-sites, festivals, hotels, libraries, and even a page explaining Bookshop Tourism.

This is exciting for me (I thought I invented Bookshop Tourism!) but leads to one of the negative aspects--it's a rather disorganized book. I don't think this was particularly avoidable, since if you organize activities by geographical location you'll separate those related to authors who lived in different places, and vice versa. But I wish there were an index--perhaps this will be in the published version--and I really think that some of the material could have been grouped better.

More important to me is what this book is missing. It seems that the authors were working from a definition of literature straight out of their old high school English anthologies. Britain, Paris, Russia, and New England are abundantly represented; Hemingway and Steinbeck pop up everywhere, but that's really it.

Every author associated by this book with a site of interest is white, save two--Zora Neale Hurston and Frederick Douglass. Harlem itself barely rates a mention.

I don't understand the authors' policy toward the rest of the world, either. They don't restrict their book to sites of English literary interest, since they represent Hugo, Tolstoy, and Dante. Nor can they be prioritizing accessible sites--many of the destinations and activities they mention are tremendously expensive. So I can't see why they leave out Latin America, Australia, Africa, and the entirety of Asia. It's as though they forgot that the non-Western world might also be capable of producing and commemorating great writers.

So whether you're an armchair traveler or really planning a literary holiday, Novel Destinations won't give you a chance to contemplate the tiny Mexican villages Mariano Azuela fought in as he reproduced them in Los de Abajo, Assia Djebar's Algiers, Aime Cesaire's Martinique, Ngugi wa Thiongo's Kenya, Kate Grenville's Sydney, Graham Greene's Freetown, even Toni Morrison's Ohio... in other words, for the average American reader this book fails the National-Geographic promise of expanding horizons and instead remains, in the end, very provincial.

Wonderful for the literary traveler and the arm chair traveler alike. ( )