Joni Rendon

I admit it. I love gossip. Was it Alice Roosevelt Longworth who said "If you don't have anything nice to say about someone, come sit by me?" That's my philosophy. I'm ashamed of it, but there it is. And this is absolutely delicious gossip about literary figures. Not necessarily all secrets or unknown, but great fun to read. Divided into seven sections, from "Folie a Deux" to "This Side of Paradise," Norman Mailer to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, great little stories of the love lives of some show more of our greater and lesser literary folk. Truly a fun read! show less

Book-inspired travel is a favorite of mine and my wife's. On my first trip with my in-laws, they cheerfully indulged my literary nerdiness by diverting a family road trip so that I could search for poet and novelist H.D.'s grave in Bethlehem, PA. Through multiple biographies and Jackson's own writing, my wife and I pieced together a route through North Bennington, Vermont, to explore Shirley Jackson's world. And for my babymoon, my wife took me to Yaddo, famed writing center, so I could walk show more the grounds so many favorite authors had.

All this is to say: a book that basically does all the work and offers me many, many ways to visit my favorite literary sites is pretty much catnip for me.

In its second edition, Novel Destinations offers a variety of literary and bookish tours to suit all sorts of readers, and I'm not exaggerating when I say it's featuring heavily in my future vacation planning.

The tours and experiences range from tour author houses and museums, walking tours, literary festivals, literary lodgings, and curated sections that collect the various places and museums if one loves a particular author (Austen, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc.).

There's a fab index by locale, so if you know you're going to California, you can see what literary things are there to visit. The layout and design of the book is appealing -- color photos and bold callouts, and through browsing the offerings, an opportunity to learn about authors and their lives and work.

A wonderful volume for the bookish traveler. While one could conceivably discover everything here on their own through internet sleuthing, it's fab to have this book in hand to give one a start. Personally, I'm excited for the literary lodgings chapter -- I'm a sucker for a book or author themed boutique hotel or B&B! I'll be sure to blog any trips I take inspired by this book -- let me know if you do, too! show less

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 show more 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. show less

I enjoyed sampling the entries from this book, but it wasn't particularly useful when I went to use it to plan some literary adventures. The layout stymied me when I approached the book from a planning standpoint. I felt like I had to search around quite a bit to find what I was looking for, both when looking for everything for one author and for everything in one geographical region. I wanted to be able to say, "I'm in New England; what can I do that's literary?" but it didn't work that way show more for me. (It's possible this was due to user error.) I also could have used a book more centered on North America because that's where I am and that's where I plan most (or, so far, all) of my road trips. I liked reading about the destinations in the UK, but having never been there and having no immediate plans to go there, it was difficult to envision the locations.

I do plan to pick this one up again as my kids get older and they and I plan trips together. Or at least I hope that's what will happen. My kids and I all love to read, and the whole family loves road trips; literary road trips seem like a logical outcome of all of this reading/road-tripping love, but it's possible I'm not taking into account the feelings of pre-teens and teens about traveling with their mom. show less