7 Books That Remind Us of Where—And Who—We Were

18.05.2024 - 14:29 / cntraveler.com / Ernest Hemingway

When you crack open a list of great travel reads in an esteemed publication like this one, you usually have a pretty good idea of what you’re going to get: books that uncannily bring to life a place or an experience. There’s a very good chance you’ll get a smattering of MFK Fisher, Paul Theroux, and Bruce Chatwin; some iconic American travelogues (On the Road, Travels With Charley, Blue Highways); perhaps the odd title by Mark Twain or Ernest Hemingway. Maybe there’ll be a dutiful inclusion of A Passage to India. You’re virtually assured of getting a very good list. But this is not that kind of list.

The other way to think about what constitutes a great travel read is a book that you devoured while on a trip, which you’ll forever associate with that journey. That’s what we want to celebrate here. For me, the experience of reading can be so completely bound up in the place where the reading happened.

Maybe that’s a beach. I read all of Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden on Stinson Beach north of San Francisco one hot August day, and Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, accompanied by cheap margaritas, in Tulum. Or it could be a hotel room: Jennifer Egan’s A Visit to the Goon Squad will always be the book I read when I couldn’t sleep my first night in Bilbao, the Guggenheim’s ghostly mass visible through my window. Or, of course, a plane or an airport, especially when there’s some kind of delay: I tore through Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, an incredible invocation of an imaginary place, while flying back and forth between the Ecuadorian mainland and the Galápagos because of bad weather on the islands; recently, stuck for a endless afternoon in a drab corner of Amsterdam Airport Schilphol because of a missed connection, I journeyed to the fraught mountain in Idaho where Tara Westover spent the childhood she describes so grippingly in her extraordinary memoir Educated.

After that, I found myself wanting to know what books other editors of Condé Nast Traveler loved reading while they were somewhere else, and how those reads made them feel. I think you’ll enjoy what they shared as much as I did.

I read Keri Hulme’s inimitable The Bone People the only time I ever left New Zealand on a one-way ticket and it was medicinal. I was 19, the move was by choice, and even still, I was a total wreck. For the entire journey (and honestly, so long afterward…), I grieved that country and my life there pretty deeply. And so I spent 14 hours, most of them overnight, sitting alone in a United cabin, under the vague yellow of an overhead light, as strangers around me slept, transfixed by this brilliant novel, set on the South Island’s West Coast. The story itself—of three complicated, isolated individuals whose lives intertwine—is dark,