Literary Holidays

A post in the Guardian's Books Blog today asks, "If you were choosing a vacation destination on the basis of its bookish associations, where would you go?" You might not find the answers that surprising:

Travel website TripAdvisor has come up with a list of the world's top 10 literary spots, according to its editors. So, in order: London, Stratford-upon-Avon, Edinburgh, Dublin, New York, Concord in Massachusetts, Paris, San Francisco, Rome and St Petersburg.

I've been to 7 of these spots (not Paris, Rome, or Edinburgh), but I've only made a point of seeing the literary sites in Concord. (Well, I went to a play in Stratford-upon-Avon, but I didn't actually do a tour.) For sheer beauty and saturation of literary associations, I'd choose the Lake District in England, myself--in addition to Wordsworth and Coleridge you get Ruskin and Arthur Ransom, author of the Swallows and Amazons series, and some of the most glorious scenery in England. And then, as one commenter has already noted over on the Guardian blog, you could also choose Haworth and the Yorkshire moors for its Bronte resonances. How about Oxford, home of Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Philip Pullman, and setting of my favorite Dorothy L. Sayers novel, Gaudy Night?


Where would you go?

quick update--and potential Breaking Dawn spoilers

So here I am in Chicago at Terminus, where the fans by far outnumber the academics (and, yes, most of the academics are fans, but we're not all dressed up in House robes...), the weather is lovely, and I've already caught up with a couple of friends.

[edited to fix insane punctuation...]
========possible spoilers below============
I spent the travel day reading Breaking Dawn. I wasn't thrilled about bringing a big book with me--I even left my copy of HP & the Deathly Hallows, the subject of my talk, behind--but I had to do it. I've been avoiding all discussion of it since last weekend, and I can't keep my head in the sand much longer. And, I have to say, I'm a little disappointed. I was really hoping that the literary allusions of the earlier novels (read the comments), especially to Wuthering Heights and Romeo & Juliet, meant that Meyer had a little more distance on the central couple than, in the end, I think she did. There's just an awful lot of deus ex machina (or, ok, hybrid ex machina) in the working out of the plot. I need to think about it some more, but that's my initial response.

getting ready

I leave Thursday morning for the Terminus conference, where I'll get to hear Cheryl Klein speak, I'll give a paper, and I'll probably cut out from the conference for a bit to go hear John Green speak as well. Usually as I prepare for a conference I make lists for my family so the house doesn't fall apart in my absence; after years of doing so, however, I have finally realized that, really, they're pretty competent, and I'm probably not the one who's keeping the house together. So I'm eating peaches instead.

anticipation

I'm off on a trip tomorrow, and I have assembled for my reading pleasure:

• Little Brother, Cory Doctorow
• Out of the Wild, Sarah Beth Durst
• The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley

and some magazines, not too terribly trashy...

It's all I can do not to start reading now. Can I start in the airport departure lounge, or do I have to wait until I'm on board? Do I start on the first (short) leg, or do I wait until we're really and truly on our way? Ah, decisions, decisions.

Blog hiatus approaching, due to aforesaid travel. Details on my return.

Tired Eyes

As you can maybe tell from the viewing list over on the sidebar, I spent way too much of my travel time watching movies. It was nice to catch up--I'd long wanted to see Waitress, for example--and I needed something to do while I did some knitting--but mostly I was just brain dead and perfectly happy just to let things wash over me. I didn't even list the part-movies that I saw: something with Nicolas Cage foreseeing the future, and Hoax, with Richard Gere as Clifford Irving. Really it was all too much.

And I did very little reading on the trip. A couple of magazines, which are my usual airplane comfort fare. And I did manage to pick up Jasper Fforde's second Nursery Crimes book, The Fourth Bear, in the San Francisco airport--and to finish it before I left Chicago. I love Fforde. His zany sense of humor (competitive cucumber growing?) and vast store of what might usually seem irrelevant knowledge combine for hugely entertaining novels. I never quite know what's going on from moment to moment, but just trust that I'll get where he's going by the end. Perfect for travel.

I'm sure I'll have further updates from the trip, but I'm still feeling a little slow and disoriented, so it'll be a while.