How do you find a good book to read on a trip?
I went to Budapest last year with some relatives. We spent a week visiting their relatives and seeing the sights of that beautiful city on the Danube. Glorious.
I purchased the requisite Rick Steves‘ book, Rick Steves’ Budapest, and went through with a highlighter, marking the places I particularly wanted to see. I’ve written about what I saw here and here and here.
A guide book provides plenty of information, the places worth visiting, a history of the place, where to eat dinner. But it can’t always give you a feel for what it’s like to actually live in the city. For that sort of information, I turn to novels.
Rick Steves’ website gives you plenty of information, including suggestions for what to read on your trip by country. As I perused the titles, one recent one stood out: The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer. But someone described it on Amazon.com as a 400 page book crammed into 600 pages–I didn’t want to waste my time on a lugubrious read.
Fortunately, a woman in my aerobics class had just finished the book and raved over it. “I couldn’t put it down,” she said. “I took it with me everywhere and constantly opened it up to see what was happening next.”
On her recommendation, I purchased the book for my Kindle. I’m so glad I did.
As it happened, Orringer’s story of World War II life mirrored that of my “outlaws,” which gave me plenty to discuss with them. But more than that, the book provided touch points that made the entire visit very rich. I felt like I was on two different trips: the fictional journey each night with the novel, and the day time visits, in person, to the locales described in the book. Absolutely charming–when it wasn’t just a bit confusing.
Here was the Jewish Ghetto where the outlaws went to school, bullet holes from 1944 still visible in the walls. The main characters from The Invisible Bridge lived there, too. We spent a terrific afternoon floating in Széchenyi Baths which our hero visited as soon as he returned to Budapest after living in Paris. We marveled at the Byzantine look of the Dohány Street Synagogue and that night I read about the hero and heroine’s wedding there.
I felt like I lived a parallel life: walking the streets and hearing the stories from outlaws during the day, and reading about the emotions (which the outlaws did not want to discuss) in the novel at night. Sometimes I got confused between the stories–but it all melded together into a sense of Budapest as a beautiful, well-loved city with a tragic past.
I’d read other books before I flew halfway around the world–memoirs and a history book. I’ve since read Kati Marton‘s Enemies of the People, describing her parents’ arrest by Hungarian authorities in 1955. Reading about the places I had seen with my own eyes, enriched that tragic tale as well.
How do you decide what books you’ll take when you travel? Do you try to match the theme of your trip with the place you’re visiting? Do you like to read novels about your vacation spot once you’re there, before you go, or after you return? Have you read anything that mirrored my experience with The Invisible Bridge?
Thoughts? Reactions? Lurker?