If you can’t physically go to a destination you dream of, read a book set there and let your imagination do the rest.
Ten books to help you travel outside the walls of your home….
1. MOROCCO
“The Sheltering Sky,” – Paul Bowles
The tale of Port and Kit Moresbury, a sophisticated American couple, who are finding it more than a little difficult to live with each other. Endeavoring to escape this predicament, they set off for North Africa intending to travel through Algeria – uncertain of exactly where they are heading, but determined to leave the modern world behind. The results of this casually taken decision are both tragic and compelling.
2. TANZANIA
“The Magic of Saida ,”- M. G. Vassanji
A Giller Prize winner and powerfully emotional novel of love and loss. An African/Indian man returns to the town of his birth in search of the girl he once loved—and the sense of self that has always eluded him.
3. ALASKA, CALIFORNIA, NEW MEXICO, CHILE, MEXICO
“A Manual for Cleaning Women,” Lucia Berlin
Berlin’s posthumous collection of short stories offer a portrait of the mid-20th century West through the eyes of young women (many of them based on Berlin herself) living through extraordinary circumstances.
4. ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT
“Justine,” Lawrence Durrell
This is the first novel of Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet,” and introduces the tetralogy’s primary love affair — between two people, and between a man and a city.
5. TRINIDAD; NEW YORK; WILTSHIRE, ENGLAND
“The Enigma of Arrival,” V.S. Naipaul
This semi-autobiographical novel follows Naipaul’s peripatetic life as he navigates the experience of being a newcomer, observer and outsider in places far from his home of origin.
6. VENICE, ITALY
“Watermark,” Joseph Brodsky
This paean to Venice — part notebook, part prose poem — is composed in vignettes of two decades of winters Brodsky spent there.
7. VIETNAM
“The Mountains Sing,” Nguyen Phan Que Mai
This debut novel from the Vietnamese poet Nguyen Phan Que Mai follows multiple generations of a family through the political tumult of 20th-century Vietnam.
8. PUGET SOUND
“Holy the Firm,” by Annie Dillard
A hallucinatory, eerily beautiful account of two years of relative isolation on an island in the Pacific Northwest.
9. BUDAPEST; JARKOVAC, SERBIA
“Abigail,” Magda Szabó
Szabo’s novel about 14-year-old Gina Vitay’s coming-of-age during World War II is her most popular in her home country; its first English edition was published earlier this year.
10. KENYA
Out of Africa – Isak Dinesen’s memoir of her years in Africa, from 1914 to 1931, on a four-thousand-acre coffee plantation in the hills near Nairobi. She had come to Kenya from Denmark with her husband, and when they separated she stayed on to manage the farm by herself, visited frequently by her lover, the big-game hunter Denys Finch-Hatton, for whom she would make up stories “like Scheherazade.”