For many of us, the most pleasing prospect of planning a summer vacation is the trip to the local bookstore or library to load up on all those things we’ve been wanting and meaning to read, from the latest potboiler to classic novels left half-read since a college survey long ago.
We look, in these titles, to fill many needs: diversion, illumination, education and play, but also to provide the appropriate imaginative setting for our travels themselves. There are, we trust, the perfect books to accompany each traveler, to each destination.
Here is a selection for a variety of book(wo)man’s holidays:
In the heartland
My Antonia, by Willa Cather.
Settlers on the Nebraska plains, when “there was nothing there but land.”
Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson.
American Gothic, in a collection that undermines, even as it expresses, nostalgia for our lost hometowns.
Beloved, by Toni Morrison.
The ghosts after slavery’s end, across the Ohio to what passed for freedom.
Knickerbocker tales
Winter’s Tale, by Mark Helprin.
Magical realism in old New York.
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
West Egg’s homage to the East.
The Drowning Room, by Michael Pye.
A portrait of New Amsterdam’s first “procuress.”
Down to the sea
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville.
Forget what you think you remember; you’ll be hooked before Ishmael leaves New Bedford.
To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf.
“Through the short summer nights and long summer days” of the
Ramsays.
Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys.
The lost early years of the first Mrs. Rochester.
Town and country
The Bostonians, by Henry James.
As wonderful for its settings as for its delightful satire of New England Brahmins and their Southern cousins.
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy.
Forget Scarlett and Rhett.
Summer, by Edith Wharton.
Her self-described “hot Ethan”–seduced and abandoned in the Berkshires.
Here and Nowhere Else, by Jane Brox.
A lyrical account of the demise of a farm and its family.
Into the West
The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer.
For its harrowing depiction of the Utah landscape of Gary Gilmore’s latter-day outlawry.
This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind, by Ivan Doig.
An elegiac tale of a Montana boyhood.
Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson.
When and where the West ran out.
On the road
USA, by John Dos Passos.
A monumental trilogy charting the course, across the continent, of this century’s first decades (includes “The 42nd Parallel,” “1919” and “The Big Money”).
Sister Carrie, by Theodore Dreiser.
Chicago to New York, on the road to ruin.
Wicked, by Gregory Maguire.
On and off the Yellow Brick Road, with a wonderful witch of the West.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard.
Off the road, on the muskrat and grasshopper’s trail.
