Commentary: Reading on the Road

Reading on the Road

Years ago, at my grandmother’s suggestion, I began a travel tradition that I have just begun instilling in my own kids. Before I went to Greece and Turkey for the first time, my grandmother gave me Mary Renault’s novels of ancient Greece. Visiting the Palace of King Minos at Knossos on Crete after reading The King Must Die, I could easily envision the life and intrigue that once inhabited its crumbling chambers. Years later, in India, I devoured Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and Rohintin Minstry’s A Fine Balance. These colorful epics cover different eras, but each brought into clearer focus the country that I toured. The magical realism of Jorge Amado helped explain the extremism of Brazil, as did John Updike’s novel Brazil. Fernando Meirelles’s brilliant film The City of God haunted me each time I drove past one of Rio’s favelas. Thanks to Beryl Markham’s West with the Night, every time I have visited the Serengeti, I have viewed it through my eyes and hers.

This spring, before I took my daughter to Paris, I ordered the movies Gigi and A Little Romance so she could get acquainted with the city’s look and feel. On the plane, I began reading Diane Johnson’s Into a Paris Quartier: Reine Margot’s Chapel and Other Haunts of St. Germain. During our five-day trip, I looked out for the historical landmarks in my book, and my daughter searched for those in her movies. Major scores: Maxim’s and Angelina. The lyrics of the films’ songs were an added bonus, as I’ll never forget my daughter singing “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” with her cousins in the Tuileries. We were there for another family tradition, which my mother started with my eldest niece: she introduces each granddaughter at age nine—this year two of them—to the capital of fashion, fine food and all things French. It’s an ideal city for any age because as Henry Miller is quoted as saying in Johnson’s book: “…each day I will see a little more of Paris, study it, learn it as I would a book. It is worth the effort…The streets sing, the stones talk. The houses drip history, glory, romance.”

In anticipation of our next trip, my daughter has already read Cornelia Funke’s The Thief Lord, which is set in Venice. I will finally dig into Andrea de Robilati’s A Venetian Affair. It’s a way to prepare for the journey but also to deepen our immersion in the place, which is why our online destination reports include recommended reading and film lists in the Library sections. One of our members, who recently traveled with her teenagers to Egypt, couldn’t get her kids to read history books, so she downloaded Cleopatra, Ben Hur and Helen of Troy on their iPods. This kind of technology is not something my grandmother would have imagined. She and my grandfather always traveled to Kenya with a leather book box filled with works by Hemingway, Freya Stark and Laurens van der Post among their trunks. The medium doesn’t matter, though; it’s that the stories help us understand the places we visit.

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