Shannon Mckenna Schmidt

- A nice idea of highlighting literary connections with various travel destinations that unfortunately doesn’t quite work. But I think this book’s failure is more down to its design and layout than it’s content. It falls between two stools and ends up as neither a literary overview nor a practical travel guide. By organizing the content by genres and jumping from author to author with no clear delineation the information soon blends together. I ended up cherry picking entries by searching for authors in the index. Talking of indexes the book desperately needed a dedicated index of locations mentioned to aid any travel planning with a literary twist. I was hoping that this could be the book to help me figure out a few fun places to visit the next time I’m in New York for a few days, or on a future trip back to the UK. The frustration is that the information is all in there, it’s just not presented in a useful way.… (mere)

Book-inspired travel is a favorite of mine and my wife's. On my first trip with my in-laws, they cheerfully indulged my literary nerdiness by diverting a family road trip so that I could search for poet and novelist H.D.'s grave in Bethlehem, PA. Through multiple biographies and Jackson's own writing, my wife and I pieced together a route through North Bennington, Vermont, to explore Shirley Jackson's world. And for my babymoon, my wife took me to Yaddo, famed writing center, so I could walk the grounds so many favorite authors had.

All this is to say: a book that basically does all the work and offers me many, many ways to visit my favorite literary sites is pretty much catnip for me.

In its second edition, Novel Destinations offers a variety of literary and bookish tours to suit all sorts of readers, and I'm not exaggerating when I say it's featuring heavily in my future vacation planning.

The tours and experiences range from tour author houses and museums, walking tours, literary festivals, literary lodgings, and curated sections that collect the various places and museums if one loves a particular author (Austen, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc.).

There's a fab index by locale, so if you know you're going to California, you can see what literary things are there to visit. The layout and design of the book is appealing -- color photos and bold callouts, and through browsing the offerings, an opportunity to learn about authors and their lives and work.

A wonderful volume for the bookish traveler. While one could conceivably discover everything here on their own through internet sleuthing, it's fab to have this book in hand to give one a start. Personally, I'm excited for the literary lodgings chapter -- I'm a sucker for a book or author themed boutique hotel or B&B! I'll be sure to blog any trips I take inspired by this book -- let me know if you do, too!… (mere)

I enjoyed sampling the entries from this book, but it wasn't particularly useful when I went to use it to plan some literary adventures. The layout stymied me when I approached the book from a planning standpoint. I felt like I had to search around quite a bit to find what I was looking for, both when looking for everything for one author and for everything in one geographical region. I wanted to be able to say, "I'm in New England; what can I do that's literary?" but it didn't work that way for me. (It's possible this was due to user error.) I also could have used a book more centered on North America because that's where I am and that's where I plan most (or, so far, all) of my road trips. I liked reading about the destinations in the UK, but having never been there and having no immediate plans to go there, it was difficult to envision the locations.

I do plan to pick this one up again as my kids get older and they and I plan trips together. Or at least I hope that's what will happen. My kids and I all love to read, and the whole family loves road trips; literary road trips seem like a logical outcome of all of this reading/road-tripping love, but it's possible I'm not taking into account the feelings of pre-teens and teens about traveling with their mom.… (mere)