About the Library

SHORT VERSION

Here at the Library, we will wander the globe, in no particular order, ignoring the Dewey Decimal system, the alphabet, continental boundaries, or any other artificial organization. This page is about the Library, if you are looking for more about me, there’s another page for that.

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Here’s a note for you about the books we discuss and the advertising on the site.

MORE ABOUT THE LIBRARY

In my grandmother’s living room there was a cabinet, and in the cabinet was a child’s book from long ago.* Each page showed a child in elaborate costume of its native land and in an appropriate setting–palm trees, snowy fields, sand dunes.  When I was very young I saw that book and wanted to see those places in person.

This was the beginning of my two great loves–books and travel. And since Grandma worked at the movie theater, I got to see every movie that played in our small town. What books have made you want to travel?

I was particularly entranced by the Bedouin and the Laplanders in that children’s book, because they moved all the time. WOW! Many years later I traveled to northern Sweden and ate reindeer meat in a restaurant run by Samis, the native name of Laplanders. I brought home a delicate bracelet made of reindeer hide. Later I visited Israel where I saw Bedouins, now sadly confined to a very small area and subsisting partly on selling pictures of tourists on camels. I bought a beautiful necklace a Bedouin crafted out of bone. And I moved to the West and learned about the colorful American Indians.

Me in Kastro, Sifnos Island, Greece

Just like you, I looked for books and movies that would be my guide to a different landscape, a different people, a different culture.  I have accumulated shelves of books of this kind. You might call them metaphorical guidebooks because they are not literal guidebooks. My travel library contains both fiction and non-fiction, biographies, histories and novels. Mystery novels are the best because the authors must create a strong sense of place.  This is what I want to share with you here.  Books that inspire and inform your travel.  And a few movies that do the same.

My Disorganized Library

Any traveler collects  guidebooks as well, but another blog can cover those.  Sometimes we may make an exception for the guidebooks that are exceptionally well written, or those that concentrate on  literature or culture of a place.

Pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable. Join the discussion.  I want to hear your recommendations for additions to my travel library.

And here’s a list of some of the sites that I regularly visit, Favorite Sites.

*That sentence about grandmother was a little test. If you have read Patagonia, the travel classic by Bruce Chatwin, you may remember his opening line, “In my grandmother’s dining-room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin.” I can’t resist this parallelism with my own memories.

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