What works of literature made you love a place?

[ReadableRdTrip]

So often, location in literature can act as a character almost as much as the people within it. What books or works of literature have you read that left a strong impression of "place" on you? I'm hoping to read my way through the United States on a "readable road trip". Would welcome any suggestions!

[Lykren]

Try Walt Whitman, he's a road trip sort of guy.

[Anne Catherick]

I fell in love with Spain through 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'

[Lokasenna]

My love of medieval Icelandic literature long ago instilled in me a similar love of Iceland itself - I get there as often as I can find the time or money to do so!

[mona amon]

The beautiful English countryside, as described in oh so many many books. I haven't been there, so I'm just assuming it is as beautiful as described. I have fantasies about living in Blandings Castle. :)

[kelby_lake]

Fell in love with Yorkshire through The Secret Garden

[ladderandbucket]

Knoxville, Tennessee from Cormac Mccarthy's book Suttree.

[kev67]

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami made me want to see the Japanese mountains.

[Emil Miller]

The beautiful English countryside, as described in oh so many many books. I haven't been there, so I'm just assuming it is as beautiful as described. I have fantasies about living in Blandings Castle. :)

Yes it really is as beautiful as in many English novels. Here is a very good example of just one facet of England where gardening has always been of major importance.

http://youtu.be/5G4tbxhrlUg

[AuntShecky]

Sometimes books can make you love a place, but the best writers are good at helping you know a place, like West Egg and East Egg (the Hamptons) in The Great Gatsby.

There are plenty of American novels and short stories that depict New York. Henry James and Edith Wharton during the Gilded Age, and later, we have John O'Hara, Cheever, Salinger. New York was at its best during the Post-war 1950s until it starting going bad. But then New York started getting better again, cf. Woody Allen movies.

How about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which the young hero is enthralled by the sights along the Mississippi: "true gorgeousness"?


The Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery series featured gorgeous descriptions of P.E.I. Sarah Orne Jewett's descriptions of Maine are unmatched. Willa Cather's in the Great Plains, Katherine Anne Porter's short stories of Texas, and more recently Richard Powers novel about Nebraska (The Echo-Maker.) all capture their setting masterfully.
Marjorie K. Rawlings offered vivid pictures of rural Florida.

For less majestic, slightly-skewed views of the good old U.S.A., there are plenty of American novels that progress through road trips -- The Grapes of Wrath shows the trek from Oklahoma to California; Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita goes cross-country in violation of the Mann Act, Kerouac's On the Road, etc.

[mona amon]

Yes it really is as beautiful as in many English novels. Here is a very good example of just one facet of England where gardening has always been of major importance.

http://youtu.be/5G4tbxhrlUg

Ooh! Lovely! :)

[Volya]

After reading Fiesta I really want to visit Pamplona, Paris, and the rest of Spain.

[prendrelemick]

I could be the only person left alive who has read " Ramola" by George Elliott.

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?49110-Ramola-by-George-Elliot

Her evocation of Florence during the renaissance is something I'll never shake off. In fact I don't want to go there as I'm sure to be disappointed.

[Emil Miller]

When skillfully conjured up, the spirit of place often leaves an enduring memory for the reader. Scott Fitzgerald's New York in the 1920s or Isherwood's 1930s Berlin remain in the mind's eye long after being read and there are a whole string of writers who have conjured up Paris: perhaps the most evocative city of them all.
When it comes to descriptions of rural locations, great writing is equally in evidence and one tends to think of Hardy, Dickens, Trollope etc. where English authors are concerned but striking portrayals abound in the literature of many countries.

[WICKES]

Oscar Wilde, John Betjamen, Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf and PG Wodehouse made me fall in love with a (probably) idealized view of upper class life in England. They create an image in my mind of what civilization is (I can understand why Nelson Mandela said that when he thought of the word civilization he thought of an 'English gentleman') . I know that most of those authors satirized and ridiculed that world more than they praised it, but, still, such writers conjure up a jumble of images: soft, warm evening sunlight falling across the well-kept lawns of country houses; witty, sophisticated people with polished RP English accents; the architecture of Oxford and Cambridge; cricket; irony etc etc

I have never read Proust, but I did read Alain de Botton's wonderful book about him. That made me fall in love with Paris and the intellectual and artistic life of Paris. To me Proust looks like the archetypal Parisian-French artist: small, slim, pale skin, black hair etc.

Thanks mostly to literature I tend to think of the south of England and the area in and around Paris as the centres of sophistication and civilization.

[Jackson Richardson]

As a child I was entranced by Rudyard Kipling's account of Sussex in Puck of Pook's Hill.

I'm just in love with all these three:
The Weald and the Downs and the Marsh Country.
Nor I don't know which I love the most:
The Weald or the Marsh or the White Chalk Coast.

Although I've lived for the past three years an hour and a half from Brighton, I've never been to Romney Marsh yet not to the South Downs. I'll be a bit of a damp blanket about the South Eastern English Country than Emil. It is greatly overcrowded and with dual carriageways the only way to get anywhere fast, you get precious little sense of beauty. The Weald is greatly suburbanised.

I will get to Firle Beacon this year, though.

[Emil Miller]

As a child I was entranced by Rudyard Kipling's account of Sussex in Puck of Pook's Hill.

I'm just in love with all these three:
The Weald and the Downs and the Marsh Country.
Nor I don't know which I love the most:
The Weald or the Marsh or the White Chalk Coast.

Although I've lived for the past three years an hour and a half from Brighton, I've never been to Romney Marsh yet not to the South Downs. I'll be a bit of a damp blanket about the South Eastern English Country than Emil. It is greatly overcrowded and with dual carriageways the only way to get anywhere fast, you get precious little sense of beauty. The Weald is greatly suburbanised.

I will get to Firle Beacon this year, though.

This sounds like the comment of a typical motorist as opposed to a walker. Driving through the Weald of Kent or through the Surrey hills is a million miles away from WALKING them. Get out of the car and use your legs, going across country using the multiple footpaths that are centuries old will take you for miles without sight of a dual carriageway. Living in London, I gave up on the car as an expensive and increasingly useless conveyance. I could show you stunning vistas that leave all mechanisation behind in a landscape that recalls England as it must have been long before the invention of the internal combustion engine. Please do go to Firle Beacon, the South Downs are a very beautiful part of the English countryside.

[Seasider]

I fell in love with Ingrid Bergman through " For Whom the Bell Tolls."

[Dono]

They didn't necessarily make me LOVE the southwest desert of the USA really, but the Crossing trilogy by Cormac McCarthy made me appreciate it a little more than I had. And the account of the Nez Perce Indians in the Bitterroot mountains always stuck in my head, particularly the phrase that read "the soldiers knew about half dozen routes through the mountains and blocked them. But the tribe knew of fourteen." Don't know why but it resonated.

[Seasider]

Between 1973-74 I was an Exchange Associate Professor of Education in The University of Tennessee in Knoxville. It was my first visit to the USA

and I thought Tennessee was a beautiful state...especially in The Fall when The Smoky Mountains burst into flame. And as The Volunteer State it had an interesting history.
So I looked at Cormac MacArthy's photos with interest and was amazed that I did not recognise a single view.
Whether it was my fading memory or 40 years of Civil Development, I don't know, but just looking at the pictures made me remember how tremendously I enjoyed that year.

[Jackson Richardson]

This sounds like the comment of a typical motorist as opposed to a walker.

I don't own a car.

[mal4mac]

Dickens made me love London, and as a Northerner I'm not easily persuaded...

[Emil Miller]

I don't own a car.

Well i'm pleased to hear it because if you go to Newlands Corner, an interesting walk from Guildford Station in Surrey, you will see a car park which in Summer is crowded with people sitting in their car admiring the view when just behind them are wonderful footpaths leading down to the Silent Pool with its strange legend. Obviously not all of the cars' occupants are able-bodied enough to get out and walk far but many are and are missing out on the chance to experience the English countryside underfoot. It's depressing to see children sitting with their parents when it would be an adventure for them to walk in glorious woodland. I have seen similar situations elsewhere in which people drive out into the country without getting to know it.
Anyhow, i'm sorry if, as a non-motorist, you were offended but you are one of the few people I have come across who doesn't own a car.

[hopeingod]

James Herriot's "All Creatures Great and Small" made me want to experience what it was like to live in such green, open land where farming is the major occupation. I'd not resort to raising flocks and herds, but I would like to meet the folks and drink a dark ale with them. It was, in the 40s, a hard life, but one that pitted the individual more against the elements than his neighbor. A deep inner toughness was the character that formed in many farmers, and yet the love of the dale is to them like a calling.

[hannah_arendt]

Thanks to Forster I fell in love with Italy and now I go there almost every year.