Books That Feel Like a Holiday

There are some books that don't simply tell you a story.

They take you somewhere.

A few pages in and suddenly the room around you begins to disappear.

Perhaps you're walking through narrow cobbled streets in a city you've never visited.

Maybe you're sitting beneath the shade of a palm tree, somewhere the sea is impossibly blue and nobody appears to be in much of a hurry.

You might find yourself in a tiny village tucked into the mountains, on a windswept Scottish island or wandering through a bustling market thousands of miles from home.

No passport required.

No suitcase to pack.

Just a book.

The wonderful thing about reading somewhere else

Travel and reading have always belonged rather nicely together.

We pack books into suitcases for holidays, choose something to read beside the pool and spend far too long deciding which paperback deserves precious hand-luggage space.

But books can give us a little of that feeling even when we aren't going anywhere.

Sometimes it's the setting.

A writer describes a place so beautifully that we can almost feel the heat of the sun or hear waves breaking somewhere beyond the page.

Sometimes it's the characters — people living lives completely different from our own.

And sometimes it's simply the pleasure of spending a few hours somewhere that isn't here.

Because escapism isn't always about escaping something.

Sometimes it's simply about going somewhere else for a while.

Some places exist first in books

There are places many of us knew through stories long before we ever saw them for ourselves.

Paris.

New York.

Venice.

The Caribbean.

The Scottish Highlands.

Tiny villages in Provence or Tuscany.

Great stretches of African wilderness.

Wild coastlines and tropical islands.

Books build pictures of places in our imaginations.

Then, if we're lucky enough to visit one day, there's that peculiar little moment when the real place collides with the one we've carried around in our heads.

And occasionally the opposite happens.

We visit somewhere first.

Years later we open a book set there and suddenly a memory comes rushing back — the light, the heat, the sounds, perhaps even the feeling of being there.

For a moment, we're back.

The perfect holiday doesn't have to be perfect

Of course, fictional holidays aren't always particularly relaxing.

There are mysterious villas.

Suspicious fellow travellers.

Family secrets uncovered beside swimming pools.

Holiday romances that become wonderfully complicated.

Remote hotels where something clearly isn't quite right.

And fictional cruises have taught us that boarding a luxury ship with a collection of strangers is apparently an excellent way to encounter murder.

We wouldn't necessarily want to experience any of these holidays ourselves.

But from the safety of a favourite chair?

Absolutely.

That's another wonderful thing about travelling through books.

We get the adventure without the delayed flight, lost luggage or questionable hotel mattress.

A book can change how we see a place

The best books don't simply use a location as scenery.

They make the place part of the story.

The weather matters.

The landscape matters.

The food, language, buildings and rhythm of everyday life matter.

We begin to understand somewhere through the people who inhabit the pages.

Sometimes a book even plants the first seed of wanting to visit.

You finish the final chapter and think:

I'd like to see that place for myself one day.

And suddenly another destination has quietly appeared on the imaginary travel list.

Then there are the places we dream about

Most of us have one.

That place we picture when life gets noisy and we need to mentally disappear for five minutes.

Perhaps it's a cottage beside the sea.

A cabin surrounded by mountains.

A little apartment overlooking a European square.

A quiet garden.

A tropical beach.

Or a shaded veranda where you can sit with a book while warm rain falls beyond the roof and everything becomes wonderfully cool and quiet for a while.

Sometimes those places are memories.

Sometimes they're plans.

And sometimes, for now at least, they exist mostly in our imagination.

Books understand that.

They've always been rather good at taking us to places we're not quite able to reach yet.

Your next journey might already be waiting

That's one of the joys of browsing second-hand books.

You never quite know where the shelves are going to take you.

Pick up one book and you're in London.

The next might carry you halfway across the world.

Another takes you backwards through history.

And occasionally you'll discover somewhere you'd never even thought about visiting before.

Perhaps that's why choosing a new book can feel like the tiniest beginning of an adventure.

You don't need an itinerary.

You don't need a reservation.

You don't even need to know exactly where you're going.

Choose a book.

Find somewhere comfortable.

Turn the first page.

And see where it takes you.

Because sometimes the loveliest escape doesn't begin at an airport.

It begins with a story.

Wherever today finds you, I hope you find a story worth getting lost in.

The BookBuddies Team