Richard Kreitner - Booked: A Travelers Guide to Literary Locations Around the World

The Vale of Grasmere in the English District.

Yet despite the exhilarating sunrise walk to the top of Helm Crag, the rocky peak jutting out over Grasmere, the terrors, pains, and miseries that had plagued me in Montreal seemed to have hitched a ride in my knapsack. Those days were a roller coaster of the highest highs and the lowest lows. As I sipped hand-pulled pints at the local pub, walked the fells (as locals call the districts barren hills), toured Wordsworths famous Dove Cottage (which, incredibly to me, still had his two-hundred-year-old mirror), and sipped a few more pints, I struggled with the gnawing fear that I was somehow doing it wrong, that I wasnt communing as fully or as deeply as I should have been with Wordsworth, or Grasmere, or the fells.

I should have trusted Wordsworth more. In hindsight, I see the trip was a turning point. I came back differenta little calmer, stronger, more worthy of myself, as The Prelude puts it.

In the decade since, I have spent much of my spare time making similar trips to places featured in some of my favorite books: poetry and prose, fictional or otherwise. Only now I am not alone. The girlfriend I left behind in Montreala fellow editor at the student newspaperhas since become my wife. She enjoys visiting authors homes and other literary places at least as much as I do and has gamely consented to book-based excursions through the United States and around the world, from New Hampshire and Colorado to Poland and Greece. (Without her intelligence, indulgence, and Harry Potter expertise, this book, and everything else I have done, would have been impossible.)

Why do we search out places from literature? Most obviously it is to see how our mental image of it, shaped by the authors descriptions, matches up with reality. In our minds eye, we map our conception of the place as it is described in the book onto what we see before us, and tally up how much is the same and how much is different, and of that which is different, how so.

Yet when we search out places from books, we are not simply looking for particular buildings or vistas or even atmospheres that made it into the work. There is something weirder and more magical going on. We want to see how the artist has transformed banal reality into the stuff of art. There is something even a little religious about itthus the aptness of the word pilgrimage.

When we travel to places featured in books we love, we are not only looking for how the place has impacted the book but how the book has impacted the place. After devouring a work that seems as if made only for us, it can be thrilling to see the fictional world so fully imagined in our minds recreated and saluted in this, the physical worldas in a statue of one of the characters (like that depicting Ignatius J. Reilly, from John Kennedy Tooles