As I transition into this platform I’m reposting some pieces I have written over the years. This one is from September 2017, but covers something that I still find myself thinking of frequently and includes an expanded book and place list from the original piece.
After finishing Elif Batuman’s book The Idiot, I’ve found myself thinking a lot lately about the way certain geographic places occupied when reading, tend to intertwine themselves into and with the narrative of the book itself. Throughout her book, Batuman, vividly describes the various contexts that her protagonist finds herself reading in, noting with great specificity such details as the hazelnut wafer cookies her character is eating on a bed in a hostel in Budapest, while also consuming Bram Stoker’s Dracula. After reading that particular scene I began to wonder what vaguely Proustian moments I’ve had with books—which geographic locations have become inextricably associated with some of the narratives I’ve found most poignant or memorable. For instance, I will always see and think of Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams and be viscerally reminded of a summer I spent in DC, and a particular coffeeshop in Georgetown where every Saturday morning I’d perch on a stool with a cortado, letting the inescapable east coast summer humidity, the hum of tourists, and the smell of espresso shots being pulled wend there way through Jamison’s essays.
Recently, as I was traveling between Minneapolis and Chicago I began to think of books and place in a different context. Settling into my chosen airplane read (Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney), I was reminded of all the books I’ve read over the years that I associate with those moments of suspension—those moments of transition that occur when traveling betwixt and between two geographical locations. These stories will always have a uniquely transitory quality to me—reminding me of those moments of placelessness, and the timelessness that those moments of being out of one singular place, and momentarily hovered between time zones, bring to the narrative.
A few titles and the associated trips that came to mind:
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (DC to Boston)
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doer (Minneapolis to Missoula, Montana and back again)
Blue Nights by Joan Didion (Minneapolis to Chicago, and back again)
Modern Lovers by Emma Straub (Minneapolis to Missoula)
Commenwealth by Ann Patchett (Minneapolis to several cities in Florida and back again)
Places I Stopped on the Way Home by Meg Fee (Minneapolis to Missoula)
Florida by Lauren Groff (a camping trip along the Minnesota/Wisconsin border)
What about you? Are there any particular places, or moments of placelessness, that you’ve come to associate with certain books? I’d love to hear!