I have, of late, been thinking a lot about the relationship between traveling and reading. One of the ways that I fell apart a little bit during the first year of the pandemic, as so many of us did, was that I largely stopped reading books. By early 2021, I had resolved to change this, and the return of travel helped me do it.
That spring, I read Animal, Vegetable, Junk, Mark Bittman’s marvelous social history of our food systems, en route to Hawaii and arrived on the Big Island full of questions about soil quality for the farmers I was meeting there. Some months later I wandered the endless, airy halls of Susanna Clarke’s addictive fantasy novel Piranesi while flying between the Ecuadorean mainland and the Galápagos. I considered my country through the lens of indelibly American tales of identity and belonging, including Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, and Hua Hsu’s Stay True, when I was overseas. In January, while heading to Southern Africa to write about the genius guides of African Bush Camps, I tore through Tara Westover’s gripping memoir Educated, teleporting from a sterile corner of Amsterdam Airport Schiphol to a mountain in Idaho suffused with emotional violence and strange, stark beauty.
This has always been true for me. Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex will always make me think of a beach in Tulum; Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad of a bathtub in Bilbao with a view of the Guggenheim. It’s only natural: Travel opens you to possibility, to new ways of thinking, to worlds unlike your own. And so do books. Which is why I encourage you, as you plan your trips for the remainder of the year, to plan your reading as well. With all due respect to wine and cheese, I can’t think of a better pairing.
This article appeared in the April 2024 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
