A good travel book starts the trip before the flight is booked. These reviews sort the guidebooks, memoirs, and travel writing worth your shelf space.
Booking a short-term rental in Barcelona comes with a local catch: the city tightly licenses them, and an unlicensed flat can be cancelled out from under you. Beyond checking the license, most of the decision comes down to neighborhood, since Gràcia, the Gothic Quarter, and the beach make for three different trips.
A good novel can bring a place to life in a way a guidebook can’t, capturing its atmosphere, people, and rhythms. These stories are as much about experiencing a destination as imagining one.
A good novel can keep a favorite destination close between trips. Stories set on Martha’s Vineyard capture the island’s character in ways that make returning, even on the page, part of the experience.
Cape Cod has inspired plenty of novels, but the best ones capture more than the scenery. Set among the island’s summer light and family secrets, this is the kind of story that keeps the Cape close between visits.
A great travel magazine sells the trip before you book it, and sometimes instead of booking it. The best of them do more than list destinations; they hand you the itch to go and the stories that make a place worth going to. For the between-trips stretch, the right magazine keeps the wanderlust alive on a shelf.
The Last Bookstore has become a downtown Los Angeles landmark less for what it sells than for how it feels: a cavernous former bank filled with book tunnels, arches made of paperbacks, and quiet corners to get lost in. People come to wander as much as to buy.
The film turned Frances Mayes’s memoir into a romance, but the book is something quieter: a story about restoring an old villa and building a life in Tuscany. Knowing the difference makes it easier to appreciate each on its own terms.
Some travel memoirs stay with you because of the places they visit. Others stay with you because of the life they describe. This sailing memoir offers both.
Some places continue to shape people long after they leave. This memoir explores Martha’s Vineyard through the memories and experiences that keep drawing people back to the island.