Reading and traveling go hand in hand for me.
Before I could travel, I read.
For the most part, whatever my local library offered, I read. The librarians learned my tastes and made recommendations galore. My favorites were fictional tales of girls or young women setting out on giant adventures. They went places and experienced marvelous moments that expanded their minds and made them better people.
I wanted to go, too. Back then, I dreamed of doing just that, but for years, I had to settle for reading about it.
I remain grateful to the patient librarians who helped me find or borrow books they thought I would enjoy. Through their efforts, those women opened the world to me. Time and again, I've seen librarians do that for others. Librarians are heroes in my book.
By the sixth grade, I was making a mental list of the places I wanted to go. The list of place names, some of which I couldn't spell or pronounce, was like a pipe dream, but I made it nonetheless. Making lists of things to do, places to go, people to meet has never steered me wrong.
Though I didn't take my first plane ride until I was 23, in the years since, I've found ways to see more of the world than I ever thought possible — 46 states and 47 countries thus far.
I've come to believe that the common thread between traveling and reading is that both have the potential to strengthen our empathy muscles.
While my family and I traveled broadly in 2019, I've ended up canceling every flight I've booked since then. However, I've got a big trip to Istanbul and Athens scheduled for November. I've never been to either Turkey or Greece and have wanted to go to both since some of those books I read when I was young.
To prepare for the trip, I'm in the midst of my little pre-travel ritual — the selection-of-place-based-fiction stage. I've found the first book I plan to read about Istanbul, "10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World," by Elif Shafak.
Neil Gaimon said, “Fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gifts of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.”
I reference a variety of sources to make my travel fiction selections. There's even a nifty website called Trip Fiction that makes place-inspire recommendations (www.tripfiction.com).
Reading fiction set in a certain place, especially written by locals, often gives an additional sense of understanding hard to grasp, notice or observe otherwise. That said, it's also a reminder of how little we know, how many more books are necessary to read and how many places there are to visit.
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October 16, 2022 at 04:30PM
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