Monday, August 04, 2014

The Frequent Flyer Miles of an Armchair Traveler




Have you ever wondered why it is that you like to stick close to home in your reading... or why it is that you like to travel to as many countries as you can each time you open a book? I have, and I can't decide whether my inclination to travel the world from my comfy reading spot is nature or nurture.

I can't remember a time when I didn't want to see what was over the next hill. In an earlier post I said that the first books I fell in love with were all about the furred and feathered. When I read Thornton Burgess, I "traveled" out to the fields, the meadows, the woods, and the streams to find out where the animals lived. I think that was my first foray into the unknown, and it wasn't long until I was old enough to hop on my bike and pedal out into the country to see if I could find the places Burgess had told me to look for. I know-- that's not reading "far afield," but keep in mind that I wasn't even ten years old.

I immediately segued into Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books when I'd finished reading Burgess, and that's when I really began to roam in my reading. I was in that covered wagon with the Ingalls; I saw Indians; I lived in a soddy; and I survived the long winter. Those Little House books along with the Childhood of Famous Americans series I was reading certainly opened my eyes to all the different sections of America-- and that people had different customs and lived in different types of homes in various parts of the country. I liked that.  Even from the beginning I didn't want to live in a world where everyone was alike.

Right around the age of ten, my grandmother and mother began to work in earnest on our family history, and that really fanned the flames of my desire to know more about the world around me. To know when my ancestors first came to this country (1626), to know that a few of them followed Daniel Boone, to know that one headed out to the gold mines of Arizona to find his fortune-- all that and much more made me want to know more about the places they lived, the people they knew, and most of all I wanted to know why. (Don't I always?) Why didn't they stay put? Was there something wrong with where they were living that made them want to move?

As my two intrepid detectives discovered more nuggets of family history, I soon found myself looking for books about England and Scotland and France-- especially during the time periods my ancestors lived there. I fell in love with the idea of a place called the Isle of Skye. I wanted to go to Northumberland to see Alnwick Castle. I wondered if a house known as Bolling Hall still existed. I began planning the trips I would make when I was grown up.

As I read about all these places and looked them up on maps, I was also gathering other interests to read about, like the plague. I've been a plague groupie for decades, and not because I'm a morbid soul. In reading about the plague, I found many wonderful books that told me so  much about how people lived, what food they ate, what clothes they wore, how they spoke and the traditions they had. Let's face it-- that's the primary reason why I was reading: I needed to know as much as I could about the ancestors who'd had a hand in making me the person I am.

Yes, part of my desire to read about the world around me is due in part to my nature, but part of it is also due to my mother who had her own desire to check out the far side of that hill over there. We went on cross country trips to the deep South and all the way west to the Pacific Ocean. We moved to Utah and began spending weekends looking for old ghost towns. It wasn't until we'd moved to Arizona and I was helping her with some of her genealogical research that it dawned on me that she and I had followed a long-established family pattern.

Looking back over the centuries, someone in our family had gotten itchy feet and moved far away from family and friends every one hundred years or so. Family who'd lived in Bolling Hall in the early sixteenth century moved from Yorkshire to London. In the early seventeenth century they made the move to Virginia. One hundred years later, moves were made to Tennessee and Kentucky. The next century saw them settling in Illinois. An endless progression all the way through to the twentieth century when my mother and I moved to Arizona.

So my choice to read about the world is indeed a matter of nature, nurture, and lack of funds, but it's also a matter of a desire to know. Before I made my headlong dive into crime fiction, I was reading historical fiction and history-- South America, Russia, India, Japan, Australia, Italy.... A particular favorite for many years has been maritime history, and Nathaniel Philbrick's superb Sea of Glory took me on a voyage around the world with many stops in exotic locales filled with fascinating people and customs.

When I did finally begin reading crime fiction with a vengeance, I glutted myself on Michael Connelly, Nevada Barr, Patricia Cornwell, and many more American authors, but I wanted more. That's when I turned to one of my favorite crime fiction resources, Stop, You're Killing Me!, and used it for more than just reading my series books in order. I looked at all those links on the left side of the page, and I spotted "Location Index."  Hmmm... I clicked on it and discovered choices like Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, South America, etc. When I clicked on those, I was given huge lists of mysteries set in countries all over the world. I was in heaven!





I have a favorite tote bag that is emblazoned with the motto "Crime Has No Time Zone"-- and it doesn't. If I want to solve a mystery and learn about the politics and customs of... Brazil... I can do that. If I want to know more about the people of Thailand, I can do that, too. If I'm feeling a bit peckish, all I have to do is open a book, find myself in France, and begin immersing myself in food, wine, language, culture... and murder. Crime fiction is one of the best ways to learn that I know. My brain is stimulated by intriguing investigations that vary slightly from country to country depending upon the country's laws. I learn a bit about the history of the places I visit as well as the languages, customs, favored modes of transportation, cuisine. Reading crime fiction has actually helped connect me more firmly to the world around me-- the more I read, the more I see how much people of all nations are basically alike.

What about you? Do you prefer to read closer to home, or do you like to see what's on the other side of the hill? There's a lot to be said for both preferences, isn't there, and neither one is "wrong" by any stretch of the imagination!


12 comments:

  1. I enjoy books that take me into other cultures, whether they be real places or worlds from the realms of fiction. For me a good book is one where I can really imagine being in the place, with the people it describes. I don't think I'm as real-worldly read as you however.

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    1. To each his own, right? For some reason, there tend to be few books set in other worlds that have really gripped my imagination. Frank Herbert's DUNE is the only one that springs to mind at the moment. But I am in total agreement-- if you're "there" and experiencing everything as you read, then it's a good book.

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  2. Most of the time, my preference is for something new, whether it be domestic or International; "new" for me usually means another country. But I am particularly grateful for the computer-based technological advances I have witnessed and utilized during my lifetime, resulting in tools I can use to enhance my reading. Things like Google Maps, Bing Images, Google searches, and video from multiple sources. Last week as I read "The Dead Don't Dance" (thank you for the review), I wondered if such a place as Apelu's island really exists and what it might look like, and voila! in seconds I had my answer.

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    1. Those tools are fabulous! I remember an evening in which I mentioned to Denis that I was reading one of Graham Hurley's mysteries set in Portsmouth, England. Being ex-Royal Navy, at one time he was stationed in Pompey. He was on Google Earth for some reason, and he set it to Portsmouth. I wound up getting a tour of the place, and afterwards, I knew more about Denis and could picture Portsmouth much more clearly when reading Hurley.

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  3. Cathy - Oh, I travel virtually too! It's not that I dislike books about where I live or where I grew up. But you can learn so much from reading about other places. I know I do!

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    1. I know I try to balance mine with reading about Arizona, but there's a whole world out there that keeps insisting on my attention!

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  4. What a great post, Cathy! There's so much to respond to that I'd have to write my own post to cover it. ;-)

    I do love to travel - in time as well as in place - and I had never thought to get out a map when I'm reading about far-away places. Thanks so much for that idea - and for pointing out the location finder on SYKM!

    BUT - I admit that my favourite reading is set in Atlantic Canada - my adopted home. The more I read about this place, the more I understand it, and hope to fit in.

    Thanks so much for writing this post.

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    1. You're welcome, Debbie. I'm glad you enjoyed it. I understand your preference for reading about your adopted home because I do the same with Arizona. I don't want to be the type of reader who knows more about the rest of the world than she does her own backyard. :-)

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  5. This is such a wonderful post. We're very similar in that I too started to travel book-wise in my Cornish childhood. Books about Scotland, Scandinavia, the USA and so on thrilled me to bits. I collected stamps for the very same reason. There was no money at all in my family but I could go anywhere I wanted via books. I moved on to other planets and fantasy worlds in my teens. LOL. And this urge to read the world and beyond has never left me and probably never will.

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    1. I collected stamps, too, Cath, and no money here either. My mother raised me on a small widow's pension and a variety of part-time jobs. I started earning money at a young age as well. Thank heavens one of my mother's jobs was as the village librarian. Growing up in the stacks was perfect for me!

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  6. What fascinating post! And you were lucky to have curious and dogged investigators into family history. Did you ever figure that some of the moves to the U.S. and within it were motivated by economic needs? To find a job or be able to open a business or move to where one thought he or she could live financially.

    I know why my Jewish/Russian/Polish relatives came; they were fleeing czarist pogroms, as were the forebears of many friends and descendants of Jewish immigrants. But what I'd like to know is more about the Irish side of the family. I know my great-grand-mother came from Ireland and married an English groomsman. They must have come for economic reasons, to find jobs, have better lives.

    And you are so lucky, too, that your mothre worked in the village library. Just perfect for a book-hungry person. I would have had to be wrenched out of the stacks. As it was, I was always late to high school because I could not put my book down and turn off the light.

    I was not as adventurous in my reading and read U.S.-written books until I got in global crime fiction and read so many great blogs, such as this one, read book reviews and about more authors, etc.

    I do agree that the Internet has expanded my global reading, but also made possible instant research. I just love to search for more information about a book's location, geography, flora and fauna and the history of the region. To read more blogs and books means to search more.

    I saw the De Luca dvd's from Italian TV and spent two days reading about post-war Italy. Reading Angela Savage's great series set in Thailand has sent me scurrying to Google's search engine,looking at maps (a favorite) and even fish millions of years old.

    Where would we be without search engines? And now more and more global mysteries?

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    1. It would seem that none of the ancestors left journals or anything of the sort that would let us know why they decided to move. Usually it's to make a better life for themselves.

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