What About Mom Book Review: These Is My Words
April 24th, 2009 by Laura Moncur in Literature
“Susan” at the What About Mom blog wrote a wonderful review of These Is My Words by Nancy Turner.
One of my favorite things is to read books in the locations where they’re set. The only thing better than escaping into the world of a book is to escape mentally at the same time that physically you’re exploring to. I read Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile while cruising down the Nile, Jane Austen in Bath, Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark while in a motorhome between Colorado and New York City, Elizabeth Peter’s Night Train to Memphis while not far from there (Egypt, not Tennessee), and Romeo and Juliet while sleeping in a 16th century palazzo-turned-youth-hostel in Verona. Someday I’d like to read Death in Kenya on the plains of the Rift Valley, and a Susan Napier romance while backpacking in New Zealand. This week I read These is My Words: the Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine 1881-1901, Arizona Territories (a novel) as we camped on the Utah-Arizona border with my parents.
The idea of reading a book while at the location set in the book is new to me. I actually started reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil when we were in Savannah, Georgia. Once the plane hit Utah soil, however, the half-read book went unfinished.
In contrast, there are a lot of cities that I decided I wanted to visit BECAUSE of the fiction that I’ve read. And when time machines are easily accessible, there are FAR more epochs that I want to visit because of fiction.
The beauty of books is that they can transport us to a different city and time without having to leave our comfy chairs.