Top Ten Tuesday: Anti-Travel Books

For That Artsy Reader Girl‘s Top Ten Tuesday, this week’s topic was

June 12: Books That Awaken the Travel Bug In Me

But then I started thinking that books that make me want to stay home might also be kind of fun…

1. Wedding Night by Sophie Kinsella

Location: Greek Resort

Problem: Lottie is disappointed when her boyfriend doesn’t propose. When her ex-shows up they impulsively decide to elope. After the ceremony, it’s a quick flight to Greece. But Lottie’s sister, Fliss, knows that this marriage is a terrible idea. She also knows the marriage can be easily annulled if it’s not consummated, so she’s on a mission to keep that from happening, getting everyone from the groom’s best friend, to the hotel staff to help her.

2. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

Location: Italy

Problem: Tom Ripley has been hired by a rich man to get his son Dickie to return to the US. Tom meets up with Dickie and some of his friends in Italy. But instead of getting Dickie to go home, he ends up killing Dickie and assuming his identity.

3. Don’t Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier

Location: Venice, Italy

Problem- A young couple is vacationing in Venice while trying to recover from the loss of their daughter. They meet two women who claim to be psychic, and the women give a warning and tell them that their daughter’s spirit is with them. At the same time, a serial killer is stalking the city’s streets and canals…

4. The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware

Location: Scandinavian luxury cruise

Problem: Lo is a travel writer, assigned to cover the maiden voyage of a new cruise line.  Her first night on board, she hears a scream and a splash. Looking out her window she sees something in the water. However, the ship’s officials don’t believe that anything really happened. Lo had been drinking that night, and no passengers are missing.

5. The Ruins by Scott Smith

Location: Cancun, Mexico

Problem: Four friends are on a beach vacation. When the brother of one of them disappears they decide to look for him where he was last seen, checking out some ancient ruins in the jungle. When they reach the ruins, the locals don’t seem to want to let them go, and once they do make it, they’re not allowed to leave, because an ancient enemy lives in the ruins.

6. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

Location: Dorset coast, England

Problem: In 1962, Florence and Edward have just gotten married, and are on their honeymoon. But one of them has a secret that may tear them apart.

 

7. Rachel’s Holiday by Marian Keyes

Location: Ireland

Problem: Rachael is an Irish ex-pat living in NYC. But when her tendency to overdo things lands her in the emergency room, her family whisks her back to Ireland and sends her to the Cloisters, a rehab. Rachel thinks it might be kind of nice: a little vacation, some spa treatments, maybe a celebrity roommate… What she finds are a lot of group therapy and some unwelcome self-knowledge.

8. Sleeping Arrangements by Madeline Wickam (aka Sophie Kinsella)

Location: Spain

Problem: Hugh feels alienated from his wife and kids. He hopes that a trip to a friend’s luxury villa in Spain will help the family reconnect. Meanwhile, Chloe and her family are facing similar problems and their friend offers them the same solution. But it turns out that their friend booked both families in the villa for the same week. And Chloe and Hugh have a history, and before the week is out old ghosts will be put to rest, new tensions will erupt, and the families may or may not make it out intact.

9. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

Location: North Africa

Problem: Port and Kit travel to Africa believing that it’s one of the last “unspoiled” places in the world. They’re soon joined by several annoying, parasitic travelers. To escape they head into the Sahara without plans or directions. It does not go well.

10. The Magus by John Fowles

Location: Greek Island

Problem: Nicholas Urfe is a recent grad who has accepted a job teaching on a Greek island. He befriends the owner of an estate on the island, who plays elaborate mind games with him until he can’t tell what is and isn’t real.

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Top Ten Tuesday: Best Summer Books

The Broke and the Bookish are taking a break from their Top Ten Tuesday for the summer, but there’s no reason that I have to do the same. This week, I decided to look at ten books that are set in the summer and evoke the season somehow.

1. Atonement by Ian McEwan– In the summer of 1935, thirteen year old Briony Tallis sees a moment of sexual tension between her sister, and the housekeeper’s son, but doesn’t quite understand it. This misunderstanding leads her to tell a lie that will haunt the three of them for decades to come.

 “Dearest Cecilia, You’d be forgiven for thinking me mad, the way I acted this afternoon. The truth is I feel rather light headed and foolish in your presence, Cee, and I don’t think I can blame the heat.”

2. Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver– This novel features three interconnected plots that take place over a hot, humid, Appalachian summer. 

“Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end.”

3. Summer by Edith Wharton– This book, about a bored 18 year old who has an affair with a neighbor and gets pregnant, caused a bit of a scandal when it was first released in 1917. A century later it’s not as shocking, but Wharton is, as always, a beautiful writer.

“She was blind and insensible to many things, and dimly knew it; but to all that was light and air, perfume and colour, every drop of blood in her responded. She loved the roughness of the dry mountain grass under her palms, the smell of the thyme into which she crushed her face, the fingering of the wind in her hair and through her cotton blouse, and the creak of the larches as they swayed to it.”

4. The Magus by John Fowles– Nicholas is an Oxford grad who takes a job as a teacher on a remote Greek island. Over the summer, he becomes bored, depressed and lonely. Then he meets Maurice Conchis, a wealthy recluse who lives on the island.  Nicholas is gradually drawn into Conchis’ psychological games to the point where he isn’t able to tell what’s real and what isn’t. 

“I knew that on that island one was driven back into the past. There was so much space, so much silence, so few meetings that one too easily saw out of the present, and then the past seemed ten times closer than it was.”

5. The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer- This books follows the lives of several kids who met at a summer arts camp in the 1970s as they grow up. They circle one another over the year, coming together and apart. 

“But here was where the question of talent became slippery, for who could say whether Spirit-in-the-Woods had ever pulled incipient talent out of a kid and activated it, or whether the talent had been there all along and would have come out even without this place.”

6.  Evening by Susan Minot– A dying old woman remembers a wedding in Maine, one summer in the 1950’s. It was the summer she found and lost the love of her life. This novel is as bittersweet as a summer romance.

“Who ever said that one got what one wanted. It was a small thing compared to… well, to a lot of things. She’d gotten over things before none like this she’d left things behind this was more she couldn’t speak of it this was the first thing only hers she would have to forget. It was too great it was her heart. She couldn’t explain and to try and to fail would be worse. It pressed in her. Life simply went on. He was not the only man. Her heart did not believe it. There were other men in the world. There was only one. She would try to live a life he would be proud of. She could not imagine it. She would always have him with her. He would go he would disappear he was already disappearing already he was gone. He had given her a great thing. He has gone, said her heart. She would not let this defeat her. Her heart swam on ahead. She would keep going, she would never speak of it. Her heart went on without her. No one would know. She swam through the cold water and let cold reason take over and the heart which had asked for too much left her behind and when she emerged from the water on the rocky beach she had let go of it and there was a new version in her, a sort of second heart. She went in with one heart and came out with a second heart inside.”

7. Joyland by Stephen King- This isn’t King’s best known work by any means, but it does evoke a summer feel. It’s about a 21 year old by who spends his summer working at a North Carolina amusement park. At first there’s a sense of innocence that’s shattered as our narrator encounters an murder and a haunting.

“When you’re twenty-one, life is a roadmap. It’s only when you get to be twenty-five or so that you begin to suspect you’ve been looking at the map upside down, and not until you’re forty are you entirely sure.”

8. Summer Sisters by Judy Blume- Caitlin and Vix are best friends who spend every summer together. As they grow up, they find their relationship strained. Just a note, Blume is known for children’s and YA fiction. While the coming of age story might sound like it’s child friendly this novel is clearly intended for adults.

“Some people never get over their first loves. They spend their whole lives trying to recapture the thrill. Sometimes, after fifty years they get back together. They meet at some reunion or other and realize they were meant to be together.”

9. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf- The Ramsey family spend their summers in the Hebrides on the Isle of Skye in Scotland.  Woolf’s depiction of the emotions and ideas can be so overwhelming that it’s easy to forget that this is really a book about family, about “getting away from it all” with the people who mean the most to you but also annoy you the most.

“She felt… how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.”

10. The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith– Tom Ripley is hired by a rich man to go to Europe and convince the man’s son, Dickie, to come home. Tom befriends Dickie, and grows attached to the extravagant lifestyle he enjoys with Dickie. But when Dickie begins to tire of him, Tom takes drastic measures. This book is set mostly in sunny vacation spots in Italy and Greece that seem to evoke the smell of citrus and sunblock.

“Why should Dickie want to come back to subways and taxis and starched collars and a nine-to- five job? Or even a chauffeured car and vacations in Florida and Maine? It wasn’t as much fun as sailing a boat in old clothes and being answerable to nobody for the way”