nicholas-nickleby

When Fiction Reading Meets Nonfiction Travel

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At the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. (2013 photo by me.)

In the Northern Hemisphere, today is the first day of summer – the season when many people travel. And that traveling can be literature-related in certain ways. I’ll discuss some of my experiences, and then ask about yours.

In my post on another topic last week, I mentioned the Pantheon in Paris and Westminster Abbey in London, both of which contain the tombs of famous authors and/or “memorials” honoring them. These writers include, among others, Chaucer and Charles Dickens in Westminster and Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Voltaire, and Emile Zola in the Pantheon. Sobering, unforgettable visits for fiction lovers.

Speaking of Zola and Dumas, I was in the south of France in 2007 accompanying my French professor wife Laurel to a Zola conference she was speaking at in Aix-en-Provence. Another speaker was Zola’s great-granddaughter, Martine Le Blond-Zola.

During that trip, Laurel and I also visited Marseille – from where we took a boat to the Chateau d’If island prison immortalized in Dumas’ novel The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas used a jail cell there as the model for the one in which his Edmond Dantes character would be wrongly incarcerated for years.

On an earlier European trip, I visited the London house where Dickens lived from 1837 to 1839 – during which time he finished The Pickwick Papers and wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby.

Also while in London back then, I went to the Madame Tussauds wax museum – where the figures I most remember were of the three Bronte sisters (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne) sitting together.

Back in the USA, I’ve visited literature-related sites such as the Herman Melville “Arrowhead” house and museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts (where the author lived from 1850 to 1863 and wrote works such as Moby-Dick) and the Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Connecticut (where the author lived from 1874 to 1891 and penned novels such as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn).

In addition, I toured the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis while attending a conference in that city.

And I’ve traveled to other conferences and gatherings in which speakers included novelists Tom Clancy, Lisa Scottoline, John Updike, Tom Wolfe, and others. (I didn’t go to see those writers per se; they happened to be among the speakers.)

Getting a literary experience while visiting somewhere can be more indirect. For instance, when I spent several days in St. Petersburg many years ago I didn’t see anything specific about Fyodor Dostoevsky but thought about Crime and Punishment’s setting as I walked around the Russian city. And I once stayed in a Terre Haute, Indiana, hotel where there was a lobby display about famous local Theodore Dreiser of Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy novels renown.

I have the vague recollection that I wrote about this topic years ago, but couldn’t locate that possible post in an online search. I’ll add that frequent commenter here Michele indirectly gave me the idea for today’s post when she mentioned a recent New York Times article about literary travel; that story (below) took a different approach than I did.

Any personal literature-related travel experiences you’d like to share?

Misty the cat says: “So THIS is where Anne Tyler wrote her 1995 novel ‘Ladder of Years’!”

My comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )

This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

I’m also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, I write the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — which contains great library news and laments the long delay of a much-needed forensic audit of my town’s deficit-ridden school district — is here.

What Is So Rare as a Cat Post in June?

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SO ready for my close-up. (Photo by some human.)

I, Misty the cat, am back for my every-two-month guest blog post — this time starting with a book-related complaint. Is my beef the fact that few males in literature are as handsome as my feline self? Well, that’s an issue, but my complaint actually involves libraries not always having every book in a series — causing me to slap photos of not-there novels on milk cartons under the word MISSING.

Sure, I realize some of those novels are being borrowed by library users, but my cat intuition suspects that in other cases the whole series were not ordered by acquisitions departments. If Amnesty International didn’t have infinitely more important things to do, they’d investigate.

I most recently wrestled with missing-book syndrome after looking several times for Y Is for Yesterday, the 25th and final installment of Sue Grafton’s wonderful series of alphabet mysteries (the author unfortunately died before authoring Z). I decided not to write 25 strongly worded…letters.

Then, after reading Peter May’s riveting thriller The Blackhouse and its equally intense sequel The Lewis Man (unexpectedly not about Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor), I returned to the library several times with hopeful tail in air looking for the third installment: The Chessmen. But it was never there. Not even a single cheap plastic pawn, rook, or bishop. Sure, I could try to get on a waiting list (if my local library had those books) or do the interlibrary loan thing, but I have so many books on my to-read list that I just ended up borrowing other novels. After briefly sobbing for multiple days.

During my last library visit vainly seeking The Chessmen, I randomly chose a different Peter May novel called Lockdown. Didn’t like it at all; I abandoned the book after struggling through nearly 100 pages — though I kindly gave the library some clues about where I had abandoned said book. (Hint: it’s buried near where labor leader Jimmy Hoffa disappeared in 1975.) Even the best authors can write the occasional clunker, and their prison terms for doing so tend to be only several years.

More clunkers by otherwise excellent authors who are not cats like me? Stephen King’s Cell, Kristin Hannah’s Fly Away, Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl, and Jack London’s A Daughter of the Snows, to name four. I’d love to see what’s in the parent-name boxes on that snow daughter’s birth certificate.

Nary a clunker among George Eliot’s big-five novels published in this chronological order: Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda. Oddly, Mary Ann Evans wrote the same five novels — meaning she and Eliot may have been smoking noms de plume.

Daniel Deronda reminds me — the intermittently meowing Misty — that many fictional works have alliterative titles: Black Beauty (Anna Sewell), Captains Courageous (Rudyard Kipling), Cat’s Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut), Golden Girl (Elin Hilderbrand), Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn), Make Me (Lee Child), Marjorie Morningstar (Herman Wouk), Nicholas Nickleby (Charles Dickens), Perestroika in Paris (Jane Smiley), Peter Pan (J.M. Barrie), Rob Roy (Walter Scott), The Cuckoo’s Calling (J.K. Rowling), The Custom of the Country (Edith Wharton), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov), The Boys from Biloxi (John Grisham), The Plains of Passage (Jean M. Auel), etc. Oh, and Crime and Crunishment.

What does “crunishment” mean? I think it has something to do with being bombarded by croutons.

It’s June and the sun is often out, so I would like to conclude this post with some novels that have “Sun” in their titles. The Sun Also Rises, of course, which I feel is overrated Hemingway — although he was a big fan of never-overrated cats. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. And so on. I, Misty the cat, do not live in “The House of the Rising Sun” but instead dwell in “The Apartment of the Rising Sun” — from which I emerge every morning for my daily leashed walk to do more reading: STOP signs, street signs, graffiti, license plates, T-shirt logos, and the occasional plane skywriting “Where’s the final alphabet mystery?”

My human Dave will reply to all comments because “crunishment” is not a word.

Misty the cat says: “I’m inches from garden-bag greatness.”

My (and Dave’s) comedic 2024 book — the part-factual/part-fictional/not-a-children’s-work Misty the Cat…Unleashed — is described and can be purchased on Amazon in paperback or on Kindle. It’s feline-narrated! (And Amazon reviews are welcome. 🙂 )


This 90-second promo video for the book features a talking cat: 🙂

Dave is also the author of a 2017 literary-trivia book…

…and a 2012 memoir that focuses on cartooning and more, including many encounters with celebrities.

In addition to this weekly blog, Dave writes the 2003-started/award-winning “Montclairvoyant” topical-humor column every Thursday for Montclair Local. The latest piece — with primary election results, a governor’s mixed reaction to protests against an awful immigrant detention center, and more — is here.