Book Lust To Go - Nancy Pearl

Nancy Pearl, a librarian in Seattle, has two prior books in this "series" - Book Lust and More Book Lust. All three are filled with her recommendations of books to read in various categories. Book Lust To Go focuses on travel - with Pearl breaking up the book into sections based on countries, cities, or type of travel (long train rides, for example). Pearl acknowledges in her introduction that she is not much of an actual traveler, but that she enjoys seeing new places through the pages of books in the comfort of her own home. And so she put togehter these lists filled with non-fiction, travel narratives, and fiction - all of which give the reader a real sense of the flavor of a given destination. Given that I predict limited ability to travel in the upcoming year - I was thinking of doing some armchair traveling of my own in 2011 - picking a country or region a month and focusing my reading on that area. Pearl has provided a lot of inspiration and suggestion for this project of mine. My only hesitation is that I want to be sure I'm reading books that are really true to a given place, and by Pearl's own admission, she hasn't herself been to many of these place. Though, it does sound like she sought out recommendations from people who had been...so I take some of her suggestions with a grain of salt. But, as with her prior two books, her lists have given me a wonderful jumping off point, and I look forward to traveling around the world with her help for the next 12 months!