Just as important as a vacation destination: The books you read there
Why would I bring a book set in rural Ireland to Portugal when displayed nearby as I was shopping at Politics & Prose was a novel with a more apropos title: “Two Nights in Lisbon”? Well, I wasn’t sure I wanted another person’s descriptions of the city I’d be visiting interfering with my own experiences. Plus, the book jacket saidnew novel is about a husband who mysteriously disappears during a trip with his wife to the Portuguese capital.
For me, picking the right book to take on vacation is nearly as much fun as the vacation itself. I don’t always get it right. I managed to finish the first-person account by a survivor of the Uruguayan rugby team that crashed in the Andes and resorted to cannibalism, but it was a poor choice for a beach house on the Outer Banks. Somehow, though, “Moby Dick” was perfect for a rainy weekend at Chincoteague in the 1980s with my then-girlfriend.
I knew the Tana French paperback wouldn’t last me the whole vacation, and I looked forward to buying something in country, so to speak — if I could find a Portuguese bookstore that sold books in English. In Porto we visited, which has been called the world’s most beautiful bookstore. It’s an art nouveau masterpiece, a jewel box of carved-wood curlicues, stained-glass windows and a curving staircase painted crimson. Being inside the store made me want to drink absinthe.
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