Sarah Baxter

Literary Places: Inspired Traveller’s Guide by Sarah Baxter, illustrated by Amy Grimes

White Lion Publishing
Nonfiction, travel
March 5, 2019
Rating: 5/5

I received this digital ARC from NetGalley and White Lion Publishing in exchange for an unbiased review.

A great story allows the reader to travel in time to places that only exist in our imagination. This book focuses on 25 great literary places around the world. Each chapter uniquely illustrated provides a reflection hoping to transport you to those places which we can only visit via the pages of these literary treasures. The author explores the location in regards to history and the author’s vision at that time.

Imagine being in Paris 1800’s during the Enlightenment amidst the squalor and revolution which existed in Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. An interesting history of Paris during this era provides a historical perspective of the travails of Jean Valjean. From there you can time travel to Dublin where James Joyce describes the humdrum events in a typical Irish day in Ulysses. Imagine being Léopold Bloom exploring the streets of Dublin on 16 June 1904.

Similarly, A Room with a View by E.M. Forster allows us to see Florence during the resplendent Italian Renaissance. Fast forward to Naples 1950’s as two young girls come of age in My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. You can also imagine Berlin Alexanderplatz in the late 1920’s during a period of hardship and political unrest. Perhaps a trip to a timeless place of simplicity and awe! We might find ourselves in Nordland as described by Knut Hamsun in Growth of the Soil.

Of course, a literary jaunt would not be complete without a stop in St. Petersburg, an imperial Russian city described in Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. These are only a sampling of the journey you will take in this book. A lovely guide for those who enjoy the journey as well as the destination.

https://www.bookbub.com/books/literary-places-inspired-traveller-s-guides-by-sar...… (more)

Literary Places: Inspired Traveller’s Guide by Sarah Baxter, illustrated by Amy Grimes


White Lion Publishing
Nonfiction, travel
March 5, 2019
Rating: 5/5

I received this digital ARC from NetGalley and White Lion Publishing in exchange for an unbiased review.

A great story allows the reader to travel in time to places that only exist in our imagination. This book focuses on 25 great literary places around the world. Each chapter uniquely illustrated provides a reflection hoping to transport you to those places which we can only visit via the pages of these literary treasures. The author explores the location in regard to history and the author’s vision at that time.

Imagine being in Paris 1800’s during the Enlightenment amidst the squalor and revolution which existed in Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. An interesting history of Paris during this era provides a historical perspective of the travails of Jean Valjean. From there you can time travel to Dublin where James Joyce describes the humdrum events in a typical Irish day in Ulysses. Imagine being Léopold Bloom exploring the streets of Dublin on 16 June 1904.

Similarly, A Room with a View by E.M. Forster allows us to see Florence during the resplendent Italian Renaissance. Fast forward to Naples 1950’s as two young girls come of age in My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. You can also imagine Berlin Alexanderplatz in the late 1920’s during a period of hardship and political unrest. Perhaps a trip to a timeless place of simplicity and awe! We might find ourselves in Nordland as described by Knut Hamsun in Growth of the Soil.

Of course, a literary jaunt would not be complete without a stop in St. Petersburg, an imperial Russian city described in Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. These are only a sampling of the journey you will take in this book. A lovely guide for those who enjoy the journey as well as the destination.

https://www.bookbub.com/books/literary-places-inspired-traveller-s-guides-by-sar...

… (more)

Cinematic Places, written by Sarah Baxter and illustrated by Amy Grimes, is volume 7 in the Inspired Traveller's Guides series and continues the coupling of brief informative descriptions with wonderful artistic representations.

First, this is a traveler's guide, not a cinematic guide, so don't expect movie analysis. And no, this book about traveling should not be organized by film genre any more than a cinema guide should be organized by where a film takes place (unless, of course, that is the main point of the book). This also isn't simply a collection of places where film's happened to have been shot, these are films where the location is almost like an additional character in the film. Or, as an old film and lit professor of mine emphasized, "the world of the work."

It has taken me a while to grow comfortable with the hand-drawn illustrations rather than photographs, but I have come to think this works very well. I'll explain in relation to this volume but the idea can be used for the others as well. These places are elements in a story, they hold special appeal for how we remember them in relation to the film and the characters. Even places from our own past are remembered through selective memory, we might remember places as more magical, or darker and danker, based on what we did there. Same with films (or books, or spiritual places, etc) so the illustrations present an image of a place in that same way, while a photograph taken this week might show something that distracts us from the purpose of the image, namely, recalling the location in relation to the film. So I am comfortable with the illustrations, though admittedly I would probably enjoy photographs also. And if you read the very first sentence in the book description where I saw it, it states "hand drawn illustrations," so it doesn't require special attention to understand this, just basic reading comprehension.

I have seen 21 of the 25 films highlighted here and for the most part the written descriptions and the illustrations did a great job of bringing me back to the feeling I had when viewing the film. For the ones I hadn't seen, I still enjoyed the artwork and the descriptions made me consider watching them.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (more)