Joni Rendon

- A nice idea of highlighting literary connections with various travel destinations that unfortunately doesn’t quite work. But I think this book’s failure is more down to its design and layout than it’s content. It falls between two stools and ends up as neither a literary overview nor a practical travel guide. By organizing the content by genres and jumping from author to author with no clear delineation the information soon blends together. I ended up cherry picking entries by searching for authors in the index. Talking of indexes the book desperately needed a dedicated index of locations mentioned to aid any travel planning with a literary twist. I was hoping that this could be the book to help me figure out a few fun places to visit the next time I’m in New York for a few days, or on a future trip back to the UK. The frustration is that the information is all in there, it’s just not presented in a useful way.… (mais)

If you personally know an author/writer DO NOT give their significant other this book for Christmas. With the exception of one or two it seems that writers cannot be (1) married, (2) monogamous or (3) happy, they do however derive great inspiration from the muse of disastrous love affairs. Touching on iconic writers from Agatha Christie and Lord Byron through to Hemmingway and Arthur Miller not one sheet is left unturned.

This book is broken into small chapters with whimsical titles like “All War, No Peace: Leo Tolstoy” and “Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know: Lord Byron”. The short chapters are a good idea for this type of book as it is not one that you plop yourself down and read in one sitting, it’s more of a sneak a peek when you have just a couple of minutes to read something.

An interesting read.
… (mais)

Scandalous, indeed! Based on this book, it seems like most every writer in history had several affairs, unsavory sexual appetites, or some kind of mental instability (sometimes all of the above). Each foray into an author's romantic life is no longer than 6 or 7 pages, which is just enough to examine the debauchery they got up to. After a while, I began to wish for a happy ending. Luckily the authors heard my plea and relegated their last section of the book to the happier stories (even though most of them still involved divorce or some other scandal).

While I learned some new info about each of the writers, I found the writing to be mediocre and kind of repetitive; the addition of random quizzes like "Identify the Mistress!" left me rolling my eyes. Still, for what it was, I had some fun reading it. I will be passing this book along to be donated.… (mais)

I enjoyed sampling the entries from this book, but it wasn't particularly useful when I went to use it to plan some literary adventures. The layout stymied me when I approached the book from a planning standpoint. I felt like I had to search around quite a bit to find what I was looking for, both when looking for everything for one author and for everything in one geographical region. I wanted to be able to say, "I'm in New England; what can I do that's literary?" but it didn't work that way for me. (It's possible this was due to user error.) I also could have used a book more centered on North America because that's where I am and that's where I plan most (or, so far, all) of my road trips. I liked reading about the destinations in the UK, but having never been there and having no immediate plans to go there, it was difficult to envision the locations.

I do plan to pick this one up again as my kids get older and they and I plan trips together. Or at least I hope that's what will happen. My kids and I all love to read, and the whole family loves road trips; literary road trips seem like a logical outcome of all of this reading/road-tripping love, but it's possible I'm not taking into account the feelings of pre-teens and teens about traveling with their mom.… (mais)