The two modes of travel reading
Pre-trip or substitute-for-trip. The first is reading about somewhere you are about to go; the second is reading about somewhere you cannot. Different books work for each.
For France
James Haller's Vie de France is the strongest culinary memoir of a Loire Valley summer in our review catalog. Elizabeth Adler's The Last Time I Saw Paris is the romance-comfort companion. The Hotel Riviera moves you to Saint-Tropez for the second half of the trip.
For Australia
Kerry Greenwood's Murder on a Midsummer Night is the best 1928 Melbourne tour you can take in print. The Phryne Fisher series across the catalog gives you suburb-by-suburb city walking tours, hotel listings, restaurant references, and the social history that the contemporary city still trades on.
For Russia
Boris Akunin's The Winter Queen is the most stylish 1876 Moscow walking tour available in English. The Fandorin series puts you in St. Petersburg, on the Trans-Siberian, in the Crimean War zone, and across the late-Tsarist empire.
For New York
Michael Cunningham's The Hours is the best contemporary New York / Greenwich Village / Washington Square literary novel in print. The 1998 New York chapters are some of the most attentive city writing of the late-twentieth-century American literary catalog.
For coastal America
Rita Mae Brown's The Sand Castle (Maryland Chincoteague). Clive Cussler's The Chase (1906 San Francisco). Two different coasts, two different centuries, both ground-level in the way only fiction can be.