Live the literature

I wanted to tell you about several fabulous holidays I've enjoyed as a result of books. It's topical: I'm planning another.

There was a visit to Vienna, to see the Big Wheel, the Mozart Cafe, and other places whence we saw the demise of Graham Greene's Harry Lime in The Third Man.

There was a trip to San Francisco, setting for A Crack in the Edge of the World. On the same adventure, I went to New York, to stare vacantly into the duck pond in Central Park where Holden met Phoebe in Catcher in the Rye, and pass the Plaza, where Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway drank champagne with Gastby and Daisy and lost Jordan, and stroll in Soho looking out for Patrick Bateman, the all-American Psycho.

And there was a trip to dark, mysterious Java, to visit Krakatau, Bogor, Anyer, Jakarta: crucial locations in The Day the World Exploded.

Where to next? Next is a long time off, I'm afraid, but it'll be Egypt -- inspired by Noel Coward's Middle East Diary of 1943 (as well as, oh, Death on the Nile, Tutankhamun, the Rosetta Stone, etc. etc.) -- and Spain, to follow in the dusty footsteps laid out in Rose Macaulay's Fabled Shore.

I can recommend this approach to travel: read a book, love it, and visit the place in which it was set. Look for the heros in their haunts, tread the pavements where the bad guys stalked, lie in fields in which hearts were lost, sit in the cafe where the heroine first appeared. Live the literature.