Armchair Travel
Summer is the time of year that evokes visions of lazy days by the pool, chasing fireflies and, for many, the sometimes boring but always illuminating experience of the family vacation. If this year's vacation is more of a stay-cation or the farthest you are traveling is Table Rock Lake (I've got my flip flops and an inner tube, I'm sure you need a friendly librarian to suggest books on the trip!) then armchair travel may be what you are looking for in your summer reading.
Armchair travel simply means experiencing the people, cultures and places from all around the world through books and magazines. From your comfy armchair you can live vicariously in a place you may never experience in real life or learn more about a place you are about to visit. The best examples of this concept would be the magazine National Geographic and such popular tomes as Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia by Elizabeth Gilbert and In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson.
This summer, to support the Library's Adult Summer Reading Program Novel Destinations, we will be highlighting several different areas of our collection that will help you see the world. Keep checking back to see if we highlight the place you want to visit most. Until then, remember our librarians at each of the Springfield-Greene County Libraries would be thrilled to help you with your reading selections. If figuring it all out on your own is more appealing, here are a few starting points:
Travel to... A booklist compiled by the staff at the Springfield-Greene County Library District of books set in a variety of locations from Egypt to South America.
Bibliotravel.com is a site developed by two librarians to connect books about different areas of the world with the people who want to read about them. Simply type in the place you want to visit in a literary sense and, voila, instant reading list.
"One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things." -Henry Miller
Find this article at http://thelibrary.org/blogs/article.cfm?aid=1425&view=print