Globe Corner Blogs

Countless times customers come into the bookstore asking for a book they heard on NPR, only they forgot the author…and the title. I usually enjoy the challenge of tracking down the book based on the strains of story the customer picked up on their morning commute or over lunch break. Sometimes, however, the search is in vain, the sound byte too short.

So if you heard the Globe Corner Travel Annex at Brookline Booksmith mentioned on your local WBUR station over the past few days, but didn’t quite catch the full range of travel resources we now have on hand at Booksmith, we’re here to fill you in and make sure you’re prepared for your next destination.

If that destination happens to be one of our country’s grand national parks, Lonely Planet has several guides to take you through the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite National Parks. These books have everything you need to explore, from detailed mountain hikes to cycling paths, nature and wildlife to watch for, and information on accommodations, including camping.

Want to leave the country without going overseas? Our neighbors to the north are waiting with open hands. But don’t go with empty hands, pick up one of our Moon Handbooks for Montreal and Quebec, Nova Scotia, and even the Canadian Rockies.

If you’re in the Boston area, we’ve got National Geographic Trail maps for the Boston Harbor Islands and Cape Cod–the perfect place to spend the upcoming holiday.

And for those of you lucky enough to be traveling to Europe this summer, check out Rick Steve’s guides to European countries, including the Rick Steve’s pocket guides to cities such as Paris, Rome, and Athens. These books are full of trip planning and touring advice you do not want to be without.

Looking forward to seeing you at Brookline Booksmith’s Globe Corner Travel Annex. Happy Travels.

Ever since I finished Cheryl Strayed’s new book Wild, about her journey along the Pacific Crest Trail, I have been craving a good long hike. I can get caught up in the routine of urban life, thinking my walk to work is exercise enough, my pause by the Charles River a sufficient enough breath of nature to get me through. I forget what a good hike can do, until a book like Strayed’s or a brilliant summer day reminds me: I’m due for a hike. 

Luckily I have two spectacular mountain ranges within reach: the Green and White Mountains. And luckily, we have a plethora of National Geographic Trail Maps to guide me to my next day hike. Just unfolding one of these maps makes my feet ache to hit the trails.  

If you’re Boston-bound but still craving a hike, take heart, or rather, Take a Hike, Boston, the title of Moon Guide’s latest trail guide for the Boston area. Look to Moon Handbooks to guide you into your next summer destination in North, Central, or South America, be it to a beach in Cancun or the wilds of Glacier National Park. 

Traveling with kids? Check out Lonely Planet’s new travel series geared specifically toward young travelers. The Not For Parents guides, available for London, New York, Rome, and Paris, are filled with brilliant graphics, photos, and illustrations along with information and tips aimed to engage children with their new surroundings. 

You may have heard these guidebooks mentioned on your local NPR station recently. We’re excited to be part of your summer plans, bringing you the latest and best in travel guidebooks and maps at our new Globe Corner Travel Annex at Brookline Booksmith. Happy Travels.

When I was ten, I decided I would never run a marathon. This may sound like a no-brainer for most people, but most people didn’t grow up in a family whose parents had medals and race posters from their four or five 26.2-milers a piece decorating the walls of their house. I eschewed the expectation that I would follow in their 26.2-mile-long footsteps for almost as long as I can remember. Somehow, I knew I would have to find my own ways to be brave. 

My older sister is different. She’d run her first marathon by the time she was 25. And when she and her husband turned 30 last year, they decided that to celebrate, they would hike the Appalachian Trail.   

The pleasures of armchair travel are many. Reading can not only take you to the places you long to go, but into experiences you never in your life would try outside of the covers of a book. Perhaps it’s the nature of the middle child to live vicariously through a more adventuresome older sibling. Maybe this ability to imagine myself into my sister’s shoes is what made me into such an avid armchair traveler.   

And maybe it was the admiring little sister in my that allowed me to immediately empathize with blister stories and tales of unbearable desert heat as I lay sweating comfortably in my apartment during the Boston heat wave last week with a fan oscillating a few feet away, reading Cheryl Strayed’s new book Wild, a travel memoir about her grueling emotional and physical journey along the Pacific Crest Trail.   

Cheryl Strayed is brave. But at the end of a harrowing day of solo encounters with the wilds of California, she inevitably crawls into her tent and opens a book, escaping from the challenges of her journey by way of someone else’s narrative. Each night, she burns the pages she read in her campfire, lightening her load. If I couldn’t identify with the aching muscles and blackened toenails of her hike, I understood this impulse (not the impulse to burn the books, but the impulse to read them). I also saw its influence in the very craft of her writing, in Strayed’s remarkable ability to tell her own dramatic story.   

There are many ways a book can find you. Yesterday a customer asked at the information desk not for Wild, but for Wildwood, Colin Meloy of the Decemberists fantastical young adult novel. As soon as I handed him the book, the customer began to flip through the pages, stopping midway with a cry of recognition. He had paused at an illustration by Meloy’s wife, Carson Ellis, of a badger pulling a rickshaw. “There it is!” he cried, explaining that he had bought this print at an art show a month ago for its own merits, ignorant of the fact that there was a book behind it. Now he was eager to learn just who this badger pulling a rickshaw was.   

Determining just who she is, finding a story to match the image of herself she once had before her mother’s death, is at the heart of Strayed’s journey through the wilds of the PCT. Even her name has changed since the loss of her mother, several affairs, a heroin addiction, and a divorce broke her from the person she thought she was. Strayed chose her name from a dictionary. “Its layered definitions spoke directly to my life and also struck a poetic chord:” she writes, “to wander from the proper path, to deviate from the direct course, to be lost, to become wild, to be without a mother or father, to be without a home, to move about aimlessly in search of something, to diverge or digress. I had diverged, digressed, wandered and become wild.”   

As I contemplated the importance of names in the formation of our stories, I realized that it was the very name of Strayed’s book that had compelled me to read Wild. The week before, my sister had been visiting from overseas to introduce me to my nephew, born three months ago in Bangkok, just shy of nine months after the completion of her Appalachian hike. His name is Wilder.   

For those of us who can’t travel to Dublin every June 16th for the annual celebration of Bloomsday, a new biography of James Joyce has been released in time for your local celebration of the genius behind Ulysses. Gordon Bowker’s James Joyce introduces us to the life models that inspired Joyce’s most famous characters, including Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom.

On June 16, 1904 James Joyce asked his to-be wife Nora on their first romantic outing. He chose to set the entire work of Ulysses on that day, a decision which has been commemorated every year since 1954 on the streets of Dublin with public readings in the squares and re-enactments of the novel’s most famous scenes. Because Ulysses  is so geographically placed in the city, it is possible to follow the characters around each chapter, and many fans take guided tours through Dublin, tracing the route of Joyce’s infamous Leopold Bloom. For the brave and die-hard Joyce fans, a breakfast of organs starts off the celebrations. (Joyce’s character, Bloom, for whom the day is named, begins his June 16th with a tasty fried organ.)

I am one of those readers for whom a description of place, even a place name, is not enough. Once a work of literature has captured my imagination, I must travel to its source, to see the houses, streets, and landscapes that inspired my favorite scenes.  So in 2008 I flew to Dublin to participate in my first Bloomday celebration, and I’ve been marking the day ever since.

This year I had a quieter acknowledgement of Bloomsday. I didn’t even have it in me to walk to my local JP butcher, Meatland, to see if they had any organs on hand. Instead, I cooked up a “trinity” of three fried eggs, the breakfast Joyce’s other famous character, Stephen Dedalus, enjoys in the opening pages of Ulysses.  (I have had a long-standing fictional character-crush on Stephen for several years, and fried eggs are easier to stomach than fried kidney.) Then, after breakfast, as I do every year, I returned to the book itself for a private reading, and found myself suddenly transported without guidebook, map, ticket, or suitcase, onto the streets of Dublin.

New York is a city of extremes. As soon as I arrived I remembered how it was possible to love and hate the city at once. “You either sink or swim here,” Pat Carrier of the former Globe Corner bookstore told me as he guided me through the labyrinth of  publisher booths crammed inside the illogically (it seemed to me) laid out Javits Convention Center. I had come to NYC for two days of Book Expo America, beginning with an author breakfast with Stephen Colbert, Barbara Kingsolver, Junot Diaz, and Jo Nesbo, the last of whom, I thought, proved funnier than our host, who kept his punch lines to Fifty Shades of Grey jokes.

After coffee with Colbert (okay, it wasn’t quite as intimate as it sounds, and listening to Colbert crack Fifty Shades jokes over blueberry muffins wasn’t exactly an appetizing way to start the day), I stepped onto the exhibition floor full of publishers, authors, booksellers, librarians, and readers all conducting the business of books, which included much elbowing for the latest free advanced reader copy. I wandered disoriented among the chaos for quite some time, unsure of how exactly I fit between the world of swanky New York publishers and the woman in front of me who just jammed a display copy I am not certain was free into an already burgeoning shoulder bag of ARCs.

Unidentified BEA attendee with bags full of free books.

I felt exactly as I had when I first stumbled off my train from Boston the night before, weaving through Penn Station crowds and onto the metro–instantly overwhelmed, intimidated, and drained by the city. But when, 15 minutes later, I had emerged from the underground up onto a quiet, tree lined street in Greenwich Village, where I was lucky enough to find a room, I discovered that I could breathe again, and deeply. Perhaps it was the refreshing contrast from home, the thrill of new streets and shops to explore, perhaps it was the contrast with the crowds of the metro that made the sudden space and sunshine more charming than was their due, but I was enamored.

These extreme reactions continued at BEA, leaving me baffled at first, overwhelmed, then charmed and grateful at once. By the second day on the exhibition floor, I began to take a few faltering strokes. I found space to think and even to be inspired in a few of the educational sessions, and I began meeting people within the book industry, talking, exchanging cards. Once conversations began to open up, I began to see inside the work that was going on before my eyes. Though I had much to learn, I was no longer an outsider. Continue Reading »

 I’d already heard the  story of how Charles de Gaulle left France during an uprising and told his country to shape up (and they did) a few times from my boyfriend’s father, who lived in France at the time. But I’d never heard the slogan of that student revolution “La Beaute est dans la Rue,” or understood just what the riots of 1968 were about until I read John Baxter’s contribution to the Museyon Guide series, Chronicles of Old Paris , a guidebook that allows the reader to travel not only through the streets of Paris, but through time. Each of the twenty-nine chapters focuses on a specific person, invention, trend, or revolution (militaristic or artistic) that contributed to the development of the city of light we know and love and long to travel to today. And if you do travel there, a map to each significant site is included at the end of each segment.

Baxter admits the reader into the cellars of Garnier’s majestic opera house and behind the cork-lined wall’s of Proust‘s bedroom. Fifty Shades fans can learn about the appetites of the Marquis de Sade, and those with an appetite for the surreal can explore the movement’s beginnings with founder Andre Breton. I learned more about the guillotine than I wanted to know (such as why the block is called the mouton, French for “sheep”), and learned enough about French cinema to want to see more.

Museyon Guides are available for more than just Paris. We currently stock Chronicles of Old Boston, and Chronicles of Old London is due out in time for the Olympics in that city this summer. I chose to read Museyon’s Paris first, not only because I love the city, but because the author is a trusted guide through its streets. John Baxter has written several books on France, including the beloved The Most Beautiful Walk in the World, a memoir of his experience as a literary tour guide in Paris. In fact, Baxter includes several “walking tours” at the end of the Museyon Guide. And if his work experience and writings on Paris aren’t enough, Baxter also lives in the former residence of my hero: American expat and bookseller and publisher of James Joyce, Sylvia Beach. Reading his guide to the city he so obviously loves, one is forced to admit that once again, the French have it right: the beauty is in the streets.