The Booking Through Thursday questions for today are about the settings of books we read.
- Have you ever wanted to travel to a place described in a book? If the author is good — and there are so many who are — every time.
- Have you ever ACTUALLY travelled to a place because of the way it was described in a book? Where do I get the tickets for Middle Earth? or Victorian England?
- And if so, did it live up to the expectations, feelings, emotions you expected from the book? Did you feel like Anne was going to come romping around the corner of Green Gables? Was it as if Jo was upstairs at Orchard House, scribbling on a story? Or was it just a museum, or just a city street? Like Abbey Road without the Beatles? The only actual "pilgrimage" I’ve made so far was to Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, to see the house where Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell grew up, and to Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, where Vanessa lived for most of her life — these were on my first trip to London. Number 22 was rather different than I’d pictured it, since I’d never seen the rest of the street, and I’d imagined it with the noise of four young children, hackney cabs outside, and so on, but despite the unmistakeable aura of the late 20th century, I was not disappointed. Charleston was pretty much everything I expected, although rather lonely without its residents and the smell of linseed and turpentine and tea. And these are both, of course, settings more in the biographical sense, not fictional like Green Gables. A place I would like to visit someday because of a particular author’s novels is Moffat, in Dumfriesshire; D.E. Stevenson lived there for many years.
Photo from Visit Moffat, who although there is no mention of Stevenson, do include a lovely series of walks around the countryside, something very dear to her heart.
A Bluestocking Knits 
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