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| Passage through India inspires literary tours |
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DAVID COOPER/TORONTO STAR
Benjamin Walsh, 31, of Toronto has established a particularly adventurous book club, "Reading India." He got the idea while reading a novel on a train from Mumbai.
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Twelve book club members read six books on the country – then travel there
Sep 29, 2009 04:30 AM
John Goddard
Staff Reporter
For an overnight train journey through India, Benjamin Walsh packed a fresh new novel.
Pulling south out of Mumbai two years ago, he cracked open David Davidar's The Solitude of Emperors and realized as the sun rose the next morning he was riding the same train as the book's protagonist.
"The windows and doors were all open, I was watching all this incredible landscape go by and I was reading about a young journalist who travels from Bombay (Mumbai) to cover communal violence in southern India," Walsh recalls.
"It was very likely the same train, even the same train number," he says. "All of a sudden this idea popped into my mind – could I convince 10 or 12 customers to do this sort of thing with me?"
Walsh had just started working at Nicholas Hoare book store on Front St. E. and last fall – after intensive research – launched a particularly adventurous book club, "Reading India."
Members gathered at the store to discuss six books in six months, then travelled to the literary settings. The trip included 12 readers, ran three weeks and cost $7,850, including flights, meals and accommodation.
This fall a repeat offering quickly sold out, making two India groups a possibility. Encouraged by the success, Walsh is also running two Havana book/travel clubs this winter and is to announce a Russian Trans-Siberian Railway club later this year.
"Sometimes a place doesn't match what you imagine," says Charlotte Sam, an inaugural member and director of St. Stephen's Waterfront Child Care Centre.
A tumble-down building called History House in Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things stood resplendent in real life as a colonial-era hotel.
"When we saw it, it looked just wonderful," Sam says. "We ate lunch there, then boarded a boat for the backwaters of Kerala."
Meeting for discussions once a month, and taking a meal together in Little India on Gerrard St. E., meant the group bonded before departure, Sam says. "It was like travelling with your school mates."
But the group suffered one major disruption.
Last fall, while everyone was reading Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, Islamist terrorists attacked several targets in Mumbai, the book's setting, leaving more than 170 people dead, including two Canadians.
"Half the group withdrew," Walsh says. "The other half continued to read the book and we were able to pick up the extra people to make 12."
Walsh continues to regard Mumbai with particular affection. Now 31, he made his first solo trip there at 16 and has returned again and again.
"People imagine Bombay to be not the real India, but both through fiction and non-fiction you find a city rich and diverse and lush and exciting," he says. "Fiction becomes a great guide when you're travelling."
The group convenes Oct. 13 to discuss The House of Blue Mangoes, the latest work by David Davidar, an Indian author now residing in Toronto as publisher at Penguin Canada.
Last year he appeared as the club's guest.
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| Passage through India inspires literary tours |
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DAVID COOPER/TORONTO STAR
Benjamin Walsh, 31, of Toronto has established a particularly adventurous book club, "Reading India." He got the idea while reading a novel on a train from Mumbai.
|
Twelve book club members read six books on the country – then travel there
Sep 29, 2009 04:30 AM
John Goddard
Staff Reporter
For an overnight train journey through India, Benjamin Walsh packed a fresh new novel.
Pulling south out of Mumbai two years ago, he cracked open David Davidar's The Solitude of Emperors and realized as the sun rose the next morning he was riding the same train as the book's protagonist.
"The windows and doors were all open, I was watching all this incredible landscape go by and I was reading about a young journalist who travels from Bombay (Mumbai) to cover communal violence in southern India," Walsh recalls.
"It was very likely the same train, even the same train number," he says. "All of a sudden this idea popped into my mind – could I convince 10 or 12 customers to do this sort of thing with me?"
Walsh had just started working at Nicholas Hoare book store on Front St. E. and last fall – after intensive research – launched a particularly adventurous book club, "Reading India."
Members gathered at the store to discuss six books in six months, then travelled to the literary settings. The trip included 12 readers, ran three weeks and cost $7,850, including flights, meals and accommodation.
This fall a repeat offering quickly sold out, making two India groups a possibility. Encouraged by the success, Walsh is also running two Havana book/travel clubs this winter and is to announce a Russian Trans-Siberian Railway club later this year.
"Sometimes a place doesn't match what you imagine," says Charlotte Sam, an inaugural member and director of St. Stephen's Waterfront Child Care Centre.
A tumble-down building called History House in Arundhati Roy's novel The God of Small Things stood resplendent in real life as a colonial-era hotel.
"When we saw it, it looked just wonderful," Sam says. "We ate lunch there, then boarded a boat for the backwaters of Kerala."
Meeting for discussions once a month, and taking a meal together in Little India on Gerrard St. E., meant the group bonded before departure, Sam says. "It was like travelling with your school mates."
But the group suffered one major disruption.
Last fall, while everyone was reading Suketu Mehta's Maximum City, Islamist terrorists attacked several targets in Mumbai, the book's setting, leaving more than 170 people dead, including two Canadians.
"Half the group withdrew," Walsh says. "The other half continued to read the book and we were able to pick up the extra people to make 12."
Walsh continues to regard Mumbai with particular affection. Now 31, he made his first solo trip there at 16 and has returned again and again.
"People imagine Bombay to be not the real India, but both through fiction and non-fiction you find a city rich and diverse and lush and exciting," he says. "Fiction becomes a great guide when you're travelling."
The group convenes Oct. 13 to discuss The House of Blue Mangoes, the latest work by David Davidar, an Indian author now residing in Toronto as publisher at Penguin Canada.
Last year he appeared as the club's guest.
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BOOKS: TRAVEL
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| A novel approach to exporing the liteary landscape |
|
Publishing reporter Vit Wagner reveals what he
puts in his backpack when he travels - and why
|
It's entirely possible I'll forget to take the appropriate clothes when next travelling abroad. I might even neglect to pack crucial items such as a razor, a toothbrush or swimming trunks. The wheels of the plane will probably leave the tarmac at the exact moment my palm smacks my forehead for failing to write down the postal codes of friends expecting a "wish you were here" salute from lovely wherever.
The one thing I am guaranteed not to leave at home – apart, I hope, from the necessary passport, airline tickets and credit card – is a backpack full of literature about the places on my itinerary.
By literature, I do not mean any of the myriad travel guides that supposedly offer savvy advice on where to stay, the coolest places to eat, what to see, and how best to order a double espresso in the local lingo. Those I can manage without.
What I mean are books, mostly novels, set in the very places I will visit.
This now unbreakable habit started nearly 25 years ago when I flew off to Spain with a change of underwear and a copy of The Sun Also Rises. If memory serves, reading The Sun Also Rises in Spain was pretty much the entire purpose of the trip – never mind that I had already devoured the Hemingway masterpiece at least three previous times. As luck would have it, the same adventure later took me to Paris where - since an important part of
the novel is also set there |
– I read it again. Bonus!
This is meant in no way to disparage the incalculable pleasures of lying on the beach and turning the pages of a breezy yarn while the sand dries between your toes or, better yet, delving into a hefty classic after sundown on a screened-in cottage porch. Both are fine ways to luxuriate in a summer read.
But my ideal vacation runs more toward reading Ivan Klima in Prague, Dashiell Hammett in San Francisco, Haldor Laxness in Iceland and Graham Greene in Havana – or, to be even more site-specific, reading Greene's Our Man in Havana while staying in the Hotel Sevilla, a stately colonial establishment frequented by both the novelist and his fictional protagonist.
I have yet to visit Dublin, but when I do you can be sure that James Joyce will be joining me at the pub for a Guinness. There is something about the juxtaposition of a place and its fictional mirror that, at least for me, heightens the enjoyment of both the locale and the narrative at hand.
This is not quite the same as reading in preparation for departure, although there is much to be said for that, too. The best-case scenario is to follow one experience with the other.
Nicholas Hoare Books in downtown Toronto operates a book club that invites about a dozen
customers to spend six
months reading about a place and then going there. Bookseller Ben
|
Walsh came up with the idea a couple of years ago while travelling on a train through India at the same time as reading David Davidar's The Solitude of Emperors, a novel set in India during the mid-'90s.
After its inaugural visit to India last year, the bookstore is now organizing a return expedition to the subcontinent, as well as planning book club journeys to Havana and Russia. The reading list for each destination ranges from background history to travel literature to fiction.
"Because a lot of us read fiction first and foremost, we start by throwing around ideas of places where we know the fiction is great," Walsh says. "We want to have a great reading list. But we also want to have a list that will give our members tools and skills that they can use while they're travelling.
"Someone once told me that (Mikhail Bulgakov's) The Master and Margarita is a key that opens doors to so many conversations in Russia. People are excited that you're read books that they value so highly."
Not every foreign reading experience has to scale the literary heights of digesting Bulgakov's devilishly sly satire of Stalinist Moscow while camped out in Red Square or, switching scenery, perusing the pages of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice within view of the Grand Canal. A current
title, such as Geoff Dyer's smart and exactingly
detailed new novel, Jeff in |
Venice, Death in Varanasi, would serve as a welcome travelling companion to the Mediterranean or the Ganges.
Few authors, however, cover the proverbial waterfront more thoroughly than crime writers, whether it's Donna Leon's Venice, Ian Rankin's Edinburgh, Cara Black's Paris, Arnaldur Indridason's Reykjavik, Robert Wilson's Seville, Barbara Nadel's Istanbul, Diane Wei Liang's Beijing and on and on. In books by those writers, you can almost smell the streets and taste the food. Reading Indridason in Reykjavik, as I did last summer, enhances acclimation.
"Good crime fiction is very detailed and filled with observation, so the physical characteristics of the city, as well as descriptions of how people live and what they do, weave right into that," says Ben McNally, owner of the Toronto bookstore that bears his name and organizer of a travel book reading series associated with Harbourfront Centre.
The reading list for the first Nicholas Hoare India trip included Ragtime in Simla, the second in a detective series by Barbara Cleverly.
"Unlike any of the other books we read," Walsh recalls, "when we were walking through that city people were saying things like, `I wonder whether this is the narrow alley where that brothel was hidden?'"
It is well to remember that visitors come to Toronto |
with a similar hunger for fictional embellishment. McNally, for instance, can think of two celebrated Pakistani writers, Nadeem Aslam and Kamila Shamsie, who each arrived here with a burning need to commune somehow with In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje's great novel about, in part, the construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct.
"Aslam ran out of his hotel in the morning, jumped into a cab and asked the driver to take him to the viaduct," McNally says. "This was before they put up the barriers. The cabbie eventually refused to take him. He thought he was going to jump."
One can only hope to aspire to that level of reader dedication. In preparation for a trip at the end of the summer, I'm already amassing a stack of books to take along to Berlin, Nice and Venice. (Any recommendations on Nice books are heartily welcomed.)
In the future, I'm told, I'll be able to lighten my load considerably by travelling with an e-reader chock full of digital books instead of lugging cumbersome printed versions. Sorry, staring at a screen doesn't strike me as the optimal way to experience Christopher Isherwood in the shade of Berlin's famous boulevard of linden trees.
Besides, so what if some other stuff gets left behind? A pair of sandals should be sufficient footwear for a trip like that, right? Saves on the need for socks. |
| Toronto Star - Satruday, June 13, 2009 |
BOOKS: TRAVEL
|
| A novel approach to exporing the liteary landscape |
|
Publishing reporter Vit Wagner reveals what he
puts in his backpack when he travels - and why
|
It's entirely possible I'll forget to take the appropriate clothes when next travelling abroad. I might even neglect to pack crucial items such as a razor, a toothbrush or swimming trunks. The wheels of the plane will probably leave the tarmac at the exact moment my palm smacks my forehead for failing to write down the postal codes of friends expecting a "wish you were here" salute from lovely wherever.
The one thing I am guaranteed not to leave at home – apart, I hope, from the necessary passport, airline tickets and credit card – is a backpack full of literature about the places on my itinerary.
By literature, I do not mean any of the myriad travel guides that supposedly offer savvy advice on where to stay, the coolest places to eat, what to see, and how best to order a double espresso in the local lingo. Those I can manage without.
What I mean are books, mostly novels, set in the very places I will visit.
This now unbreakable habit started nearly 25 years ago when I flew off to Spain with a change of underwear and a copy of The Sun Also Rises. If memory serves, reading The Sun Also Rises in Spain was pretty much the entire purpose of the trip – never mind that I had already devoured the Hemingway masterpiece at least three previous times. As luck would have it, the same adventure later took me to Paris where - since an important part of
the novel is also set there |
– I read it again. Bonus!
This is meant in no way to disparage the incalculable pleasures of lying on the beach and turning the pages of a breezy yarn while the sand dries between your toes or, better yet, delving into a hefty classic after sundown on a screened-in cottage porch. Both are fine ways to luxuriate in a summer read.
But my ideal vacation runs more toward reading Ivan Klima in Prague, Dashiell Hammett in San Francisco, Haldor Laxness in Iceland and Graham Greene in Havana – or, to be even more site-specific, reading Greene's Our Man in Havana while staying in the Hotel Sevilla, a stately colonial establishment frequented by both the novelist and his fictional protagonist.
I have yet to visit Dublin, but when I do you can be sure that James Joyce will be joining me at the pub for a Guinness. There is something about the juxtaposition of a place and its fictional mirror that, at least for me, heightens the enjoyment of both the locale and the narrative at hand.
This is not quite the same as reading in preparation for departure, although there is much to be said for that, too. The best-case scenario is to follow one experience with the other.
Nicholas Hoare Books in downtown Toronto operates a book club that invites about a dozen
customers to spend six
months reading about a place and then going there. Bookseller Ben
|
Walsh came up with the idea a couple of years ago while travelling on a train through India at the same time as reading David Davidar's The Solitude of Emperors, a novel set in India during the mid-'90s.
After its inaugural visit to India last year, the bookstore is now organizing a return expedition to the subcontinent, as well as planning book club journeys to Havana and Russia. The reading list for each destination ranges from background history to travel literature to fiction.
"Because a lot of us read fiction first and foremost, we start by throwing around ideas of places where we know the fiction is great," Walsh says. "We want to have a great reading list. But we also want to have a list that will give our members tools and skills that they can use while they're travelling.
"Someone once told me that (Mikhail Bulgakov's) The Master and Margarita is a key that opens doors to so many conversations in Russia. People are excited that you're read books that they value so highly."
Not every foreign reading experience has to scale the literary heights of digesting Bulgakov's devilishly sly satire of Stalinist Moscow while camped out in Red Square or, switching scenery, perusing the pages of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice within view of the Grand Canal. A current
title, such as Geoff Dyer's smart and exactingly
detailed new novel, Jeff in |
Venice, Death in Varanasi, would serve as a welcome travelling companion to the Mediterranean or the Ganges.
Few authors, however, cover the proverbial waterfront more thoroughly than crime writers, whether it's Donna Leon's Venice, Ian Rankin's Edinburgh, Cara Black's Paris, Arnaldur Indridason's Reykjavik, Robert Wilson's Seville, Barbara Nadel's Istanbul, Diane Wei Liang's Beijing and on and on. In books by those writers, you can almost smell the streets and taste the food. Reading Indridason in Reykjavik, as I did last summer, enhances acclimation.
"Good crime fiction is very detailed and filled with observation, so the physical characteristics of the city, as well as descriptions of how people live and what they do, weave right into that," says Ben McNally, owner of the Toronto bookstore that bears his name and organizer of a travel book reading series associated with Harbourfront Centre.
The reading list for the first Nicholas Hoare India trip included Ragtime in Simla, the second in a detective series by Barbara Cleverly.
"Unlike any of the other books we read," Walsh recalls, "when we were walking through that city people were saying things like, `I wonder whether this is the narrow alley where that brothel was hidden?'"
It is well to remember that visitors come to Toronto |
with a similar hunger for fictional embellishment. McNally, for instance, can think of two celebrated Pakistani writers, Nadeem Aslam and Kamila Shamsie, who each arrived here with a burning need to commune somehow with In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje's great novel about, in part, the construction of the Bloor Street Viaduct.
"Aslam ran out of his hotel in the morning, jumped into a cab and asked the driver to take him to the viaduct," McNally says. "This was before they put up the barriers. The cabbie eventually refused to take him. He thought he was going to jump."
One can only hope to aspire to that level of reader dedication. In preparation for a trip at the end of the summer, I'm already amassing a stack of books to take along to Berlin, Nice and Venice. (Any recommendations on Nice books are heartily welcomed.)
In the future, I'm told, I'll be able to lighten my load considerably by travelling with an e-reader chock full of digital books instead of lugging cumbersome printed versions. Sorry, staring at a screen doesn't strike me as the optimal way to experience Christopher Isherwood in the shade of Berlin's famous boulevard of linden trees.
Besides, so what if some other stuff gets left behind? A pair of sandals should be sufficient footwear for a trip like that, right? Saves on the need for socks. |
| Toronto Star - Satruday, June 13, 2009 |
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READ
TORONTO BOOKSTORE TO HOST LITERARY TOURS
| Toronto bookseller Nicholas Hoare has launched a new book club that promises to immerse bibliophiles in the places that informed and inspired their favourite authors. The Books Abroad program will begin this September with six fiction and non-fiction works set in India. Members will meet on the first Tuesday of each month for six months to discuss the books by Salman Rushdie, William Dalrymple, Arundhati Roy, Madhur Jaffrey, Suketu Mehta and David Davidar. Then, on March 7, 2009, the members will embark on a |
16-day tour of India that begins in Fort Cochin, on the Malabar Coast, and includes visits to Mumbai, Delhi, the Taj Mahal and Varanasi, where Hindu pilgrims bathe in the holy waters of the Ganges. The tour costs $6,225 a person, based on double occupancy, and can be extended for $590 with a visit to Shimla and the Himalayas.
>>For more information, call Benjamin Walsh at 416-777-2665 or visit www.booksabroad.com.
>>Massimo Commanducci |
|
Globe and Mail - Saturday, July 5, 2008
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READ
TORONTO BOOKSTORE TO HOST LITERARY TOURS
| Toronto bookseller Nicholas Hoare has launched a new book club that promises to immerse bibliophiles in the places that informed and inspired their favourite authors. The Books Abroad program will begin this September with six fiction and non-fiction works set in India. Members will meet on the first Tuesday of each month for six months to discuss the books by Salman Rushdie, William Dalrymple, Arundhati Roy, Madhur Jaffrey, Suketu Mehta and David Davidar. Then, on March 7, 2009, the members will embark on a |
16-day tour of India that begins in Fort Cochin, on the Malabar Coast, and includes visits to Mumbai, Delhi, the Taj Mahal and Varanasi, where Hindu pilgrims bathe in the holy waters of the Ganges. The tour costs $6,225 a person, based on double occupancy, and can be extended for $590 with a visit to Shimla and the Himalayas.
>>For more information, call Benjamin Walsh at 416-777-2665 or visit www.booksabroad.com.
>>Massimo Commanducci |
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Globe and Mail - Saturday, July 5, 2008
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Nicholas Hoare | 45 Front Street East | Toronto, Ontario | Canada | M5E 1B3 | 416-777-2665 | toronto@nicholashoare.ca
Going Places Together | 197 Douro Street | Stratford, Ontario | Canada | N5A 3R8 | 519-271-6037 | nancy@goingplacestogether.com
Uniglobe Creative Travel Inc. | 301 Fruitland Road | Unit 7 | Stoney Creek, Ontario | L8E 5M1 | 905-643-4848 | denise@uniglobecreativetravel.com
50006797
Nicholas Hoare | 45 Front Street East | Toronto, Ontario | Canada | M5E 1B3 | 416-777-2665 | toronto@nicholashoare.ca
Going Places Together | 197 Douro Street | Stratford, Ontario | Canada | N5A 3R8 | 519-271-6037 | nancy@goingplacestogether.com
Uniglobe Creative Travel Inc. | 301 Fruitland Road | Unit 7 | Stoney Creek, Ontario | L8E 5M1 | 905-643-4848 | denise@uniglobecreativetravel.com
50006797
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| Copyright (c) 2009 by Going Places Together
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