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kelsis_book_nook's review against another edition
4.0
To be clear, I only read sections of this book that were based on books I've already read. My rating is based on those sections, not the entire work.
Beautiful illustrations and a great in depth look at the worlds of familiar classics from Jane Austen to Emily Bronte, from Victor Hugo to Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I would recommend this work to anyone interested in learning more about the world of their favorite works of classic literature.
Beautiful illustrations and a great in depth look at the worlds of familiar classics from Jane Austen to Emily Bronte, from Victor Hugo to Carlos Ruiz Zafon. I would recommend this work to anyone interested in learning more about the world of their favorite works of classic literature.
thebooktrail88's review against another edition
5.0
Literary Landscapes
As soon as I saw this book, well, to say it sang to me is an understatement. Setting and place in a book and travelling to those locations for real is how The BookTrail first began. (even if I did tuck myself in wardrobes in search of Narnia or dig holes in search of the white rabbit before that, but that’s another story)
There’s a lot to like about this book. The cover for one is stunning and inside, it’s even better. Great colour pictures and illustrations showcase the location of each book, whilst nice long text explains why and how such a setting was used and brought to life.
It’s a coffee table and dip in and dip out kind of read. There’s so many places and books to travel with. Whether you want to revisit the Canada of Anne of Green Gables or delve into Charles Dickens’ London, it’s all there for exploring. And it's great fun to pick where you want to go next. Canadian Countryside to London town...and the stories which put these places on the map.
Don’t think this is a literary step back in time either. There’s lots for fans of more recent fiction to pour over. Elena Ferrante. is of course there as an Italian stopover, and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River takes you all the way to New South Wales.
There’s a lot of information on each stopover as I’m calling them. I was particularly excited to see Carlos Ruiz Zafón there!It was like meeting old friends and travelling with them which was a joy.
Happily, there's lots of information about the author, ( well theirs are the eyes you’re seeing this new destination through after all ) and plenty of useful background about the book itself such as publication date and the context in which it was written.
I could wax lyrical about this for ages to be honest. I’m like a child in a sweet shop. If there’s one negative about the book, I would have liked to know who was writing the essays in question. The book and locations are clear but the authors of the individual essays on the book are not. They lurk at the back of the book but I say, bring them on to the stage!
I’ve already got this in mind for a few fellow travellers of a literary persuasion!
verityw's review against another edition
3.0
Perfectly nice gift book. I’d read less of these than I expected but also wasn’t mega inspired to go and read many of the others. A fair few typos too. Fine.
booknotes_athina's review against another edition
4.0
I really enjoy reading books like this. Books about books.
This one of course was no exception. It travels you through time to some of the most notable books of classic literature and the way you picture the landscape through them.
This book certainly added more to my tbr.
In the same series you can also find Literary Wonderlands.
This one of course was no exception. It travels you through time to some of the most notable books of classic literature and the way you picture the landscape through them.
This book certainly added more to my tbr.
In the same series you can also find Literary Wonderlands.
amalia1985's review against another edition
5.0
‘’Literary landscape is composed of words which must be recomposed in a frame of imagination. ‘’The inward eye’’, British ‘’Lakeland’’ poet William Wordsworth called it, drawing a distinction between perception and imagination. Just as the painter can choose his balance of verisimilitude - striving for eye-witnessed accuracy - and creative depiction, so the writer must decide how much of an influence his ‘’inward eye’’ will have on the scene depicted. What one might call ‘’creative bias’’ comes into it- subjective coloration. And sometimes moral judgement.’’
John Sutherland
One of the most precious gifts reading can give us is travelling. When we hold a book in our hands, we enter houses, we travel to cities, to countries, to continents that we may never have the chance to see in ‘’real life’’. Through reading we can form images, fall in love with cities and this is how a fervent wish to visit a country starts. We often say that cities become characters in novels. They shape the narrative, the personality of the characters, their thoughts and opportunities, their hopes and disappointments. Reading allows us to travel back in time and witness a city changing through the eras, though conflicts and wars, and social development. This marvelous book is the embodiment of all the features we love. Containing beautiful essays edited by John Sutherland and embellished with outstanding illustrations, paintings, posters and memorabilia, Literary Landscapes is an astonishing journey around the world, a return to the past, an understanding of the way a city can not only influence but forge our soul and spirit.
‘’I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.’’
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Where else could Heathcliff and Cathy experience their ordeals but in the moors, a place of wild, obsessive, threatening beauty? Dickens’s Bleak House was a reflection in the mirror of London, the seemingly cultured and utterly corrupted and metropolis where children faced their nightmares.
‘’Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green airs and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.’’
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Let us walk to Paris, passing injustice, passing the barricades, watching the Parisian youth demand democracy, guided by Victor Hugo, at the side of Jean Valjean. Witness the glory of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and unwind in Pokrovskoe, exchanging philosophical remarks with Levin, turning a blind eye to Anna Karenina’s fate. Far are the Scottish Highlands where Robert Louis Stevenson narrates a story rising from the fog and the moors. From Scotland to Canada and the wildly beautiful Prince Edward Island in the company of brilliant Anna from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Read D.H.Lawrence’s The Rainbow carefully, a hymn to sensuality and self-discovery and an homage to Nottinghamshire. Travel to Norway during the Middle Ages, full of religious and political conflicts depicted in Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdotter. Feel your heart breaking, witnessing the emotional ordeal of Newland Archer struggling to defy the norms of the New York high society, eloquently highlighted in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Decipher Bloom’s troubled mind and musings within a day, walking around James Joyce’s Dublin and Ulysses and then find yourself trying to understand London through Clarissa and Septimus in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.
From one metropolis to another, because Gatsby is standing there, gazing at the green light across the bay in East Egg. Return to Europe and witness the cancer that the Fascists have brought to the Eternal City, in Alberto Moravia’s Gli Indifferenti. Further North, at the same time, all kinds of marginalized citizens have been gathered in Alexanderplatz. Alfred Döblin is there to draw their portraits. Isaac Babel’s stories are populated with prostitutes, beggars and rabble-rousers, residents of the Moldavanka district in Odessa, Ukraine. Let us jump to Massachusetts where the Southern Gothic, the grotesque, the supernatural, the humane is born from the pen of William Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom! A young woman, wife to a fascinating man, is waiting to uncover the secret of Rebecca, residing in Daphne du Maurier’s beloved Cornwall.
A winter’s night is the perfect opportunity for Frits van Egters’s pain to come to the surface in Gerard Reve’s The Evenings. And who can forget Wales and, especially, Laugharne as depicted in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood? Return to Russian and Moscow and witness the duel between the Devil and Margarita in Mikhail Bulgakov’s immortal subversive, masterpiece. Back to England and Dorset, in the enigmatic presence of Sarah Woodruff in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Let us party - but carefully- in Jay Mcinerney’s New York, living the failed dream of Bright Lights, Big City. Listen to the whispers of the ghosts in Tokyo, where curses and demons compose a crime tale in The Summer of the Ubume by Natsuhiko Kyōgoku, very different from the Gothic spirits of cursed books in beautiful Barcelona of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind.
Is that all? No. Travel to India, Nigeria, New Zealand, Germany, Austria, China, Australia, Venezuela, Brazil...This book is a mega ticket to a literary journey unlike any other…
‘’We are, as never before, a travelling, ‘’sight-seeing’’, ‘’place-knowing’’ race of humans. It is a privilege. The contention of this book, (grandiose, it may sound, but genuine) is that we should cultivate our historically unique sense of place and use the resource of great literature (more available to us, like travel, than our ancestors) to do so.
Enjoy.’’
John Sutherland.
My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/
John Sutherland
One of the most precious gifts reading can give us is travelling. When we hold a book in our hands, we enter houses, we travel to cities, to countries, to continents that we may never have the chance to see in ‘’real life’’. Through reading we can form images, fall in love with cities and this is how a fervent wish to visit a country starts. We often say that cities become characters in novels. They shape the narrative, the personality of the characters, their thoughts and opportunities, their hopes and disappointments. Reading allows us to travel back in time and witness a city changing through the eras, though conflicts and wars, and social development. This marvelous book is the embodiment of all the features we love. Containing beautiful essays edited by John Sutherland and embellished with outstanding illustrations, paintings, posters and memorabilia, Literary Landscapes is an astonishing journey around the world, a return to the past, an understanding of the way a city can not only influence but forge our soul and spirit.
‘’I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.’’
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Where else could Heathcliff and Cathy experience their ordeals but in the moors, a place of wild, obsessive, threatening beauty? Dickens’s Bleak House was a reflection in the mirror of London, the seemingly cultured and utterly corrupted and metropolis where children faced their nightmares.
‘’Fog everywhere. Fog up the river where it flows among green airs and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city.’’
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Let us walk to Paris, passing injustice, passing the barricades, watching the Parisian youth demand democracy, guided by Victor Hugo, at the side of Jean Valjean. Witness the glory of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and unwind in Pokrovskoe, exchanging philosophical remarks with Levin, turning a blind eye to Anna Karenina’s fate. Far are the Scottish Highlands where Robert Louis Stevenson narrates a story rising from the fog and the moors. From Scotland to Canada and the wildly beautiful Prince Edward Island in the company of brilliant Anna from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Read D.H.Lawrence’s The Rainbow carefully, a hymn to sensuality and self-discovery and an homage to Nottinghamshire. Travel to Norway during the Middle Ages, full of religious and political conflicts depicted in Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdotter. Feel your heart breaking, witnessing the emotional ordeal of Newland Archer struggling to defy the norms of the New York high society, eloquently highlighted in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Decipher Bloom’s troubled mind and musings within a day, walking around James Joyce’s Dublin and Ulysses and then find yourself trying to understand London through Clarissa and Septimus in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.
From one metropolis to another, because Gatsby is standing there, gazing at the green light across the bay in East Egg. Return to Europe and witness the cancer that the Fascists have brought to the Eternal City, in Alberto Moravia’s Gli Indifferenti. Further North, at the same time, all kinds of marginalized citizens have been gathered in Alexanderplatz. Alfred Döblin is there to draw their portraits. Isaac Babel’s stories are populated with prostitutes, beggars and rabble-rousers, residents of the Moldavanka district in Odessa, Ukraine. Let us jump to Massachusetts where the Southern Gothic, the grotesque, the supernatural, the humane is born from the pen of William Faulkner in Absalom, Absalom! A young woman, wife to a fascinating man, is waiting to uncover the secret of Rebecca, residing in Daphne du Maurier’s beloved Cornwall.
A winter’s night is the perfect opportunity for Frits van Egters’s pain to come to the surface in Gerard Reve’s The Evenings. And who can forget Wales and, especially, Laugharne as depicted in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood? Return to Russian and Moscow and witness the duel between the Devil and Margarita in Mikhail Bulgakov’s immortal subversive, masterpiece. Back to England and Dorset, in the enigmatic presence of Sarah Woodruff in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Let us party - but carefully- in Jay Mcinerney’s New York, living the failed dream of Bright Lights, Big City. Listen to the whispers of the ghosts in Tokyo, where curses and demons compose a crime tale in The Summer of the Ubume by Natsuhiko Kyōgoku, very different from the Gothic spirits of cursed books in beautiful Barcelona of Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Shadow of the Wind.
Is that all? No. Travel to India, Nigeria, New Zealand, Germany, Austria, China, Australia, Venezuela, Brazil...This book is a mega ticket to a literary journey unlike any other…
‘’We are, as never before, a travelling, ‘’sight-seeing’’, ‘’place-knowing’’ race of humans. It is a privilege. The contention of this book, (grandiose, it may sound, but genuine) is that we should cultivate our historically unique sense of place and use the resource of great literature (more available to us, like travel, than our ancestors) to do so.
Enjoy.’’
John Sutherland.
My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/
aliciamae's review
4.0
Literary Landscapes was truly a delightful read. I liked it better than Literary Wonderlands. Beautiful design, I enjoyed the essays and the books featured, and I really loved the focus of place.
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