07 June 2011

Top Ten Tuesday: Dishing up some great locations in literarture

This week's Top Ten Tuesday post is a particularly fun one for me.  Sponsored each week by The Broke and the Bookish, the list this week asks us to name ten favorite book settings.  

In the fantasy categories, I would love to visit Middle Earth from Tolkien's peerless masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings; Narnia from C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia, and Hogwarts from J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series.  These are wondrous worlds, beautifully realized (though in descending order in terms of the realization & development).

Green Gables, Avonlea, Prince Edward Island from L. M. Montgomery's Anne series.

The deserted island from Walter Farley's The Black Stallion.  Wouldn't want to get stuck there for long, but in the film version it was so incredibly beautiful that I still see it sometimes in my dreams. 

Again, I wouldn't want to live in an age where women are still chattel, but I would love to visit the parlor world that Jane Austen so fabulously created in most of her works.  And if I got a glimpse of Mr. Darcy, so much the better.  I guess I'll claim Pride & Prejudice if I need to tie it to one particular book. 

As for some modern, realistic settings, I would love to visit the world of Frances Mayes' Under a Tuscan Sun, the Botswana of Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, the shadowy Barcelona underworld from Carlos Ruiz Zafon's novels, and the London of Nick Hornby's novels.

N. B. You'd be surprised how naughty the Google images get when you're searching for "Black Stallion film." Or at least I was.

7 comments:

  1. LOL at the Google search results! I do love that film though I think Carroll Ballard makes all locations look beautiful (have you seen Duma?).

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  2. Haha! You had me laughing out loud with your Black Stallion reference, but regarding your list, we have a lot of the same picks! Good call including Narnia and Hogwarts....completely forgot about adding them to my list!

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  3. Gotta put in for a ticket to Neil Gaiman's underground London from Neverwhere.

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  4. My vote's for Botswana and I have a real life goal of making it to Prince Edward Island. I wish I would have had time to do this meme today!

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  5. I might be tempted to visit Austen's world, if only to borrow a top hat and bring it back home with me... ;)

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  6. Fun answers. I wouldn't want to live the life of the girls in P&P, but I would like to visit for a day or so.

    Check out my list here

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  7. I think that all of Alexander McCall Smith's book series have great settings. I want to visit both Botswana and Scotland because of them.

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Please, sir, may I have some more? (Comments, that is!)