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I must have read Travels with Charley one too many times. John Steinbeck’s memoir about his cross-country travels with his French poodle sidekick is an enticement to anyone with wanderlust—practically an invitation to throw caution to the wind and do something similar.
Travels with Charley is now one of the few books I own. About two months ago, I left Hoboken, New Jersey (furniture sold and apartment rented), and set out on a road trip. For the next several years I’ll be traveling the U.S. in an RV with my husband, Brian, and our trusty feline, Tabitha. We have a loose route planned: spend the summer in New England, head south along the East coast as the weather gets colder, and then venture west. (Click here if you’d like to know more about the RV adventures.)
Top on my itinerary is visiting author houses and museums, and I’ve already had the chance to check out a few. So look for some Novel Destinations dispatches from the road. And be careful what you read—you never know where it might take you. –Shannon McKenna Schmidt
A Harry Potter “experience” is to open at the studios where the films are made in England. The visitor attraction north of London will include costumes and recreations of some of the boy wizard’s haunts, such as the Hogwarts school hall and Albus Dumbledore’s study. The planned set tours — part of an expansion of Leavesden, the Warner Bros studio in Hertfordshire — are Britain’s answer to the recently opened ”Wizarding World of Harry Potter,” a 20-acre attraction at the Universal Studios resort in Orlando, Florida.
Last month, London’s mayor Boris Johnson stated that the UK was “utterly mad to leave it to the Americans to make money from a great British invention”. Warner is reportedly to spend more than $150 million on buying and expanding Leavesden, which it currently rents. Until the studio tours commence, Harry Potter fans in England can tour film locations in and around London with BritMovieTours or The London Taxi Tour Company.
In a country where afternoon high tea is a ritualized art form, it’s rare to come across a new take on the traditional standby featuring dainty crustless sandwiches, bottomless pots of Earl Grey and scones heaped with lashings of clotted cream.
But over the weekend I attended an altogether new take on high tea, the Sanderson Hotel’s Mad Hatter’s Afternoon Tea Party. Launched in March in conjunction with the Alice in Wonderland movie, this is no ordinary afternoon tea. Among the unusual (but delicious!) offerings are a Queen of Hearts teacake that melts in your mouth once the chocolate and strawberry shell is broken, a Hazelnut and Passion fruit tart that comes with a White Rabbit’s pocket watch, and pineapple lollipops that turn from hot to cold on your tongue.
The sandwiches, too, are imbued with a psychedelic touch: the ham and English mustard comes on yellow saffron bread and smoked salmon with cream cheese is served on green spinach bread. Due to the tea’s popularity, it will be running through the summer daily from 2.30pm – 5.30pm. –Joni Rendon
Russia has been accused of abandoning its literary past after it recently emerged that the Kremlin has no plans to mark the centenary of Leo Tolstoy’s death this November, and an acclaimed Russian language film of “Anna Karenina” has failed to find distributors nearly a year after being made.
Some academics charge that Tolstoy is better appreciated in the west, where new translations of Tolstoy’s work are being published this year and Dame Helen Mirren and Christoper Plummer were nominated for Oscars for the English-language film “The Last Station”, which examines the last years of Tolstoy’s life.
The director of the as-yet undistributed film adaptation of “Anna Karenina” has been told by distributors that young people going to the cinema today do not even know who Anna Karenina is. He said he hoped the centenary of Tolstoy’s death might help skeptical distributors change their minds, but so far events to honor the writer in his native country are few.
Vladimir Tolstoy, the writer’s great-great grandson, is organizing an academic conference at the family estate 125 miles south of Moscow later this year and an informal gathering of the famous scribe’s descendants is also planned. Still, visitors to Russia this summer can make their own pilgrimage to Tolstoy sites, including the Tolstoy House Museum in Moscow and The Tolstoy Estate Museum in the countryside, which contains over 30,000 original items preserved exactly as they were in the fall of 1910, when Tolstoy abandoned the home and family to live as a wandering ascetic.
To Kill a Mockingbird fans, pack your bags. If ever there was perfect time to visit Monroeville, Alabama—Harper Lee’s hometown and the model for the fictional Maycomb—it’s next month. July 1 marks the 50th anniversary of the book’s publication, and “Alabama’s literary capital” is pulling out all the stops during a celebratory weekend July 8–11.
Many of the events are taking place at the Old Courthouse (below right), the site of the famed courtroom scene in To Kill a Mockingbird and now a museum with an exhibit devoted to Lee and another to her childhood 
friend, Truman Capote (on whom Mockingbird’s Dill is based).
The courtroom (below left) has been restored to its 1930s-era appearance, and it’s where a marathon reading of the novel will take place as part of the weekend’s festivities on July 9 & 10. (Take a seat in the balcony like Scout and Jem do in the novel.) Also on the agenda are a walking tour of sites associated with Lee and Capote (July 9) and a birthday party on the Old Courthouse lawn (July 12). Click here for the full schedule.
If you can’t make it to Monroeville, there are other places to mark the literary milestone. HarperCollins Publishers has lined up an impressive 50 events at bookstores, libraries, and other venues across the country, beginning June 11 and continuing through the end of September. Stop by Oblong Books in Rhinebeck, New York, for mocktails and music by the Boo Radleys on July 12. Attend a reenactment of the novel’s famed courtroom scene at Bookshop Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz, California, on July 20. Check out the details for these and other events—movie screenings, speaking series, and a whole lot more—at tokillamockingbird50year.com.
[Photos © Monroe County Heritage Museums]
