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Books with Local and/or Personal Connections

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purple95

New Member
For my first real post, a question that has long held interest for me but perhaps this subject is so obvious to all of you as to not merit any comment. Anyway, here goes.

Books with a connection to my personal life and/or locale have always been of special importance to me.

Being an unabashed King fan, I've recently started Just After Sunset. One of the stories takes place just a few miles from my home here in Florida. I've been to the location a few times and drive by frequently. (Mr. King describes the setting very well.)

Another example was a book authored by my cousin about her family's experiences in adopting four small children. This book was set just a few miles from my home and of course involved close relatives of mine. An autographed copy is perhaps my most cherished book.

I'll only bore you with one more example. The Yearling and many of Marjorie Rawlings' other books are set close to my home. I've visited her home and the surrounding park many times and hiked the area mentioned in her stories.

Books such as these are among my most enjoyable and memorable. I search them out and it's fortunate that numerous novels are set in Florida. It's an interesting and fascinating locale of course, as Mrs. purple95 and I reside here. :D

Do any of you have similar connections to your favorite books?

Cheers,
dan :)
 
Sometimes personal connections with a book occur after the book is done and in the most odd ways. A few years ago, I read The Lost Bird by Margaret Coel two weeks before an Ozark vacation with my family. During the same time period, I read Blind Descent by Nevada Barr. The Coel book featured a story about Arapaho warriors who'd been encouraged by missionaries to journal their life stories on paper..that was done soon after the Arapahos were settled on reservations..the 'books' then became valuable and The Lost Bird centered on locating one of these Life Books...Blind Descent is about spelunking at Carlsbad Caverns. I read that one purposefuly since I knew my husband would want to tour Mammoth Cave at Silver Dollar City..was a neat intro to caves for me. What I was not prepared for was the suprise waiting at the museum at College of the Ozarks..there among all the other Native American artifacts, was three pages from one of those Arapaho Life Books! They were dated either 1899 or 1900. Nothing life shaking, just a cool book-to-life experience.
 
The only book I have read that comes close to locality is Beautiful Losers by Leonard Cohen.
Montreal ,the French /English language problems ,and life as it was back then.
 
We have a local author who is quite well known as a writer from The Chcicago Tribune--Bob Greene.

He's written a bunch of books but two, Be True to Your School and You Know You Should be Glad, are autobiographical and take place in the small suburb where I have lived my whole life--Bexley, OH (suburb of Columbus). The former, School, is a diary Greene kept for the year of 1964. He went to the same high school as me, which is much of the setting, and my uncle is actually mentioned, by name, on page 19.

They're both good books, especially the first one, and I would recommend them!
 
I have read some of the Amos Walker series by Loren D. Estleman. They are set in Detroit and the surrounding suburbs (where I grew up). In one of the books, Amos spends some time getting his bearings in a K-Mart parking lot that I had been in many times when I was younger. My mother shopped there often until it started getting rundown.
 
As I was reading The Time Travelers Wife, I really connected with the locations the author was writing about. I could have probably found the areas she was talking about.
 
Yes, I love reading books that have settings in familiar locales. This is not just in different states that I've lived but places I've visited, too. Since moving to AZ, I've read several different books that take place here such as a Zane Grey book, Nancy Turner's These Is My Words and a few others. I read James Michener's Texas when living there and his Chesapeake when living in Maryland. I've read many of Anne Tyler's and Lisa Samson's books which commonly take place in Baltimore.
 
Most of Honoré de Balzac books take place ether in Paris or Tourain.Born in Paris with deep roots in Touraine,his book are alway very vivid in termes of description to me,specialy the landscape of val de loire we find in 'le lys dans la vallée" or "Eugenie grandet ".

Having lived in Irland,Roody Doyle book also make me feel like been with my in-laws.Mad people!
 
My thanks to everyone who replied.

As I mentioned, this aspect of my reading has always interested me and I'm glad it does for others too.

Cheers,
dan :)
 
Firestorm - Nevada Barr is the only book I have found with local connections for me. I read this because it takes place in Lassen National Park which is basically my backyard. I was very sad that I didn't enjoy the book at all. :( I wanted to love it... but I could hardly finish it. Darn it.
 
The last novel I read, Antonio Tabucchi's Pereira Declares, struck home with me because it talked about a fascist period in my country.
 
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