Books like The Vacationers

Like the other books on the list, The Shining felt personal, more like something that was happening to me than a story I was reading.

Like Jack, I could feel myself hanging on while the menace around me grew more real, more concrete. And more overwhelming. Even today, I can feel the terror of losing control, of becoming part of the menace, part of the threat to everything of meaning and value. Snowbound with horror, and Spring will never come.

I love when Agatha Christie writes about family vacations (which she did a fair amount) because she pushes everything to extremes—with the highest stakes possible.

Appointment with Death is my favorite of her family vacation mysteries because the plot twist is so satisfying and the mother so evil.

What Christie does, in an over-the-top sort of way, is show how claustrophobic family vacations can be. Grown children are forced to behave like a younger version of themselves, and they are stuck in a remote location. In this case, Petra, in Egypt. All those dormant grievances have a chance to flourish.

I don’t think there’s ever been an Agatha Christie opera, but there should be.

First of all, The Red House is set in the English countryside, which I love. And it brings together a group of family members with legitimate grievances. 

Some of them involving caretaking of an elderly mother, and I feel like the issue of caretaking is always underrepresented in literature, and yet it’s such a huge issue and can change the trajectory of a person’s life.

This is quite different than Mark Haddon’s better-known book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, so you might just want to pretend someone else wrote it, or you’ll find the change in tone unsettling.

My children loved this book when they were little, and so did I.

The poor Berenstain Bear family goes on what they think will be the best family vacation ever, but instead, one thing after another happens. At the end of the book, they look at photographs and remember it as the best family vacation ever.

This resonated with me because it’s the most disastrous family vacations that I remember most fondly. Once, I got a coupon to go to Niagara Falls, and only when we got there did I realize it was cheap because it was too cold to leave the hotel. I kept a copy of this Berenstain Bears book on my desk when I was writing Merry.

The books in this list are all written by non-Spaniards, for obvious reasons. This one is almost an exception. Tomás Graves is the eighth son of the English poet and novelist Robert Graves. He has lived almost his entire life on the island of Mallorca, and is, effectively, as native as they come. Tuning Up at Dawn is a wonderfully lyrical account of his upbringing, his memories of his father, and his life as a musician. It is deliciously evocative of a slower world which has now all but disappeared.

Snowball Oranges is by my Scottish friend Peter Kerr. Kerr and his wife left their home in East Lothian, Scotland, and moved to Majorca to grow oranges. Anyone familiar with the Peter Mayle/Frances Mayes genre can predict what happens to the Kerrs. They are buffaloed by the locals, battle the elements, and ultimately triumph—or not.

After three years in Majorca, the Kerrs returned to Scotland, but Spain left an enduring impression. “We were beginning to realize that the passage of time through the unhurried serenity of Majorcan country life was something to be marked by the slowly changing face of nature, not by the hands of a clock or the pages of a calendar.”

I love to read books about women travelers whose lives take an unusual path. Lucia Graves is the daughter of poet Robert Graves and his second wife. Her parents moved to Majorca after World War II, and their daughter—like many ex-pats—had to bridge the cultures between the land of her birth, England, and the land of her heart, Spain.

She was raised in a Bohemian household but educated in the strict Catholic schools of Franco’s Spain. Her book A Woman Unknown explores the sense of dislocation and disorientation of her bifurcated life. “I found myself creating an imaginary land where I spent much of my time.”

Maybe you don't know George Sand. 

You should meet her. She is a great woman. She is even the chapter four of my book written in French about 5 inspirational Parisian women.

Unfortunately my book is not translated in English yet. So in the meantime, don't miss this biography of George Sand, famous French writer from Romantic era who took a male nom de plume.

George Sand inspired Charlotte Brontë, she was lover and muse of Chopin and Alfred de Musset.

In the rigid 19th century she did not care to have younger lovers, to wear trousers, when it was illegal for women to wear trousers, and smoking cigars in public. How shocking!

I love this novel. It’s about a young man mourning the death of his wife and trying to deal with crippling grief while also repairing his relationship with his sixteen-year-old stepson. With such a premise you wouldn’t think the book would be funny, but it’s both hysterical and emotionally touching. 

Trooper has a gift for making extremely dysfunctional characters lovable, putting them in ludicrous situations and turning them loose on each other. This book really resonated with me because of the damaged-yet-enduring family dynamic after the death of a loved one, which is similar to my own experience following the death of my father. 

The evolving relationship between the main character and his stepson is also great, and Tropper nails the adolescent angst I remember so well from my own childhood.

When I walk through the streets of Manhattan, I’m constantly awed by the variety and density of its buildings. I wonder how such a city could have ever been built. New cities today lack the soul and character. But when you look at why these buildings exist, you see that they are there for a more mundane purpose: as shelter. The Garment District, for example, was created to house massive sweatshops to clothe America. Gotham’s apartment towers enclose the beds on which residents sleep. 

Many of these structures were built by a group of family-run development companies. The founders of these enterprises invariably began as immigrants trying to hustle their way up the economic ladder. They started as teenagers working in the sweatshops or hawking newspapers and, bit by bit, erected their own real estate empires. Tom Schactman’s book tells how entrepreneurial spirit, along with New York’s rapid economic growth,… show more.