NOTE: I’m traveling again, but with summer upon us I thought a conversation with my editor Amy Alipio might give us all some tips on a few good books for the dog days.
Some adventures start with a boarding pass saved to Apple Wallet. Others begin with text on a page. For summer reading recommendations, I turned to my former National Geographic Traveler editor Amy Alipio, founder of Substack’s The Travel Book Club. After 23 years at National Geographic and a career spent writing and editing stories about the world, she knows a thing or two about transportive text. Her three picks travel from famine-era Ireland to true tales from the islands of Palau and the streets of old Los Angeles.
Land by Maggie O’Farrell
Ireland and Quebec make an unlikely pair until you realize both are places shaped by departures. One sent people away. The other received them. The novel Land by Maggie O'Farrell moves between 1860s Ireland and Quebec, two landscapes that keep history out in the open. Ireland with its stone walls, weather, and memory, is a place where the past has a habit of sitting down beside you uninvited. Quebec, meanwhile, feels like the Old World washed ashore in the New.
“In Travel Book Club we had a lively discussion of O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait which was set in Renaissance Florence,” Amy says. “Her latest novel conjures Ireland and Quebec, both are places I absolutely love for their natural good looks and their main character energy.”
So true. Both locales possess what readers crave: scenery with a backstory and a sense that every road leads back into history and the human condition.
The Wreck of the Mentor, by Eric Jay Dolin
“I have a special place in my heart for Pacific Islands, maybe because my parents are from the Philippines,” Amy says. “And this book is the true story of an American whaling ship that wrecks in the western Pacific archipelago of Palau in 1832.”
Today, Palau is the kind of destination we all dream about—an emerald scatter of islands floating in impossibly blue water, where WWII vessels rust beneath the coral. But when the American whaling ship Mentor wrecked there, paradise looked more like catastrophe. That's one of travel's enduring contradictions. The places we spend thousands of dollars trying to reach are often the very places sailors, settlers, and explorers desperately hoped to avoid.
“Palau now firmly sits on adventurous travelers’ bucket lists,” Amy says, “so I think it’s ironic that when the crew of Mentor found itself grounded there, it was considered a tragedy.”
Daughters of the Sun and Moon by Lisa See
Most visitors come to Los Angeles knowing it’s America’s city of reinvention. Lisa See's latest novel Daughters of the Sun and Moon reminds readers the city has always been built on that premise. Set in the years after the Civil War, it follows three Chinese women navigating a young LA wrestling with growth, prejudice, and competing visions of who belongs in it.
“I learned so much about the culture of tea in China from reading See’s The Tea Girl From Hummingbird Lane,” Amy says. “Her latest novel follows the stories of three recently immigrated Chinese women during a time of anti-Asian sentiment.”
This isn’t Hollywood, but a town shaped by immigrants, laborers, merchants, and communities that helped build the city while often being written out of its mythology. Walk through Chinatown today and you're not just navigating a neighborhood. You're standing inside one of America’s longest-running arguments that continues even now.
Travel and reading have always been close cousins. One allows us to visit places we may never see. The other sends us in search of places we can’t stop thinking about. If Amy’s recommendations do their job, don’t be surprised if your summer reading list eventually becomes a travel bucket list as well. See you soon.
Other destinations:
If you enjoy reading and discussing travel through reading fiction and non-fiction books check out Amy’s Substack The Travel Book Club.
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