Best places to read certain books?
It is always great to read a book about a place when you are in that place — for example, reading Killer Angels while on a trip to walk the Gettysburg battlefield, or Son of the Morning Star while driving across Montana or Wyoming.
It is always great to read a book about a place when you are in that place — for example, reading Killer Angels while on a trip to walk the Gettysburg battlefield, or Son of the Morning Star while driving across Montana or Wyoming.
But you can’t always be on location. Where in the U.S. would be the best place to read a Vietnam novel? I think probably Louisiana, with the humidity off the sea, the strange birds singing, the rats hiding in the palm trees, the pervasive fog of official corruption. Likewise, novels about the war in Afghanistan would do well in the dry mountains of New Mexico. (Santa Fe reminds me some of the Kabul I knew many decades ago, whilst Albuquerque has a Kandahar-like climate.)
Iraq novels are harder to land. I dunno where in the U.S. I would want to read one. I guess in a dust storm in southern Arizona. But I don’t think we really have a place similar to Baghdad — that is, a huge, fetid, humid metropolis surrounded by dry desert. L.A. may be an awful city, but even so it doesn’t even come close.
Library of Congress
More from Foreign Policy


Can Russia Get Used to Being China’s Little Brother?
The power dynamic between Beijing and Moscow has switched dramatically.


Xi and Putin Have the Most Consequential Undeclared Alliance in the World
It’s become more important than Washington’s official alliances today.


It’s a New Great Game. Again.
Across Central Asia, Russia’s brand is tainted by Ukraine, China’s got challenges, and Washington senses another opening.


Iraqi Kurdistan’s House of Cards Is Collapsing
The region once seemed a bright spot in the disorder unleashed by U.S. regime change. Today, things look bleak.