7 Books To Bring On Your Eurotrip

A little packing advice: Fewer clothes, more books. Panties and paperbacks, that's all you'll need.

A good book is like salt for any trip to Europe: it brings out the flavors. Sure, you could ship off to the Continent sans livres, but no Tour can be truly Grand without literature along for the Metro ride. Plus, it's not all Eiffel Tower selfies and Dirndls out there; Europeans tend to do two things more frequently and more publicly than Americans: make out, and read.

Reading A Moveable Feast your first weekend in Paris -- or Anna Karenina while on a train in Moscow, or Howards End during a trip to the English countryside -- these are utterly absurd, almost unbearably literary-pretentious things to do. But like so many absurd things in life, reading location-specific literature can also be an absolute joy.

Here are a few suggestions to get you started.

1. Off to Amsterdam? Pack Rituals by Cees Nooteboom.

Like the month I spent on a houseboat in Amsterdam, Rituals is short and delirious and ultimately sobering. Rituals was published in 1980 and won an award I can't pronounce, the Ferdinand Bordewijk Prize. I'm loath to describe a book as a 'meditation' but that's exactly what Rituals is: you go into it thinking it's a little story about three men in Holland, and you finish it realizing some small desire that's been dictating your life without you ever being aware of its existence. Following the lives of three men: our narrator, the laissez-faire Innis Winthrop and the ascetic, estranged father-son duo of Arnold and Philip Taads, Rituals will give you a stronger sense of Amsterdam as a place where people live full and real lives. (Not just tourists in town for a magic joint.)

(If you want to be impressive, the author's name is pronounced "Kase NOO-teh-boom." A friendly Dutch guy taught me that.)

Where to read it: On a bench at the Nine Straatjes with a scoop of pistachio ice cream from IJscuypje.

Select quote: "It is a peculiarity of time that in retrospect it appears so compact, an indivisible solid object, a dish with only one smell and one flavor."

2. Headed for Berlin? Bring Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood.

Hurry up. Berlin, it seems, is always ending. Of course, Berlin never really ends-- it's always reborn right before it dies. Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, written while the writer was living in Berlin between the wars, captures the hysteria of 1940s Berlin, the moments right before the boiling point.

Read it: on the U-Bahn at 4 a.m. while a German kid with a trustworthy grin takes a swig of George Washington whiskey and passes it around the car, high-fiving anyone who takes a drink.

Select quote: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.”

3. Florence? Read E. M. Forster's A Room with a View.

Some classics are classics for a reason. A Room with a View is one of them. Before the Helena Bonham Carter adaptation there was this 1908 gem of an English novel, which captures everything about being a tourist and being young and being in love with Italy and with dashing young middle-class English men and-- sigh. Forster paints a lovely Italy that serves as a perfect complement to the country itself. Florence will be swamped with tourists any time of year, but it's still more than worth the visit.

Read it: on a bench at the Giardino delle Rose, after a bottle of Pinot Grigio at lunch.

Select quote: “It is fate that I am here,' George persisted, 'but you can call it Italy if it makes you less unhappy.”

4. Paris-bound? Pick up Jean Rhys' After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie.

Did you think I was going to say A Moveable Feast? Take advantage of the fact that some of the greatest works of literature written by women came out of Paris in between the wars and pick up some under-read Jean Rhys. This is a dark novella, rich and sensual and gloomy and everything Paris can be at its best and at its worst.

Read it: at Buttes-Chaumont on a warm afternoon with your head in a stranger's lap.

Select quote: “If all good, respectable people had one face, I'd spit in it.”

5. Going to London? Pick up White Teeth by Zadie Smith.

In case you missed the moment when White Teeth was the only book anyone was reading, anywhere, drop it in your bag to read in London for a wider view of the city than a ride on the London Eye could ever offer. I began White Teeth on my first transatlantic flight and finished it by the end of my first ride on the Tube; it's a hyperactive read, and a masterpiece. Zadie Smith is a national treasure.

Read it: On the Circle Line.

Select quote: "Our children will be born of our actions. Our accidents will become their destinies. Oh, the actions will remain. It is a simple matter of what you will do when the chips are down, my friend. When the fat lady is singing. When the walls are falling in, and the sky is dark, and the ground is rumbling. In that moment our actions will define us. And it makes no difference whether you are being watched by Allah, Jesus, Buddah, or whether you are not. On cold days a man can see his breath, on a hot day he can't. On both occasions, the man breathes."

6. Going to Prague? Start with Kundera's Laughable Loves.

Oh, Prague. In high school I made all my boyfriends read The Unbearable Lightness of Being like it was some sort of urtext for my heart, and so the backdrop city itself took on this mythic, romantic status for me that was completely fulfilled when I finally paid a visit at age 21. I know I'm far from alone in the Kundera Fan Club but if you've yet to read him, may I suggest you begin in Prague. Pack along Laughable Loves, his collection of short stories. Crack it open to "The Hitchhiker's Game" and start from there.

Read it: on a rainy afternoon, at a window table at Cafe Slavia, old stomping grounds for Czech intellectuals. Order the roast duck.

Select quote: "The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people."

7. Headed for Vienna? Bring The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig.

Where is the new Vienna? Is it Berlin? Is it the Internet? It might be right here! In truth it's probably nowhere, and what Vienna was would be completely lost to us if it were not for dear Stefan Zweig. (Yes, this is the book that The Grand Budapest Hotel was based upon.) Autobiographies can be a drag but Zweig's, with great thanks to his English translator Anthea Bell, is anything but, perhaps owing to the circumstances of its creation. (Zweig committed suicide shortly after its completion.) Read this book anywhere in town and the locals will start talking to you. "Ah, you're reading Zweig!" an older woman noticed as I sat alone at Cafe Central, "He's just marvelous, isn't he!"

Vienna still has so much magic left, you just have to keep yourself susceptible to it, and The World of Yesterday will crack you right open. Like Goodbye to Berlin, it captures the moments before the Nazi takeover of a great European city; unlike Isherwood's book, Zweig's goes beyond the moment of hysteria and shows us the city both at its peak and its collapse.

Read it: on a Sunday evening at Cafe Weimar, while the kind-eyed, grey-haired piano man plays 1920s love song standards.

Select quote: “We who have been hunted through the rapids of life, torn from our former roots, always driven to the end and obliged to begin again, victims and yet also the willing servants of unknown mysterious powers, we for whom comfort has become an old legend and security, a childish dream, have felt tension from pole to pole of our being, the terror of something always new in every fibre. Every hour of our years was linked to the fate of the world. In sorrow and in joy we have lived through time and history far beyond our own small lives, while they knew nothing beyond themselves. Every one of us, therefore, even the least of the human race, knows a thousand times more about reality today than the wisest of our forebears. But nothing was given to us freely; we paid the price in full.”