Lady Bracknell demands something sensational to read on the train. I’m content to have something that holds my interest, that I can read when I’m not looking out the window on the train. We recently took Amtrak’s Ethan Allen Express from its starting point in Burlington, Vermont to New York City, a roughly 8-hour train trip along Lake Champlain and the Hudson River. The Ethan Allen Express used to terminate its northbound route at Rutland in southern Vermont, but in July 2022, the line began running north to Burlington, Vermont’s largest city after a 70-year hiatus.
I was excited to see the scenery along the Hudson; unfortunately, we were traveling during the days when the smoke particulates from the forest fires in Canada were at their worst in the Northeast US. The view from the train windows was a monochromatic range of gray but for the large red dot in the sky that was the sun. Despite the blur caused by the smoke, we did manage to see several herons in the wetlands along the river. A pair took flight as the train passed.
As we drew closer to the City, the train became more crowded and my attention turned back to the novel I was reading, The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd. The novel is largely set in NYC, specifically at the New York Public Library. The novel features Nell, a cartography scholar in a job that barely challenges her talent after she’d been fired from her position at the NYPL. She becomes the custodian of a curious map that ultimately leads her through some danger to a reconciliation with her past and her scholarship. Although a bit longer than it needs to be, the novel is a good summer-type read, a page-turner, something engaging to read on the train.
Having read the novel, I decided we needed to use the hours between breakfast and our matinee to visit the New York Public Library, a place I’d walked past several times when in New York, but had never entered. What a magnificent space to be gifted to the people of New York. Milling around the library exhibitions and shop (a fabulous gift shop where I managed to do some damage to my credit card) reminded me about some of the other novels I’ve read recently set in NY institutions.
The Cloisters by Katy Hays is another novel that features a talented scholar who has an insight into medieval materials that is not readily accepted by the establishment. Purely by happenstance–or so it seems–she’s offered a curatorial position at the Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park. Like Nell, her insights and research lead her into dangerous situations from which she emerges not wholly unscathed. This, too, was a page-turner with plenty of twists and surprises.
I recently listened to Fiona Davis’ The Magnolia Palace, a novel about the Frick. The novel has two time settings–the 1920s creation and organization of the Frick collection complete with scandal and mystery that is resolved fifty years later. Davis’ novels are well-researched, each set in a New York institution–the Frick, the New York Public Library, Radio City Music Hall, the Barbizon. The characters are young women reimagining their lives, hoping to find success in the busy-ness of New York.
New York City is the setting for a vast array of novels–page-turner romances to canonical literary fiction. An embarrassment of riches is available to anyone looking for something sensational to read on the train.
Booked for Travel 