Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CLASSICAL PURSUITS
step inside the pages of a literary classic
TORONTO, ONTARIO
Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out
of doors, played by someone I do not know.
—John Keats, great English poet
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Tour operators have made a killing in the last few years selling
Da Vinci Code
tours
of Paris and London. But long before Dan Brown penned the popular page-turner, Ann Kirk-
land was organizing book tours centered around literary classics (sorry, Dan, your book has
yet to make her list). Her Toronto-based company, Classical Pursuits, specializes in learn-
ing vacations with a literary theme. On a tour called “Irish Literary Genius,” for example,
Kirkland shows off Dublin, Galway, and the Aran Islands to readers enjoying James Joyce's
Ulysses,
Oscar Wilde's
The Importance of Being Earnest,
and the poetry and plays of Martin
McDonough, W. B. Yeats, and John Millington Synge.
“We offer the opportunity to travel through both space and time to destinations like
Dante's Italy, Hemingway's Paris, or Dickens's London,” Kirkland says. “We explore great
works of literature in the places where they are set.”
Arranged in collaboration with the Great Books Foundation of Chicago, each of the tours
has a walking guide (expect to put some miles on your Keds), a local expert (on a theater tour
to New York, for instance, Kirkland arranged a discussion with playwright Elizabeth Sharland
who was Yul Brynner's personal assistant before turning to writing plays), and an experien-
ced discussion leader. Although leaders often provide substantive commentary on, say, Carlos
Fuentes's
Old Gringo
(one of three books on a tour to Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula) or Wallace
Stegner's
The Angle of Repose
(for a tour to the desert Southwest), their primary mission is to
make sure the discussions are lively and thought provoking. They'll help you grapple with the
meaning of a book, painting, or opera, not tell you what it is.
OKAY, SO YOU'D RATHER DO THE DA VINCI CODE
