Top Ten Tuesday #25 - Places Books Have Made Me Want To Visit

Top Ten Tuesday is a Meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish where I will be picking from their top tens and attempting to reveal what my thinking is behind these choices.

Places books have made me want to visit:

1. Oslo/ Norway
The Witches, by Roald Dahl was one of my favourite books to read growing up. I loved this strange country where witches lurked around every corner and the funny, fierce old woman who lived there. I have always wanted to visit it. Also, Northern Lights  was another favourite, and it made me want to go there to experience the Aurora Borealis, so I'm twice as hungry for it.

2. Rural France
Lansquenet Sous-Tannes. I'm not even sure if it's a real place, but it feels real to me. First mentioned in Chocolat by Joanne Harris, it then features throughout a few more of her books, including my favourite, Five Quarters of the Orange. Although I have been to France before, I want to have the incredible experience of eating in patisseries and chocolateries and meld it all with a market village life along the banks of a beautiful river with gypsies living along the banks and irritable old ladies settling in shops for a mug of chocolat chaud.

3. New Orleans
The Casquette Girls is something I read quite recently, and I really enjoyed it! I want to put a city to a name now and stroll around in the historic french quarter. I want to see voodoo shops and street celebrations and really take in the history and the eerieness of the place. Oh, and did I mention it's the setting for Disney's The Princess and the Frog?

4. Narnia
It's quite not as dangerous as the likes of Westeros and you don't get stuck there, unlike Neverland. No time passes when you're there, so you can go off an have an adventure, see some mermaids and a giant friendly lion and come back to your boring life again. Plus, there are so many magical entities that I would love to spend time with! Hell, once I wished I was a Dryad.

5. Madrid
It's not often I get funny notions of going to big cities, but Carlos Ruiz Zafon's novels truly take me to Madrid, and I would love to see it and experience life there. It sounds like a great holiday destination with a lot of history and it can get a bit creepy at times I am sure.

6. Ancient Europe, Greece and Rome
Any Ben Kane novel can take me to this point in time, as well as the excellent David Gemmel series, Troy. I'm not really one for danger, and this is rife with it, so perhaps I would lay low. I think it would be incredible to go back to this time and see how people did things then. I love the mythology of these times and I think we could learn a lot from the way these people lived.

7. Ingo
I wish I was away in Ingo... I really do. This beautiful but treacherous undersea world, thought up by Helen Dunmore,  is filled with merpeople, and I love the idea that you can become one, and that people are actually able to breathe underwater if Ingo wants you to.

8. The Bayou
Ok, this is not dissimilar to New Orleans, but instead of going to the city, I would want to see the Bayou in all its glory. This was inspired by Teardrop, which focuses much more on the power of water and the Bayou feels like an extension of this power, as it floats in the background only to become part of a main event later on.

9. Italy, Rome and Venice
This is derived from Dan Browns novels, Angels and Demons, and Inferno. I am pretty obsessed over history, and it really liked the way the mystery fits in with the actual stuff in real life. I have been to Rome and seen a few of the landmarks in the book. Let me say they are stunning and well worth going to see.

10. Neverwhere
Who wouldn't want to travel to Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, an alternate version of our London, where nothing is as it seems and some things have been taken pretty literally. Black Friars really does have Black Friars in it while The Angel, Islington is an angel named Islington. I need to read this book again.

Kyra_x