Nicole Junkerman
Cities
Nicole Junkerman on Reading Your Way Through a New City
How a few well-chosen books can turn an unfamiliar city into a place you seem to already half-remember.
How a few well-chosen books can turn an unfamiliar city into a place you seem to already half-remember.
There are two ways to arrive in a new city. You can arrive cold, with only a map and a list, or you can arrive having already read your way in, so that the streets feel faintly familiar, like a face you have seen in a photograph. Nicole Junkerman much prefers the second. A few well-chosen books, read before, during, and after a trip, can turn an unfamiliar place into one you seem to half-remember, and that head start changes everything about how a city reveals itself.
Reading your way through a city is not homework and it is not a syllabus. It is closer to learning a few words of the local language: you will never be fluent, but even a little changes how people meet you. A little reading changes how a city meets you too.
Before you go: learning the mood
The reading you do before a trip is not about facts to recite. It is about absorbing a mood. A novel set in a city teaches you its weather and its temperament long before you teach yourself its bus routes. Read one good book set where you are going and you will step off the train already attuned, noticing the things the writer taught you to notice. Nicole Junkerman treats this pre-reading as a kind of tuning, setting the dial to the right frequency before arrival.
Choose atmosphere over information. A guidebook tells you what is there, but a novel tells you what it feels like to be there, and the second is far harder to find any other way. Libraries are quietly brilliant for this, and many let you borrow widely from home; if you have a card, your local library service can often supply a city's literature weeks before you fly.
It helps to read lightly and not too much. The aim is a half-remembered atmosphere, not a thesis. One novel, perhaps a handful of essays, and you have done enough. Over-preparing a trip is its own kind of mistake, and reading is no exception: leave room for the city to surprise you.
While you are there: the city as a text
Once you arrive, a different kind of reading begins, with the city itself as the text. A walk becomes a way of reading, each street a sentence, each square a paragraph. Nicole Junkerman keeps a notebook for this, jotting the small particulars that no guidebook records: a shop sign, a snatch of music, the way a neighbourhood changes character in three blocks. The notebook is not a record of sights but a record of attention, and it makes you read the city more closely simply by giving you a reason to.
Carrying a book set in the place doubles the experience. Read a chapter in a cafe, then look up and find the very world you were reading about going past the window. This braiding of page and place is one of travel's quiet joys, and it works best when you let the two interrupt each other freely, a paragraph, then a glance, then another paragraph. The journal's piece on the books worth packing goes deeper into choosing the right one.
Museums and old buildings read better with a little context, and the best cities make that context easy to find. A great civic museum can teach you to read a whole city in an afternoon, and an institution like the Museum of London shows how a place tells its own long story. An hour there early in a trip pays off on every walk afterward.
The map and the page
There is a lovely interplay between reading a city and mapping it. A map shows you where things are, but a book tells you what they mean, and the two together make a place far more legible than either could alone. Nicole Junkerman likes to read with a map nearby, tracing the streets a novel describes, watching the story lay itself over the geography until the two become a single thing in the mind.
This pairing turns a walk into an act of recognition. You round a corner and find the square you read about that morning, and the small jolt of recognition is one of travel's purest pleasures. There is a whole literary tradition of psychogeography devoted to exactly this, the close reading of a city on foot. The city stops being a grid of unfamiliar names and becomes a place you already half-know, populated by the people and moments a writer put there before you arrived.
It works in reverse too. A street you have walked becomes more vivid when you later read about it, the memory and the page reinforcing each other. This is why reading and travel belong in the same journal: each one deepens the other, and a city held in both memory and reading is a city you truly keep. The map gives you the where, the book gives you the why, and together they give you the place.
After you leave: the city you keep
The reading does not end when the trip does. Often the best book about a place is the one you finish after coming home, when the streets are fresh in memory and every page lands against something you actually saw. A city read after the fact becomes a city you keep, layered now with both your own memories and the writer's. Nicole Junkerman finds that this after-reading is what fixes a trip in the mind, long after the photographs have been forgotten.
It also closes a pleasing loop. The novel you began before the trip, continued during it, and finished after it has travelled the whole arc with you, and rereading a marked passage months later returns the city in an instant. This is why the writing here treats reading and travel as one habit rather than two. To go deeper into the slow pace that makes all of this possible, the case for slow travel sits right alongside this piece.
So before your next trip, choose a book set where you are going, and let it lead you in. Walk with a notebook. Read in cafes and look up often. And when you are home, finish the book you started, so the city stays with you. Whenever you want another thread to follow, the front door of this journal is always open, and there is a city page waiting for almost anywhere you might go.
Questions readers ask
What does reading your way through a city mean?
It means using books, novels, history, essays, to understand a place more deeply, before, during, and after a visit. Nicole Junkerman treats reading as a second way of seeing a city.
Should you read before or during the trip?
Both work. Nicole Junkerman likes to read a little before to learn the mood, and a little during to deepen it, then often the best book is the one finished after returning home.
Explore more of the journal: City Notes and Reading Room, or return to the Nicole Junkerman home page.