Mechanics' Institute Book Chat discussion

Do you have an ideal place for the stories you like to read about? Maybe you like to read books where the story takes place in exotic lands such as New Zealand or Tasmania, or perhaps you like your action closer to home, say New York City, the American countryside or small towns? Let us know!

P.B. wrote: "Do you have an ideal place for the stories you like to read about? Maybe you like to read books where the story takes place in exotic lands such as New Zealand or Tasmania, or perhaps you like your..."

Cities -- real or imagined. All cities have their own personalities. When a writer can make a city feel like a character in the story that's when the setting matters. Caleb Carr's 19th century New York City, Hammett's 1940s San Francisco, or any city that Hemmingway describes all remain unforgettable. Some authors can sum up a city in a single sentence (Such as Douglas Adams who described Los Angeles as "Like 100 square miles of American Express junk mail, but lacking the same moral depth"), while others write pages of prose revealing almost every street and alley and all manner of people. More than just a setting for a story, a really good writer can tell you about their characters by the way they interact with an actual or imaginary city, such as Terry Pratchett's commander of the Night Watch who can tell which part of the fictional city "Ahnk-Morpork" he is walking through by the feel of the cobblestones through the cheap cardboard soles of his boots on the bottoms of his feet. And we have Edgar Allen Poe's Auguste Dupin shows off his detective skills as he and his companion walk through Paris, continuously referring to the sights and sounds of the city and its people. Where else can a writer find so much to work with?


-- a complex environment for characters to interact with and inside of which they act.

A train!

Can you think of stories that place on a train?

There are soooooooo many!

The Boxcar Children series began there...

I've always loved the world the Redwall series is set in! (Those food descriptions! <3)

I like San Francisco.

The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett

I like to visit the real and fictional places mentioned in the story and imagine the City of the 1920s…before the bridges were built…places Samuel Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade knew and spoke of.

I like to compare and contrast Hammett’s hardboiled detective story and the John Huston film of 1941 which launched film noir.

Think of the changes that have come and gone with the times.