Something about fall makes me want to be surrounded by piles of beautiful books. Books are the best way to dream about places to visit, aren’t they?

My fall list includes re-reading Alledaags, which I bought in the Netherlands this summer. It’s written by a Kiwi illustrator who put an image to each day of a year in Amsterdam. Check out the samples. It’s funny, clever, and true. What could be better?

The rest of my fall reading list after the jump.

I’ve already written about how much I love the work of Alain de Botton, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I went to the bookstore last night, after I found out yesterday that he had a new book.

I’ve already finished half of A Week at the Airport, a slim 100-page treatise at being the writer-in-residence at Heathrow’s new Terminal 5. Yes, seriously.

De Botton is the single best observer of the nuances of travel living today. Period. Whereas most writers fall into cutesy traps (example A here), his perspective is more philosophical and melancholy–more like what it can actually be like to travel.

Some favorite passages.

On the airport Sofitel:

After dinner, it was still warm and not yet quite dark outside. I would have liked to take a walk around one of the few fields that remained of the farmland on which the airport had been built some six decades before, but it seemed at once perilous and impossible to leave the building, so I decided to do a few circuits around the hotel corridors instead. Feeling disoriented and queasy, as if I were on a cruise ship in a swell, I repeatedly had to steady myself against the synthetic walls.

More cheerily, on the departures board:

Nowhere was the airport’s charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities. The lack of detail about the destinations served only to stir unfocused images of nostalgia and longing: Tel Aviv, Tripoli, St Petersburg, Miami, Muscat via Abu Dhabi, Algiers, Grand Cayman via Nassau…all of these promises of alternative lives, to which we might appeal at moments of claustrophobia and stagnation.

Can’t wait to read the rest.

I’m doing a lot of heavy-duty reading for work, so the other two books on my list are really picture books, to give my brain some breathing space: The Japanese Gardens: Kyoto, because I am obsessed with getting there, hopefully next year, and a book still in its pleasing plastic wrapper, Thirty-Six Views of the Eiffel Tower.

A few samples from it are here.

One sample–with a pinkish coloration it doesn’t have in real life–is here:

copyright antimuseum.online.fr

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll still have to drive my car tomorrow. But for this weekend, to visit a traditional Japanese inn, or ryokan, I wanted to do as much as possible under my own steam. The journey still involved a diesel-powered ferry, but for a trip to Kyoto without an airline ticket, it seemed like a fair trade.

I’m not going to say it was easy–door to door, from my home in Seattle to the front step of the Fuurin-Oka Japanese inn on Bainbridge Island–was easily 18 miles over two days, with many hills in-between. But the novelty factor was high, and getting out of the car felt good, if only for a couple of days. It’s better than nothing.

The first new experience of the trip: Biking on to a ferry. I’d been on ferries dozens of times, but from within the safe hard shell of a car.

This was totally different. It involved biking to the front of the line of cars, and because it was kind of last minute, hustling to get on the boat before the huge swell of cars took over the lanes. I won’t likely forget the ferry guy shouting, “GO, BIKES, GO!”

It was totally worth it, and the long, sweaty ride (which involved lots of walking the bike up steep hills, hoping each was the last) was made better by knowing that a traditional Japanese bath was waiting on the other side.

My trip to Dutch Princess School is in a few weeks. I’ve finalized hotel reservations . But one of my favorite things to do even before one trip is finished is to start thinking about the next one.  I love trip planning, and having the next destination on the horizon eases the sting for that inevitable downer day when I’m back at the office, trip finished, sitting next to my coworker (who has a laugh like a jackhammer). It’s good to have the next trip in mind.

For me, the next destination is–I hope–Japan, and Kyoto, specifically. I’ve wanted to go ever since I read Kate Walbert’s The Gardens of Kyoto. I’ve never been to Japan, so when I remembered this ryokan that I’ve wanted to try–just a 30-minute ferry ride from Seattle–it seemed like a plan.

Ann, the owner, greeted us. She was so warm and welcoming, but gave us our space, too. She seems like a genuine and joyful person, and she deserves a place as beautiful as Fuurin-Oka–which is saying a lot.

The building is essentially one tatami-matted room with traditional futons on the floor, the sitting area you see above, a small kitchen, and the bathing area, which consists of the traditional outer chamber, WC for the toilet, and a separate bathing/showering area.

While I was there, I finished At Home in Japan: A Foreign Woman’s Journey of Discovery by Rebecca Otowa. I’ll admit that I was initially drawn to the incredible picture of her on her wedding day, wearing what looked like a Victorian beekeepers’ bonnet (you can see a photo on the NYTimes review page).

But I was drawn in by her frankness at the challenge of being a gaijin running a 350-year-old farmhouse. My favorite passage might be where she describes the house from its own perspective:

“I am one of the lucky ones. All around me, houses my age or even younger are suffering the pain and indignity of being reduced to a heap of gray wood, splinters of bamboo, plaster dust, and broken tiles. Even the stones which once proudly held up the pillars are dug out of the earth and taken away. In place of the previous old house, the occupants, who are usually the Original Families (people who belong here, who don’t come from outside), put up some kind of new structure–I would hesitate to call it a house–with no verandas, no tatami, no beams, no roof tiles. The wood struts are woefully puny and insubstantial. I know these neighborhood upstarts won’t last, not as I have lasted. I miss the old houses. They were my neighbors, my fellows, my friends.”

As Seattle heats up for the summer, and seems even more clanging, booming, and aggressive than normal, I was grateful for the elegance and respite I found this weekend.

Here are the four I’ll be reading this month.

Pagan Spain by Richard Wright

I had never heard of this book, but I was wandering through the remainder bin at Powell’s book store and picked it up. How’s this for an opener?

“In torrid August, 1954, I was under the blue skies of the Midi, just a few hours from the Spanish frontier. To my right stretched the flat, green fields of southern France; to my left lay a sweep of sand beyond which the Mediterranean heaved and sparkled. I was alone. I had no commitments. Seated in my car, I held the steering wheel in my hands.”

The whole sentiment of that opening bit reminds me of a favorite Rufus Wainright song (“one way is Rome and the other way is Mecca / on either side/ on either side of our motorbike”). Listen to the song in this live performance on YouTube:

“When I get back / I will dream in Barnes & Noble.” Yep, that’s the general idea (although hopefully a Powell’s or one of these great bookstores instead).

Creative Spaces: Urban Homes of Artists and Innovators by Francesca Gavin

You know a book is for a certain kind of artsy type when the publisher feels the need to stick a bright yellow sticker on the front over with the actual book title on it. They probably realized that at the printers.

Sometimes, when I daydream about living on a houseboat in Amsterdam, I imagine that it will be filled with flea-market portraits. I’d have the kind of oddly beautiful hallway you find in these kinds of  books.

An example from my future home in London:

Japan’s Cultural Code Words by Boyé De Mente

I’m a little intimidated by this one for a few reasons: no pictures (just being honest, folks), a publisher I’ve never heard of (Tuttle Publishing of Toyko, Singapore…and Rutland, Vermont), and a formidable list of words that seem to mostly be about business ideology. I’ll read at this one for a while and see how I do.

FYI, I picked this up at a Kinokuniya bookstore in Seattle’s own Uwajimaya grocery-store-slash-food-court-slash-kimono-shop. It’s one of my favorite places in the entire city.

I ♥ Your Style by Amanda Brooks

I’m so looking forward to this book. From the outside, it might not look like a travel book, but to me it is for two reasons:

• I don’t buy souvenirs in the traditional sense. No snow globes or shot glasses, please. But I’ll buy a soft surfer-girl T-shirt that reminds me of a day in the sun in Venice, California; a Ted Baker dress at Selfridges to make me feel like Kate Moss; a pair of flats at Maison de Bonneterie in Amsterdam that I’ll wear while riding my Dutch bike at home. I will save all year to be able to buy a treat like this to take home when I travel.
• The fashion icons in this book–having only flipped through it–are often so incredible because they are associated with a certain place. Here are some women profiled in the book as examples:

Peggy Guggenheim = Venice

Early Madonna = NYC

Bardot + Deneuve = Paris, of course  (even down to the berets!)