How does Traveling Affect our Reading Experience?

Who doesn’t like traveling? Sometimes it seems traveling is all people talk about, especially in the holiday seasons. You see it all over social media: some post their every step, some share only highlights, while others don’t bother posting anything at all. It also looks like it has become somewhat of a trend, something one does to ‘be cool’, but that is another topic. Everyone has their own reasons for traveling, but in the end, there is no denying that traveling can provide invaluable experiences that can truly enrich or even change our lives.

So it naturally follows that traveling probably also influences the way we experience books, right?

Now that the summer is behind us, and most of us are back to work or school, I thought it would be fun to think about how traveling affects our reading experience.

What Reading Experience?

Let’s start with explaining what I exactly mean by ”affecting our reading experience”. Obviously, a lot goes into how someone experiences a book. A hundred people will likely get a hundred different experiences from the same book. That is, the book will affect them in a different way – for some it might just be very interesting, some will get strong emotional responses, while others may not even bother to read it through the end. My point is, it is all very subjective. It’s about your background – what you like, where you grew up, what kind of interests and friends you have, etc.

When discussing how traveling can affect our reading experience, one thing to keep in mind is that traveling specifically is just one of many parts that goes into the equation of how we experience a book. How a book affects us depends on each person and their current life situation. With that out of the way, let’s try to isolate traveling from that equation and see where it brings us. No pun intended!

The Visuals

Perhaps the most obvious way traveling can enhance our reading experience is the visual part. When we read something, we try to visualize it in our head. That’s why we have all those detailed descriptions of characters and landscapes. We are visual beings, and we are interested in what people and things look like. Even if you’re not particularly interested in some part of a book, your brain automatically presents pictures to your mind.

I think this visualization in your mind can be highly enhanced by your travels. Imagine reading about a scene at the seaside, with the blue sea, salty air and the sound of waves. And now imagine you have never visited the seaside and don’t know how all those things actually feel. I’m not saying it’s impossible to visualize something if you haven’t experienced it, far from it, but it certainly can help.

Of course, today it’s very easy to virtually see pretty much anything through recorded walks, drone footage, movies, etc. Still, reading about how characters move through a city you’ve actually visited can bring a whole new dimension to your reading experience.

Understanding History

What usually happens when you travel is that you also learn something about the place you’re traveling to. Maybe you inform yourself before/after the trip about some interesting buildings. Maybe you find something along the way on your travels that you find interesting, and then take a tour, or read some quick history. By doing this, maybe you also learn something about religion, politics, war decisions, etc. Basically, you get a better understanding of how the world functions. Piece by piece, your picture of the world expands, and you tie together some pieces that were perhaps a little up in the air before.

With time, while reading, you could find yourself looking at certain plot points or character decisions in a different way. You tie some situations that you read with some similar situations you have seen in the real world. The more real-world situations you see, the more connections in your head you can make while reading. And this can sometimes happen automatically, without you even knowing or trying.

Understanding Characters

Another big part of traveling is meeting new people. Meeting someone new, even in your own local town, can give you lots of different perspectives, but this is especially true when meeting someone from a different country, or even a completely different culture. Reading a book set in the Far East is probably a completely different thing if you experienced this culture first hand. There are many differences in how people approach life in different cultures, from different life philosophies, to little nuances in everyday social behavior.

But I think this goes beyond the obvious of better understanding different cultures. Meeting new people can open your eyes in terms of what the problems are that people are struggling with. Health problems, losing a loved one, getting a promotion in a highly competitive field…Both positive and negative aspects they went through can change the way you view the characters that you will read about in the future. All this is very general, and you can also get this from people around you, but the more you travel, and the further you travel, the more variety of different faiths in people’s lives you will see!

Sense of Scale (Time and Distance)

One really practical one: getting a sense of what it actually means to travel by bus for 15 hours (or more). Or taking a plane across the ocean. Or driving a car for 1000 kilometers. What about being on a boat for several days? Taking the underground in a big city during rush hour? What does sleeping on a night train look like? There are countless examples of fun, and not-so fun options you can take while traveling. When reading about some of those in a book, you try to imagine all those experiences. Sure, your imagination will fill in the gaps where needed, but you can’t truly appreciate what it means to stretch your legs after being cramped for hours upon hours on a tight bus seat, until you have actually done it yourself.

Often those long, ‘boring’, travel bits are not described in detail in books and movies. It’s just not dramatic enough. However, if you have actually experienced it in real life, you can get a better sense of how characters are feeling, and what their physical and mental status is. In that way, scenes can be much more interesting to you, especially if the characters you read about experience something very similar to some of your recent endeavors.

Do I Really Need to Travel to Enjoy a Book?

So all this seems to suggest that you’re missing out if you don’t travel. Do you really need it to enjoy a book? The answer is: no! You absolutely don’t have to travel to properly enjoy any book. Even though traveling is becoming more and more accessible, it is still expensive, and a real luxury for a lot of people. I am aware that there are many among us who don’t visit the seaside regularly, maybe even never. This doesn’t mean they can’t enjoy reading a book set at the seaside, or that they get something less out of the book than someone who has those experiences in real-life.

This also heavily depends on the book itself. If traveling is a central plot point in the book, then, of course, having these experiences in real-life will most likely elevate your experience while reading it.

Can the Effect be Negative?

I’m trying to think of some negative effects that traveling can bring you in terms of how you experience a book, but I’m struggling to find one. Even if we talk about visiting very tragic places, like war museums, or seeing how some people are forced to live, like in poor neighborhoods of big cities, this still adds something to your experience. This can enhance the negative emotion you may feel in your future reads, but I don’t think that counts as a negative. The real world is pretty cruel, and it’s better for you to know about it.

The only other thing I can think of is that when you’re traveling you’re most likely on the move a lot, so you have limited time to read! Does that count as a negative in this context? Probably not. Still, not fun when you have to skip reading time!

Conclusion

The benefits of traveling really come down to widening your horizons as a human being. Experiencing different cultures, historical settings, meeting new people, and actually traveling long distances can all help you get a better understanding of the world. In turn, those adventures will enhance your reading experience, sometimes in not-so obvious ways, like you subconsciously better understanding character decisions and motivations, or certain plot points.

With that said, you really don’t need to travel to reap great benefits from reading a book. Not everyone has the luxury of traveling, as it demands both time and money (those two tend to be inversely proportional). One of the charms of reading is that it can transfer you to whole new worlds while sitting in your living room, and teach you a lot in the process.

Still, these days, traveling has become quite accessible, through school or college programs, or budget airline tickets. Those travels can greatly enrich our lives in many ways, and therefore also our reading experience. I think this is a topic that could be explored much further, but for the sake of this article, let’s stop here.

Now another fun question might be: how does reading affect our traveling experiences? Maybe a discussion for another time!

Do you think traveling can change the way you experience a book?