Wanderlust: according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, it means “a strong desire to travel.” In my opinion, the word encompasses so much more. To me, wanderlust has more to do with an adventurous spirit, generally, than it does with the specific act of traveling. It holds a feeling of yearning, of wanting to go on an adventure, with a touch of something intangible. In other words, the word wanderlust feels a little magical to me.
So how do books inspire not just or necessarily a desire to travel, but wanderlust? Well, like the word itself, there isn’t a list of characteristics or a concrete definition to point to. It’s more of an undertone and has more to do with a book’s atmosphere than the story’s actual content. While an international setting or travel within the book itself can certainly foster wanderlust in certain occasions, a book doesn’t ever have to go to what we might consider a romanticized location or even be set in a real place to make its reader suddenly want to explore.
Many of the books I’ve chosen have magical elements or are fantasy books (in fact, I think only one of them is a pure contemporary). It might seem counterintuitive, and I certainly was surprised upon realizing that these were, in fact, the books I thought best fit the wanderlust theme. Because how could a fantasy book inspire a want to travel when it’s impossible to actually go to the book’s location? Or how could a historical book do the same thing, when we can’t travel back in time to experience the book’s setting?
It all comes back to the magic of wanderlust and the feelings these books inspired in me. For me, each of the following books has that intangible quality that I think of when I think of “wanderlust.”