CAN YOU RECOMMEND SOMETHING TO READ ON MY TRIP?
For inspirational company on your adventure, pick up They Went Whistling: Women Wayfarers, Warriors, Runaways, and Renegades ($23, www.amazon.com), author Barbara Holland's short, spirited real-life tales about some of history's most famously independent women — Cleopatra, George Sand, and Isadora Duncan among them. Kissing the Virgin's Mouth ($23, www.amazon.com), an award-winning first novel by Donna M. Gershten, will whisk you off to Mexico, from the 1940s to the present, through the story of the feisty Magda, who rises from poverty to become a successful businesswoman. And you won't need a movie ticket or even an airplane headset to be drawn into the masterful film noir-like experience of Patricia Carlon's The Unquiet Night ($22, www.amazon.com). It opens with a lurid lakeside murder, and its subsequent mysteries and missing persons are creepy enough to arouse the arm-chair detective in anyone.