Cole Porter, describing the London-bound journey of the fictional ocean liner, the SS American, wrote that “…there’s no cure like travel to help you unravel the worries of living today. When the poor brain is cracking, there’s nothing like packing a suitcase and sailing away.” Anything goes, indeed!

Despite a late-18th century divorce, Americans have had a long-held fascination with and desire to travel to Europe. As Mark Twain said in his 1869 travelogue, Innocents Abroad, “The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I have finished my travels.”

And so, this group traces the journeys of Americans as they seek their fortunes abroad—namely on the European continent. Exploring novels from the long-twentieth-century, with characters who look for many of the hallmarks of vacationing: eating good food, finding (and losing) love, and/or assuming the identity of a shipping magnate’s son after a murder.

The “Pack Your Bags” reading group meets – with some exceptions – on the fourth Sunday of the month, from 2pm-4pm in the Athenæum’s Bound.

Sun, September 22
Innocents Abroad (1869) by Mark Twain (excerpts)
The Ambassadors (1903) by Henry James
Optional: Daisy Miller (1878) by Henry James

Sun, October 27
The Buccaneers (1938) by Edith Wharton  (completed by Marion Mainwaring)
Optional: “Roman Fever” (1934) by Edith Wharton, The Buccaneers (Apple TV, 2023)

*Sat, November 30* (This has been rescheduled from November 24)
Tender is the Night (1934) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) by Anita Loos

Sun, December 22
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) by Gertrude Stein
A Moveable Feast (1964) by Ernest Hemingway

Sun, January 26
The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) by Patricia Highsmith
Optional: Purple Noon (1960), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), Ripley (Netflix, 2024)

Sun, February 23
The Dud Avocado (1958) by Elaine Dundy
Optional: The Old Man and Me (1964) by Elaine Dundy

Sun, March 23
Giovanni’s Room (1956) by James Baldwin
Optional: A Sport and a Pastime (1967) by James Salter

*Sun, April 13* (This has been rescheduled from April 27)
The Dean’s December (1982) by Saul Bellow
Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) by Ben Lerner

*Sun, June 1 [location TBD]
The Wallcreeper (2014) by Nell Zink

Sunday, June 28th [location TBD]
Running (2017) by Cara Hoffman
The Paris Novel (2024) by Ruth Reichel

Tom Sojka recently completed his PhD in History at Boston University. His dissertation explored the Bright Young People (famously satirized by Evelyn Waugh in Vile Bodies), elite sociability, and gossip in 1920s and 1930s Britain. As anyone who has ever met him can tell you, he has also dabbled at as a critic. His reviews and essays have appeared in publications like Los Angeles Review of Books, Twentieth Century British History, the Journal of British Studies, and the European Review of History. When he isn’t drinking a martini, he is a Visiting Lecturer in History at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, NH.