BOOKPATHS

St. Petersburg, Russia

Rachel Polonsky, winner of the 2011 Dolman Travel Book of the Year, "remembers living through the final Soviet winter of 1990 in St. Petersburg -- then Leningrad -- and feeling the world turn upside down."

The bride was English, a former student of mine, but she posed for photographs like an archetypal Petersburg beauty at the foot of the Bronze Horseman, Falconet's statue of Peter the Great. It was the midsummer season of white nights, when the sun never fully sets, and we stayed at the wedding party till morning, wandering along the Moika embankment for breakfast at the Hotel Angleterre.

It was all so different from when my husband Marc and I had lived here 15 years before....

Rome, Italy

City-Lit series editor Malcolm Burgess "selects his favourite reads about the eternal city, from I, Claudius to the Rome of Fellini and beyond."

Paris, France

Writer Penelope Rowlands chose "three Bastille Day reads," books that pull readers into the "bloody" July 13, 1793, "uprising."

While the following three books are based on research into this bloody uprising, they're also feel-good volumes, in a way. For each one will vividly remind you how lucky you are to be alive and reading — and with your head still attached.

Missoula, Montana

Rick Bass explains why he lives in Missoula, Montana.

More than any city or town I’ve known, Missoula balances out-of-door attractions and the arts. Missoula has hundreds, maybe thousands, of artists and writers, in part—but by no means exclusively—because of the university. It’s got a great library and great bookstores: Fact & Fiction, Shakespeare & Co., the Book Exchange, to name but a few. There’s a symphony, a children’s theater and numerous art galleries. And yet there’s healthy dirt between the cracks. The nightly river-rushing winds of Hellgate Canyon keep most things scoured clean.

Europe

Esi Edugyan chooses her "top 10 tales of Americans in Europe."

Rochefort, France

Elaine Scolino visits the home where Pierre Loti, "novelist, naval officer, scuba diver, world traveler journal writer, art collector, amateur bodybuilder, and acrobat, "was born and lived on and off for most of his life."

On an unremarkable street in the unremarkable town, the Loti house museum — two attached bourgeois houses, really — is an alternate world where wildly divergent cultures and epochs are thrown together. Loti was an eccentric of his era, and would be considered eccentric even today. He collected sperm whale teeth, Senegalese bracelets, Egyptian cat mummies, Japanese mobiles, and even bought the house next door for his overflow of objects. He posed nude except for a small genital covering to disprove rumors that his sculptured, small-waisted body was corseted. His house is the gateway to this world, with rooms that unfold as if each were a layer of his personality.

California

Inspired by a list compiled by the Los Angeles' Zamorano Club in 1945, Stephen K. Tollefson chooses his "own non-definitive list of 'sort of lost novels about California.'"

These are not books just set in California -- California is a character in each.  And for the most part, they delve into history rather than our present, although I think our past tells us a great deal about where we are today.

For the Zamarono 80 list, visit http://www.zamoranoclubla.org/zam80/.