How Books Can Gently Challenge What We Think We Know About a Place

It’s easy to arrive somewhere with a suitcase full of assumptions—formed by headlines, hearsay, or even past trips. But literature gives us another lens: slower, more personal, often more surprising.

Reading before we travel doesn’t just build excitement. It builds empathy. It helps us see the layers we might otherwise miss.

📖 Read Breasts and Eggs before visiting Tokyo, and the city becomes more than neon and temples—it becomes a place where women navigate identity, class, and quiet resistance.
📖 Read Having Said Goodnight before heading to Malta, and you’ll find not just sun and stone, but small, strange, tender stories that rarely make it into tourist brochures.
📖 Read The Blue Flower before visiting Germany, and you might find that the roots of romanticism run deeper than beer gardens and Bauhaus.

Books won’t give you the full picture. But they’ll challenge the flat ones.

That’s why Passport to Literature exists. To offer not just a guide, but a reading list to help you arrive somewhere curious, not certain.