On the experience of reading a book about a place you've never been: the book becomes the place, in a way that is both accurate and inaccurate. You've constructed an image of the place from the book and that image persists — sometimes it persists even after you visit the actual place.

I read Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia before going to Patagonia and found, when I arrived, that I was looking for the Chatwin version of the landscape. The real place was both more and less than the book. The book had been more vivid, more organized, more full of meaning. The actual landscape was more random and more present.

I read Chatwin in Patagonia on the second trip, having learned not to let the book precede the place. It was a better reading and a better visit.