Book Travel with a Soundtrack: Reading Lists for Every Destination
The argument that books and music belong together when you read is not a new one, but it has found an unusually hospitable home in the world of young adult literary fiction. YA has always been a genre defined by emotional intensity — by stories where feeling something deeply is the point, where the relationship between text and reader is intimate and the atmosphere of a book is as important as its plot. This intensity is one reason that reading soundtracks — playlists assembled to accompany specific books — became a natural part of YA literary community culture, especially in the book blogging years of the early 2010s when readers were actively sharing not just what they thought about books but how they experienced them.
The Travel Tales feature series begins from a more specific premise: not just what music suits a book's emotional register, but what music suits a book's place. Books set in specific locations carry geographic atmosphere alongside their plots — a novel set in Paris reads differently than one set in Chicago, and it reads differently still if the music playing while you read it amplifies rather than contradicts the sense of where you are. The destination-and-soundtrack pairing is the logical extension of the reading soundtrack idea: if music can deepen a book's emotional world, music that is native to or associated with a book's setting can deepen its physical world at the same time.
What follows is a set of pairings organized by destination. Each pairs a book set in a specific place with music drawn from or associated with that place's culture, atmosphere, or period. These are not the only possible pairings — reading is personal enough that any list of this kind is a provocation rather than a prescription — but they represent careful choices, where the music genuinely illuminates something about the setting that the text alone might leave implicit.
The pairings span YA, crossover, and adult literary fiction that young adult readers frequently encounter. Several of the books here are explicit about their musical influences or include music as a narrative element; others are pairings where the connection is atmospheric rather than thematic. The principle throughout is the same: to read a book about a place with music that comes from that place, or that captures it, is to create a reading experience with unusual density. The text and the music reinforce each other. The place becomes more real.
"To read a book about a place with music that comes from or captures that place is to create a reading experience with unusual density. The text and the music reinforce each other."
— Novel Sounds editorialParis: Anna and the French Kiss + French Pop and Jazz
Stephanie Perkins's Anna and the French Kiss (2010, Dutton) is the starting point for any YA Paris pairing because it is, in its category, the book that most fully inhabits its setting. Anna Oliphant is an American high school senior sent by her father to spend her final year at a Paris boarding school. She does not want to be there initially — Paris is not the point for her, at first — and Perkins uses that resistance as a device for slowly demonstrating why Paris is exactly the point. The novel is deeply specific about the city: its cafés, its cinema culture, its particular social geography, its light in different seasons. Anna's growing attachment to Paris runs parallel to her growing attachment to Étienne St. Clair, and Perkins is careful not to let the romance crowd out the setting.
For music, the pairing is French chanson and jazz. Serge Gainsbourg's work — particularly his collaborations with Jane Birkin, and the album Histoire de Melody Nelson (1971) — captures the sophisticated, slightly melancholy sensuality that Paris carries in its cultural image. Carla Bruni's acoustic albums, especially Quelqu'un m'a dit (2002), offer a more contemporary French tone that matches the novel's present-day setting. For jazz, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue (1959), recorded partly under French influence and beloved by French audiences, works as an ambient backdrop for the novel's quieter moments. The through-line is a kind of sophisticated emotional restraint that French music frequently embodies and that Perkins's Paris evokes alongside its romantic extravagance.
Edinburgh and Scotland: Harry Potter + Celtic Folk and Post-Rock
The Harry Potter series (J.K. Rowling, 1997–2007, Bloomsbury/Scholastic) is not set explicitly in Edinburgh — Hogwarts is a school of unspecified Scottish location — but Scotland saturates the atmosphere of the books through landscape, climate, and the particular Gothic quality of its castle architecture. The films reinforced this association, shooting extensively at Alnwick Castle in Northumberland and Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands. Reading the novels, particularly Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and the later, darker installments, with Celtic folk music playing is to access something the text carries but does not always name.
Capercaillie, the Scottish folk group who have been recording since the 1980s, bring Gaelic language and traditional instrumentation to music that feels simultaneously ancient and completely alive. Their album Delirium (1991) is a good starting point. For a more electronic approach, Boards of Canada — the Scottish electronic duo whose albums Music Has the Right to Children (1998) and Geogaddi (2002) are saturated with nostalgia, pastoral imagery, and a dreamy unease — pair remarkably well with the atmosphere of the earlier Harry Potter novels, where wonder and threat coexist in equal measure. The duo's Scottish identity and their preoccupation with childhood memory make the connection deeper than coincidence.
Frightened Rabbit, the Scottish indie rock band whose albums The Midnight Organ Fight (2008) and The Winter of Mixed Drinks (2010) are among the most emotionally raw recordings of their decade, suit the later Harry Potter novels — the ones where grief, loss, and the cost of the war become the dominant register. The band's music is specifically Scottish in its imagery and its restraint-then-release emotional structure, and it matches the tonal shift of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and beyond.
Chicago: Eleanor and Park + 80s Midwest Indie
Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park (2013, St. Martin's Press) is set in Omaha, Nebraska in 1986, not Chicago, but it belongs in the Midwest pairing because its cultural and musical landscape is Chicago-adjacent in the most important sense: it draws on the same pool of 80s indie rock that Chicago's independent music scene was central to transmitting to the rest of America. Eleanor and Park meet on a school bus, bonding over comics and mixtapes, and the music they share — The Smiths, Joy Division, The Replacements, XTC, The Cure — becomes the vocabulary of their relationship.
Rowell is explicit about this. The Smiths function almost as a third character in the novel. Morrissey's lyrics, particularly the way they articulate teenage alienation and longing with theatrical precision, mirror Eleanor's interior experience of being an outsider in ways she cannot directly express. The Queen Is Dead (1986) and Hatful of Hollow (1984) are the most relevant Smiths albums for the novel's period and mood. The Replacements' Let It Be (1984) captures the rawer, more self-destructive edge of Park's world — a boy who fits in better than Eleanor but feels the pull of something outside the social order he inhabits. Reading Eleanor and Park with these albums is as close as a reading experience can come to hearing the book's native language.
New York City: Every Day + The National
David Levithan's Every Day (2012, Knopf) has a protagonist who wakes up in a different body every morning, and while this makes geographic anchoring complex, the novel's emotional landscape is the emotional landscape of New York literary culture: introspective, urban, attentive to transience and connection. Levithan's fiction generally is associated with the emotional density of young adult life in cities, and New York is the city that most informs his fictional world even when not explicitly named.
The National — a Brooklyn-based band whose albums Boxer (2007) and High Violet (2010) are among the defining records of New York literary sensibility in that decade — are the natural pairing. The National's music is slow, intelligent, adult in its emotional complexity but deeply accessible in its melancholy. Matt Berninger's baritone and the band's layered, string-accented arrangements create an atmosphere of beautiful sadness that matches Every Day's meditation on what it means to love someone across the boundaries of identity and time. TV on the Radio's Dear Science (2008), recorded in Brooklyn, offers a more kinetic New York — fractured, energetic, politically aware — that suits the novel's more urgent passages.
Ravka (Russia): Shadow and Bone + Shostakovich and Sigur Rós
Leigh Bardugo's Shadow and Bone (2012, Henry Holt) is set in Ravka, a fictional nation built on the architecture of Tsarist Russia. The Fold — a strip of permanent darkness that bisects the country — functions as a geographical expression of Russia's historical weight, its sense of something vast and dark at the center of the national experience. Reading the Grisha trilogy with Russian classical music is to hear the cultural DNA that Bardugo was drawing on, even through the filter of fantasy.
Dmitri Shostakovich's string quartets — particularly the Eighth, written in Dresden in 1960 and associated with the weight of catastrophic history — bring the darkness of the Grishaverse's political atmosphere into sharp relief. Shostakovich's ability to hold grief and dark irony simultaneously is a quality the Grisha trilogy shares. For the more sweeping, landscape-oriented passages — the Fold crossing, the vast terrain of Ravka — Sigur Rós, the Icelandic post-rock band whose albums Ágætis byrjun (1999) and ( ) (2002) are built from glacial guitar and orchestral texture, provide an atmosphere of immensity that matches what Bardugo builds in the world-building sections of the trilogy.
Japan: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki + Jazz and Liszt
Haruki Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013, English translation by Philip Gabriel, 2014, Knopf) is set primarily in contemporary Tokyo. Tsukuru is a railway engineer who designs train stations — an occupation Murakami chose with precision for its implications about connection, transit, and the architecture of passage. The novel's central mystery involves a group of five friends from high school and the circumstances under which four of them cut Tsukuru off without explanation. The investigation into that past takes Tsukuru to Finland as well as across Tokyo, and the emotional movement of the book is toward a reckoning with identity, memory, and the possibility of genuine connection.
Murakami builds music into the novel's structure explicitly. Franz Liszt's piano piece Le mal du pays, from the Années de pèlerinage(Years of Pilgrimage) suite, is central to the story — it is what gives the novel its title, and its character in the novel (played by a woman named Shiro, whose nickname comes from the piece's associations) links the music to the themes of loss and longing. Reading with a recording of the Années de pèlerinage suite — Lazar Berman's recording or Murray Perahia's are both considered excellent — creates an exceptionally close alignment between reading experience and textual content. For a broader Tokyo ambient companion, Bill Evans's Waltz for Debby (1962), or any of the classic Blue Note jazz recordings that populate Murakami's fiction generally, supply the meditative, late-night atmosphere that his Tokyo consistently evokes.
Russia / Eastern Europe: The Raven Cycle + Appalachian Folk and Drone
Maggie Stiefvater's The Raven Cycle (beginning with The Raven Boys, 2012, Scholastic) is set in fictional Henrietta, Virginia, but its mythology reaches into Welsh legend — the sleeping king Owain Glyndŵr buried on a ley line — and its atmospheric texture is one of the most distinctive in contemporary YA. The series pairs well with music that is simultaneously rootsy and haunted: Appalachian folk, drone, and the kind of slow-burn instrumentation that suggests old magic in American soil.
Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator) (2001) brings Appalachian gravity and a sense of historical depth that suits the ley-line mythology of Stiefvater's setting. For the more supernatural and ominous passages — the forest sequences, the dream sequences, the chapters where the boundaries between living and dead become permeable — Grouper's drone-folk work, particularly Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (2008), creates an atmosphere of beautiful unease that closely matches the series' tonal range.
The Reading Soundtrack Principle
All of these pairings rest on a single principle: music that is native to or deeply associated with a book's setting does not merely decorate the reading experience. It completes it. A novel about Paris carries Paris within its prose, but prose is language, and language requires interpretation. Music that belongs to Paris carries Paris in a pre-interpretive form — in rhythm, in timbre, in the specific emotional frequencies that French chanson or French jazz have encoded through decades of use. When these two kinds of representation operate simultaneously, the reader is receiving information about place from two different sensory channels at once, and the combined effect is of greater density and specificity than either could achieve alone.
This is not to say that all reading should happen with music, or that any particular pairing is the only valid one. Reading is personal enough that prescriptions are almost always wrong. But the Travel Tales series rests on the observation that for readers who do listen while they read, the choice of what to listen to matters — that a thoughtful pairing can make a book feel more fully inhabited, more physically present, more like being in the place where the story is set rather than merely reading about it. The destinations on this list are starting points. The principle extends to any book with a strong sense of place and any music that captures that place honestly.
Frequently Asked Questions
A reading soundtrack is a curated playlist of music chosen to accompany the reading of a specific book. The music is selected to complement the book's setting, emotional register, period, or atmosphere. Reading soundtracks have become a significant part of YA literary community culture, with readers assembling and sharing playlists alongside reviews and recommendations. Some authors release official playlists for their novels.
Anna and the French Kiss (2010, Dutton) by Stephanie Perkins is set in Paris, where American teenager Anna Oliphant is sent by her father to spend her senior year at a Paris boarding school. The novel is notable for using the city's geography, culture, and atmosphere as active elements of its romantic storyline rather than mere backdrop. It is one of the most destination-specific YA novels set in Paris.
Eleanor and Park (2013) by Rainbow Rowell is set in 1986 Omaha and is explicit about its musical landscape. The novel references The Smiths, Joy Division, and mixtape culture throughout. A reading soundtrack built around The Smiths (The Queen Is Dead, Hatful of Hollow), The Replacements (Let It Be), and early New Order captures both the period and the emotional register of the novel's romance.
Shadow and Bone is set in Ravka, a nation modeled on Tsarist Russia. Shostakovich's string quartets — particularly the Eighth — bring the weight and dark irony of Russian historical atmosphere to the reading experience. For broader landscape passages, Sigur Rós's glacial post-rock (Ágætis byrjun, ( )) creates the sense of vast, cold terrain that Bardugo's Ravka evokes in its world-building sections.
Travel Tales is a recurring feature series on Novel Sounds that pairs books set in specific real-world locations with music native to or associated with those places. Each installment builds reading lists organized by destination, exploring how musical atmosphere reinforces the geographic and emotional world of place-specific fiction.
Research suggests that instrumental music — lacking competing verbal content — is less likely to interfere with reading comprehension than music with prominent lyrics. Many readers find that music matching a book's emotional tone or setting helps maintain immersion. The effect varies significantly between individuals; some readers find any music distracting while others report that a well-chosen soundtrack deepens their engagement with the text's world.
Haruki Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013, English translation 2014) is set in Tokyo and uses classical music as a structural element — Liszt's Le mal du pays is central to the novel's identity. Murakami's work generally is grounded in a specific, atmospheric Tokyo that rewards readers interested in literary destination fiction. The novel is accessible to older YA readers and adult readers who encountered Murakami through BookTok or reading-list recommendations.
Destination reading is the practice of choosing books based on where they are set — reading fiction about a place before visiting it, while there, or as a form of armchair travel. The practice treats setting as the primary selection criterion rather than genre, author, or narrative type. Travel Tales builds on this by adding music as a third element: books, places, and the music that connects them.
The National are Brooklyn-based and their albums Boxer (2007) and High Violet (2010) are strongly associated with New York literary sensibility — introspective, melancholy, attentive to urban transience. David Levithan's fiction, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2006, co-written with Rachel Cohn), and contemporary YA novels with an introspective New York emotional texture all pair naturally with the band's sound.
Several books address the intersection of reading and travel directly. Elif Batuman's The Idiot (2017) and its sequel Either/Or (2022) follow a reader discovering world literature alongside real-world travel. Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer (2006) discusses how setting functions in fiction and how readers absorb geographic atmosphere from prose. Within YA, Stephanie Perkins's Anything Could Happen and her whole companion series — Lola and the Boy Next Door (San Francisco), Isla and the Happily Ever After (Paris/New York) — form a destination-reading collection of their own.