Hot Picks for Your Next Hotel Stay

Sometimes just staying in a nice hotel can be a vacation in and of itself – no cooking, no cleaning, no household projects hanging over your head. My husband and I recently took a few nights at a hotel and read books by the pool, ate food cooked by someone else, drank champagne, and played board games and Gin Rummy. We also like to go as a family and with family friends to Hyatt Lost Pines Resort (outside of Austin) where they have a lazy river, a nice pool, tons of children’s activities, and wide-open spaces to lounge or run and play. This post is dedicated to those lazy vacations where you don’t see much beyond the hotel.

If you are in the market for something light and beachy, something you can fall asleep reading by the pool and maybe even lose your place in without it mattering too terribly much, I suggest these three breezy novels:

Beautiful Ruins by Jess Walter begins in a postage stamp sized coastal village in Italy where a young hotel proprietor dreams of attracting glamorous American tourists with an ill-conceived tennis court and a crumbling hotel. One day a beautiful American actress happens on the hotel, and the proprietor's life is forever changed. This early portion of the book, set in Italy in 1962, reminded me of an old, remastered movie of the sort I used to watch with my mom over Christmas holidays. Perhaps a young Grace Kelly would play the young starlet, but Princess Grace was probably always too sophisticated (but not too beautiful) for such a part. The actress and the proprietor are together for only a few short days, and they share a strong attraction that is never discussed or consummated (which, of course, it wouldn't have been in an old movie). They diverge down separate paths, living wildly different lives, but they never forget each other. The story picks back up 50 years later when they finally meet again in the United States. There are many other characters who Walter weaves into this story, all of whom are unique and compelling. This was a fun, enjoyable read, something you might throw in your carryon or rip into on the beach, a cool drink, and a shady umbrella both close at hand. My book club agreed, this was a winner, and we all liked how Walter did a short "where are they now" profile of all of the characters at the end of the book, so we weren't left to wonder what becomes of each of them after the last page was turned. I gave this book four stars on Goodreads.
 

The Hotel Nantucket by Elin Hilderbrand has a little romance, a little mystery, and a cast of quirky characters. This is 100% fluff. Lizbet Keaton (a Nantucket resident who managed the coolest restaurant on the island but who has no hotel experience) is hired by Xavier Darling (an eccentric billionaire) to overhaul the dilapidated Hotel Nantucket. Xavier’s goal is to win the highest hotel rating from an anonymous blogger in one summer and to impress a mystery woman. Lizbet just wants to prove herself and to forge a new life after a humiliating breakup. The staff is a little green, and the hotel is having trouble filling its rooms. Oh, and the hotel is haunted by a chambermaid who died in the hotel in 1922. I will say that the details about the hotel renovations had me scrutinizing wall colors and various amenities at the hotel we were staying in while I was reading this book on a recent trip. This was a fun, mindless beach read, and I gave it four stars on Goodreads.  

People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry is another solid fluff book for any upcoming beach vacations. This is the story of two best friends (Alex and Poppy) who have nothing in common. They live far apart. She’s in New York City, and he’s back home in their small hometown, but each summer for 10 years they take a week-long vacation together. Until they don’t. Now Poppy has one week to fix her relationship with her best friend. You can probably guess why they stopped traveling together and what happens at the end, but that doesn’t make this any less fun. This isn’t really about one single hotel, but we do go with Poppy and Alex on their various adventures, sometimes sleeping somewhere on a shoestring and later living it up on an expense account, so I thought this qualified for this blog topic. I gave this book four stars on Goodreads for silly, mindless fun.     

If mysteries or thrillers are more your speed on vacation, order some room service and curl up under the covers with one of these thrillers/horror stories:

At Bertram’s Hotel by Agatha Christie is set in a boutique hotel in London. Afternoons are spent in the lobby having tea, and the guests always seem to be someone important or proximate to someone important. I love pretty much everything Agatha Christie wrote, and this is no exception, though I could have used a tad bit more Ms. Marple. There's a missing clergyman, an accidental shooting, a race car driver, and lots of elderly and very respectable ladies and gentlemen having afternoon tea. Ms. Marple is on vacation at the hotel and pairs up with a detective at Scotland Yard to solve the case. I gave this a solid three-star rating on Goodreads. I normally only recommend books that I gave a four or a five-star rating, but I thought this was good enough to include here.  

The Shining by Stephen King is a must read, and while I recommended it in another post (Compasses & Bookmarks: What to Read on Your Next Camping Adventure (welltraveledwellread.blogspot.com)) because it’s a great ghost story, I decided I couldn’t write a blog about hotels without including this book. First, let me say that if you are reluctant to read this because you have already seen the movie, don't be. This is different. Sure, you still have the whole Red Rum thing, the creepy hotel, the topiary maze, and the same characters. And there's absolutely no way to picture Jack as anyone other than Jack Nicholson. The bones are the same, but the telling is so different, and gosh does Stephen King know how to tell a story. The movie (which I haven't seen in 20+ years) was absolutely terrifying and is without a doubt one of the scariest movies I have ever seen (and my husband has made me watch a lot of them). The book is much more psychological thriller than horror and focuses more on what is happening inside all of the characters’ heads, and of course, inside the Overland Hotel. This is a solid five-star book.  

The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James is one part mystery and one part ghost story. The book alternates perspectives between two young women working the night shift at the haunted Sun Down Motel in middle of nowhere, Fell, New York. Viv Delaney runs away from home and winds up in Fell with very little money and no connections. While checking into the Sun Down for a night, she gets hired by the owner to be the night clerk in exchange for a free stay. It doesn’t take long for Viv to learn that something is horribly wrong at the Sun Down, and for such a small town, Fell seems to have a lot of dead girls. Thirty-five years later, Viv’s niece, Carly Kirk, comes to Fell to try to find out what happened to her aunt who disappeared from the Sun Down without a trace years before. Now Carly is working at the Sun Down and researching the town’s history. I gave this book a four-star rating on Goodreads.     

If you want something a little weightier than the books above, I recommend the following two choices:

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is the story of Count Alexander Rostov who has been sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol Hotel by a Bolshevik tribunal. The Metropol is an elegant hotel across the street from the Kremlin, and the Count is one of those terrific, larger than life characters – witty, smart, and engaging. A member of the aristocracy, he has never worked a day in his life, and he now must watch from the windows of his attic room as Russia changes and morphs following his confinement in 1922. Despite of (or perhaps because of) his confinement, the Count is forced into a period of emotional awakening and self-discovery. The novel is set almost exclusively within the hotel, but there is an engaging and charming cast of characters who come to the hotel and interact with the Count throughout the novel. I gave this book a rare five-star rating on Goodreads.  

A Room with a View by E.M. Forster is a period novel exploring upper-class English societal “norms” and the social, sexual and class restraints for women in the early 1900s. Lucy Honeychurch knows exactly what life has in store for her until she visits Florence and awakens to the possibilities of a different life when she meets people outside of her own class and living outside of conventional social strictures at the Pension Bertolini. Lucy falls in love, and she must ultimately choose between marrying a wealthy man who she will never love or a man of a lower class and few financial advantages with whom she knows she will be happy. This is a short little novel, and central to this book is the idea that travel can change the way we see the world. How true! I gave this classic novel four stars on Goodreads.

Happy travels and happy reading!