I don’t have anything I’d call a hometown, so I don’t have much choice in the matter. I also feel like a foreigner in my home country.
It’s in the blood… One of my grandfathers re-immigrated back from Canada and the other got married in Iraq. My parents met on a Shell camp in Borneo. I spent seven years at an international school in Switzerland, and two and a half in Singapore.
I could always rebel against them by settling down with a nice house out in the suburbs.
Imaginatively, the books are innumerable.
Practically, A History of Art my high school art history text book. I bookmarked several galleries and cathedrals (Hagia Sophia, St Peter’s Rome, St Mark’s Venice, Acropolis, Palace of Knossos) and did my first major trip to see those.
Yes, I did, too. But it wasn’t until after I’d read “The Razor’s Edge” that I knew I HAD to. Just had to. That I could not stay stuck in that place, and it would have been so easy to do that. The path of least resistance and all that.
As usual, I have a list. Most of the books I read, until about 6th or 7th grade, gave me a feeling of “Oh, that could never happen to me.” In 7th grade, I read a YA novel called In Summertime It’s Tuffy, about a group of girls that always managed to go to summer camp together every year. That was when I realized, “Girls my age get to go away for weeks at a time, without their parents! OMG!” Thus began my (ultimately unsuccessful) campaign to go to sleepaway camp.
My 8th grade English teacher lent me her Hitchhiker’s books, up to So Long, And Thanks For All the Fish, for which I will be forever grateful.
My senior year of high school, I stumbled across a copy of Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner, in which she recounts a trip she took with a friend from college. It was a very evocative portrait of Paris in the 1920s. Ever since then, I have wanted to visit Paris. The closest I’ve gotten was viewing the faux Eiffel Tower at Paris Las Vegas from across the Strip. (Also the closest I’ve been to Venice, Rome and Egypt). 
For someone who has read so much about other places and cultures, I’ve traveled surprisingly little. Since coming to the U.S., the only other places I’ve been to have been Baja California, Las Vegas and parts of Georgia (including Atlanta and Gwinnett County, home of the “Runaway Bride”.) Someday, though, I’m going to Paris if it’s the last thing I do.
I have to second The Phantom Tollbooth, and the elucidation you provided. I agree wholeheartedly.
I read Kerouac’s On the Road shortly before driving across the country. The description didn’t match what I actually saw, unfortunately.
I’m one of the few people who have been to France but never to Paris. Way back in my hitchhiking days, a truck driver traveling from England picked me up on the outsirts of Brussels and drove me to Switzerland. We passed through Luxembourg and the northeastern corner of France – I remember we drove through Nancy – and into Switzerland at Basel, where he dropped me off. Never made it back to France.
When I was in grade school, I read a book that featured a description of the Blue Grotto and knew I had to go to Capri and see the Grotto (I have, and it is gorgeous).
In grade five, I did a geography project on Hawaii, and after reading all about it, I had to go. I saved up $5000. when I started working with the aim of going to Hawaii once I had that much in the bank - and I did. It was beyond my imagining and my second visit ten years ago was even better.
I always knew I’d travel even though nobody else in my family did until my dad when he retired. I’ve been to Europe twice and the US a bunch of times but still have much of the world to see.
Have you ever heard of Brian Leiter? In Nietzsche on Morality, he argues that Nietzsche should be understood as supporting a strictly scientific realist worldview, as opposed to the post-modernist reading which views him as an early proponent of cognitive relativism. I don’t completely agree with Leiter, but it does seem much more plausible to me than the post-modern interpretation. Also, The Will to Power isn’t so much a book, as it is a dubious arrangement of fragments from Nietzsche’s late notebooks sewed together by his anti-Semitic sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
As to the topic at hand, it would have to be Ludwig Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. It single-handedly kindled my interest in philosophy and so shaped much of my life afterwards.
It’s true that it was published posthumously by Nietzsche’s evil sister, but there are many ideas in The Will to Power that aren’t by any means revolutionary coming from Nietzsche. I don’t recall reading anything in there that particularly surprised me, as he briefly mentioned the Will to Power in another work (Twilight of the Idols? I can’t remember the book, but it was one among his later works) The basic [albeit yet unnamed] concept of The Will to Power appeared in his first work, The Birth of Tragedy and seems a stone’s throw from the idea of power through Dionysus. My copy (the Kaufman translation) has footnotes that point out specifically which ideas are most likely to be taken out of context and which ideas have shown up in past works. (though I totally see the fascist element his sister was trying to draw out: I’m pretty sure ‘‘if your brother is falling, give him a kick’’ came from WTP, and Nietzsche was hardly a fascist.) I would be most curious to see the work with its missing 1,500 pages.
That sounds like a very interesting read. Thanks for the recommendation! 
I want my flying car, dammit. Or a flying carpet. Or 16 vestal virgins, or groing up in Jupiter Jones’ Salvage Yard, or a Magic Lamp with a Genie (preferably not as talkative as Robin Williams, and one who accepts “three more wishes” as the final wish), or any kind of adventure or mystery that didn’t involve growing up in dreary suburbia in the 60’s and 70’s. Nothing *exciting * happened there - it happened everywhere else.
What cured me of this was **Heinlein’s ** Glory Road, which I read when I was 13, mostly because the cover featured a drawing a a topless Star, with perfect, bouncy breasts. After reading that, everything changed. Since my local library and bookstore didn’t have a lot of SciFi translated to Swedish, I soon had to start reading in English, something my English classes (since 3rd grade) hadn’t prepared me for. So with a dictionary in one hand and the omnibus The Future Through Tomorrow in the other, I learned English. That command of a 2nd language would serve me well a decade later, when as an exchagne student I landed an internship at a very big radiostation, which in turn got me a job when I got back home.
RAH brought me up.