The False Door

The concept. Travel books get written for the average of everyone who might go, and no real person sits at that average. So for a recent trip to Sardinia I built my own, aimed at one reader. That is the whole idea: decide where you are going and what you want to see there, then build the book that weaves it together into your own travel guide.

How it was built. What I care about is megalithic stonework, Bronze Age ruins and medieval castles, so the itinerary came out of that first. I then gave Claude the resulting list of sites, sacred wells, Nuragic towers, giants’ tombs, and asked for a book that fits every one of them into the many thousands of years of Sardinian history. I also gave Claude the ancient sites I had already visited elsewhere in the world and asked it to cross-reference whatever lined up with what I was about to see.

What is inside. Something tailored so closely to my own taste and my own travel that it is on this site as an example rather than as a book anyone else is being asked to read.

People almost never re-read a travel book once the trip is over. I re-read several chapters of this one after I got back, because by then I had stood in front of the sites and the pages meant something they could not have meant before. That is the test worth building for: a book about your trip that you will want to read again after it.