My memories of places I’ve visited are often infused with the books I read while there. I remember reading Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness during the 1990s in Utah’s Arches National Park, where Abbey worked as a ranger. Published in 1968, Desert Solitaire sings the praises of Arches and its beautiful sandstone formations; the author also writes that humans are having a negative impact on the park. It struck me that I was one of those humans, and, ironically, I was there thanks largely to his book, which helped popularize the region.

So many of my experiences away from home have been enriched by books about my destinations. Decades ago, in northern Michigan, I read Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories, set around Walloon Lake, one town over from where I spent several childhood summers. Before living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I got to know some of its history through Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In his hoot of a novel, The Sellout, Paul Beatty showed me a part of Los Angeles that seemed very real—even though, in the book, his fictional community of Dickens is wiped off the map. In France, Annie Ernaux’s work opened my eyes to the interior lives of women, much as Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge did during my travels in Maine. Not everything clicked: In Norway, I tried to inhabit the morose universe of Karl Ove Knausgaard; I preferred reading the landscape.

This summer, I’m going to broaden my horizons by vacationing a lot in my mind. Some places are best visited only on the page—they’re perilous, but they’re still thrilling to read about. One of them is the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where a British couple finds themselves stranded in Sophie Elmhirst’s A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck (Riverhead, July 8). Our reviewer calls the book “a tale of an adventure gone definitively wrong…a nimbly told story that should serve as a caution—but oddly, too, as inspiration—to would-be escapists.” (Read our recent interview with Elmhirst.)

Another aquatic escape is Matthew Gavin Frank’s Submersed: Wonder, Obsession, and Murder in the World of Amateur Submarines (Pantheon, July 3). Frank is afraid of the ocean, but that doesn’t stop him from diving into the water to learn about the murky world of DIY submarines. And yes, it’s also a murder story. Our review says the book is a “a fascinating voyage among the hidden tides shaping a social niche.”

Can’t afford a vacation to the French Alps? Cédric Sapin-Defour’s forthcoming book can take you there in his soulful account of bonding with a puppy: Ubac and Me: A Life of Love and Adventure With a French Mountain Dog, translated by Adriana Hunter (S&S/Summit Books, July 15).

And there are those who’d rather stay out of the sun altogether. In Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource (Random House, July 22), environmental journalist Sam Bloch writes about how ill equipped much of the U.S. is in providing the titular shelter. Time to head out of the country in search of a parasoled terrace?

John McMurtrie is the nonfiction editor.