Welcome aboard.

There’s a particular feeling that arrives somewhere between a train platform and the final page of a book.

This blog lives there.

Backpacks and Backlists is a literary travel journal about cities, bookstores, transit routes, reading life, and the quiet emotional texture of moving through unfamiliar places. It’s for the people who travel with a book in their bag, who notice the atmosphere of train stations, who walk into bookstores before museums, and who remember places through what they were reading there.

I started this space because I realised most of my favourite travel memories were tied to the books in some way. The novel carried through an airport at midnight. The bookstore stumbled across during a rainstorm. The notebook pages filled on long train rides. The feeling of becoming slightly different versions of ourselves in unfamiliar places — a little like Jo March chasing a bigger world beyond home, Anne Shirley romanticising every landscape she sees, or Scout Finch quietly observing everything around her.

I’ve always travelled slowly. I like wandering cities without too much of a plan, spending too long in bookstores and cafes, collecting small details instead of rushing between landmarks. A lot of this blog lives in those quieter moments; early morning trains, hotel room reflections, secondhand bookshops, conversations overheard in transit, and the comfort of carrying familiar books through unfamiliar places.

Here you’ll find reflective travel essays, bookstore visits, literary city guides, reading lists inspired by place, and observations gather somewhere between arrivals and departures.

This isn’t a place for seeing everything. It’s a place for noticing things.

For readers, travellers, collectors of notebooks, and anyone who has ever felt more at home in a bookstore than a tourist attraction.