One of the most exciting things, for me, about traveling to foreign cities, is tracking down literary landscapes. When I was in London three years ago, I made our entire group visit Bloomsbury, and we even had a pint in the same pub where Virginia Woolf was said to have frequented when she was in the city. When in Paris two years ago, I spent an entire afternoon tracking down literary monuments and made a point of paying close attention to the splendor of the Maison de Victor Hugo in the gorgeous place des Vosges. It's a plain fact that I actually plan vacations around literary places: when visiting Cuba this past December, we paid an exorbitant amount of money to go and see Hemingway's house – it was the highlight of our trip.

Yes, the irresistible urge to explore the literary landscape generally only hits when I've stepped off a plane and am no longer in my home time zone. For the most part, I think many people need to treat their own city, in this case, Toronto, like a tourist. And this got me thinking: does Toronto really have literary monuments of its own? While you're thinking about that, here are a number of books that have turned to this city for their literary landscape.

While I would hate to argue that no singular Toronto writer embodies the city in the way that Mordecai Richler made Montreal, it's important that many novelists have walked these streets, settled their characters in our neighbourhoods, and created fictional worlds that could exist between the boundaries of the 400-set of highways. Here are some of the books that, for me, represent the best of the T Dot as Lit Landscape.

Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood is my favourite of her novels; the present parts of the novel are set in Vancouver where artist Elaine lives and works. When a special retrospective of her work brings her back to the city of her youth, we see Toronto through the eyes of Elaine growing up. She works near the ROM; she travels on the newly built subway; and she explores her own burgeoning artistic personality in Yorkville during the 1960s—it's a much a book about Elaine growing up as it is about the city itself growing up after the shock and awe of the Second World War.

Where Cat's Eye gives you a bird-eye view of the city from an insider's point of view, from someone who, despite how different she is from her girlhood friends, Elaine grew up both in Toronto and in Canada, Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion inverts the idea. The novel tells the story primarily of the birth of the city as it looked to its immigrants: the people who literary put the filled the cracks and crevices of the bricks and mortar that built Toronto. Set in the 1920s, the central story of the book revolves around the men who built the Bloor Viaduct (officially called Prince Edward Viaduct System). It's impossible for me to drive over the viaduct, to watch the suicide railings, and not think of this book as Ondaatje's glorious homage to his home.

I also love that some younger writers have made an effort to capture the spirit and feeling of Toronto with their first novels. Both Howard Akler's City of Toronto Book Award-nominated The City Man and New Face of Fiction author Steven Hayward's The Secret Mitzvah of Lucio Burke, eat, sleep, breath, drink, fight and love the city in 1933-34. The riots in Christie Pitts, labour protests at College and Spadina, a fur shop in the garment district, and all of a sudden it's apparent that those places and neighbourhoods were alive well before Sneaky Dee's became a local legend.

There is Noah Richler's brilliant This Is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada which is filled with bits of inspiration and finally, there's one book that caught my own particular attention: Russell Smith's Muriella Pent, set in the Wynchwood Park area of the city, a location rich with the possibilities of the satire found between its covers.

At once it's almost impossible to imagine a city with a rich and varied history while logged on a TTC streetcar diverted because of construction, packed to the gills, patiently making your way to work in the morning. But that's okay, because with a little bit of research, I'm sure you can track down a novel set in Toronto to keep you company on your way this month.

If you're hellbent on heading out for literary events this month, here are a few that would be silly to miss:

On Tuesday, April 10th at 7:30pm, This is Not a Reading Series launches Alissa York's intriguing new novel Effigy. Elizabeth Ruth will be doing an on stage interview with the author and it all gets hopping at the Gladstone Hotel.

If you're feeling particularly energetic, you can head out the next night as Phil LaMarche reads from his poignant and prescient new novel American Youth at the Harbourfront on April 11th at 7:30 PM.

Lastly, April is poetry month in Canada so pick up a copy of Taddle Creek anywhere you can find one, sit down on a park bench on your lunch hour, and read some solid Torontonian poetry.

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