Concord ranks high as literary destination

Forget Paris. The city of light - and the haunt of Hugo and Left Bank literati - is eclipsed by Concord and the Walden Pond crowd when it comes to top literary vacation destinations.

So decrees TripAdvisor, a travel community operated out of Newton.

In ranking the top 10 literary destinations, Concord, which is also beloved as the zip code where Louisa May Alcott penned "Little Women," placed sixth, and Paris was seventh, TripAdvisor said.

London, a venue for novels and poems by such greats as Dickens and Keats, was tops on the list. Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon was second. And thanks to Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter, Edinburgh placed third, TripAdvisor said.

Dublin is a swell place for devotees of double-meaning books, and lovers of Kerouac and the Beat Generation can't go wrong in New York and San Francisco, the list suggests.

Dickens, incidentally, was a great believer in travel - and the importance of getting out of the house.

"Sometimes," he once observed, "it is better to be found out than found at home."
(By Chris Reidy, Globe staff)