Traveling, Reading

By Lisabet Sarai

I am writing this two weeks ahead of time because on the day it posts, I’ll be far away from my home and my computer. I’ll be traveling for twelve days, and I won’t be able to access the blog, even to reply to comments.

So far in advance, I’m not sure what I’ll be reading, but I know I will be reading. Indeed, reading is one of the joys of being on the road. A fourteen hour plane trip provides a lot of opportunities to lose oneself in a book—not to mention the hours waiting to board or to make connections. I may be doing an all-day train ride as well. Meanwhile, since I’ll be in a rural area at least part of the time, I expect that there will few activities in the evenings to compete with reading.

What will I bring with me? Well, my tablet, of course, stuffed with at least two dozen titles, many of them erotica. Thank heavens for e-books. They definitely lighten my luggage!

I’ll also be carrying George R.R. Martin’s A Dance with Dragons, the last (so far) volume in the Game of Thrones series. I’ve been rationing my consumption of that series, saving it for long journeys. I read the first half of this volume (five hundred plus pages) on my last international odyssey. I’ll finish it on this one, then feel frustrated, I’m sure, because just like real life, these books never tie up the loose ends.

That won’t be enough, though. After a while, I get tired of reading on a screen. I’m sure I’ll want to bring at least a few more print books, even with our limited luggage allowance (low cost airlines... argh!) But which ones?

At the moment, there are all sorts of candidates on my bookshelf. Riven Rock by T.C. Boyle. Sweet Caress by William Boyd. Books by Umberto Eco and John Crowley, Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie, not to mention half a dozen titles from Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series and (as a stark contrast) Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Lots of less well known writers, too—we have access to some excellent used book stores!

One needs to use special criteria choosing books for travel. They need to long enough to justify carrying them, but small enough not to take up too much space. I look for books that will really hook me and pull me in, to distract me from delays, backaches, hunger, bad smells, and other inevitabilities of travel. At the same time, for me at least, a travel book can’t be too intense, complex or intellectual. I’d rather read those books at home, where I have a wider selection and can put them down to pick up something else.

Anyway, I really can’t tell you in any detail what I’ll be reading as you read this. Very likely, though, I’ll be enjoying it.

What I'm About to be Reading

By Lisabet Sarai

I'm writing this on the 31st of March. Tomorrow morning, I will be embarking on a lengthy journey, from my home in Asia to the east coast of the United States. Optimistically, this means about 20 hours in the air, not to mention waiting time, transfers and so on. If all goes according to schedule, I'll arrive at my hotel in New York about 26 hours after I leave my apartment.

Lengthy plane flights aren't much fun, but living half a world away from my family and many of my friends, I've learned to endure them. One of the best ways to make the time fly (so to speak) is to lose oneself in an engrossing book. For a trip like this, I tend to prefer one long novel rather than several shorter books. I'm not likely to get bored (I'll be too exhausted), and I don't have to use up valuable carry-on luggage space with multiple volumes. The book should be something with a lot of plot, something that doesn't demand too much intellectual effort but which has enough excitement to keep me awake. (I don’t like to read ebooks on a plane. I get a headache.)

In preparation for this particular voyage, I bought a copy of A Game of Thrones, the first book in George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire saga. I don't watch TV, so this is going to be mostly new to me. Everything I've heard about the book and the series sounds promising, though. Three dimensional characters, intriguing cultures, a touch of magic, and lots of action. (Sex too, I gather...) And the novel fits my external criteria; it's nearly 800 pages long, yet not too heavy.

Fantasy—if it's well-written and original—has always been one of my favorite genres. In high school, I was totally enthralled by Tolkein's Middle Earth. I knew it inside and out. I even did my senior English thesis on that fictional world.

I note that the book I discussed during our last "what are you reading" cycle (Winter's Tale) could also be categorized as a fantasy, as would the other book I mentioned in that post, John Crowley's Little Big. And I recall that on one of my most enjoyable (well, least aversive, at least!) plane trips in recent years, I read Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay, another fat (650+ pages), juicy fantasy full of creative ideas.

I'm hopeful that The Game of Thrones will be equally good. It's actually quite rare for me to explicitly purchase a brand new paperback book. In fact, I tried to find a copy in several used bookshops, without success, though I did find some of the later volumes in the series. It occurred to me that this scarcity might indicate that readers wanted to hold on to their volumes, perhaps to read again. A good omen?

Wish me luck! I won't be back until the third week in April. I'll catch up on comments then.

Oh, and for the trip home, I have Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. A nice, meaty 900 pages!