There are few things I hate in the world as much as packing. Crying babies on long flights and the internet inexplicably going down come about the closest.
I am an avid traveler and a rabid reader, two things that are made obvious by the very existence of this blog. With all my experience jetsetting around the globe, flying back and forth between Philadelphia and Michigan to attend graduate school and then return home to family, and attending dozens of conferences and conventions, you’d think I’d have figured out how to pack by now. In particular, as a graduate student in literature – which means I constantly have to be reading, even as I constantly have to be on the go, attending conferences, conventions, and talks – you’d really think I’d have the whole packing books thing down, or switched to some digital medium.
You’d be wrong.
This is the books I packed for my recent four-week trip to Belarus and Russia:
The books I actually read? The Storytelling Animal and part of The Three Body Problem. That is, not even two of the ten books I packed.
Packing books is a complicated thing for me: I can’t sleep on airplanes, and I’m terrified by the idea of wasting time or getting stuck somewhere with a book to read. In fact, I can’t even leave the house without a book. Naturally, that means I overpack, because there was that one time in Kyrgyzstan I finished all ten books I brought and the nightmares of that time still haunt me. On the other hand, when I’m travelling, I’m usually photographing, writing, soaking in impressions, exploring, catching up with people, using Delta’s excellent new in-flight entertainment system, or – these days – keeping up with correspondence on my phone.
Still, packing more books than I can possibly read has become a kind of security blanket. I know I won’t read them all; I rarely read ten books in a month even when I’m at home, because I’m too busy with writing and research. Rather, the books are a reassurance that if everything goes wrong, my flight gets delayed for five hours, I have to spend a night in an unfamiliar city, and I can’t sleep in an airplane, I’ll have something to read. It’s the same kind of reassurance as a first-aid kit in my suitcase: I certainly hope I won’t crack my head open while hiking, but I feel better knowing it’s there.
The other issue, of course, is the checked luggage weight limit, a number with which I have become intimately familiar. In fact, at this point, I’m pretty sure I can tell if my suitcase is overweight by picking it up the way an experienced baker can eyeball a cup of flour. Bringing ten books is a great security blanket, but there’s the awful choice of which ten books, which I usually have to whittle down from the twenty books I actually want to bring, and – yes, I know, I have a problem.
This is usually made more difficult by the fact that I only read paper books. This isn’t some kind of Luddite stance or “get off my lawn” hatred of technology; rather, it’s a personal preference that be able to turn the pages, to physically feel the book in my hand, to spill exotic food and drink on it, and to be able to read it during take-off and landing (because not all airlines have Delta’s rather forward-looking stance of letting me keep my technology on during take-off). Also, as a graduate student in literature, pleasure reading and non-pleasure reading often intersect, by which I mean the line between the two is eternally blurry. It’s very easy for me to go from pleasure reading to dog-earing pages to taking notes, which is something I can only do with a physical book: something about physically folding that page over or manually underlining that text helps it stick.
Douglas Adams, while an excellent science fiction writer, seems to have miscalculated when it comes to my eccentricities. Image credit: Sageas.
And, often, when I’m traveling to some literary locale, the setting of a favorite novel, I want to bring my own copy, with its cracked spine, yellowed pages, spills and stains, and sand between the pages, as I explore the setting of the book. Sure, I could probably pull up an e-book of anything these days, but if I don’t have my copy, that I read, the literary travel doesn’t feel quite the same.
In short, I need to bring physical books, but that security blanket comes with a cost – often, with a hundred dollar for the extra pound overweight suitcase cost. Packing, for me, is always an adventure of what I’m willing to give up for my security blanket of books. Usually, the result is a back-breaking carry-on and only two outfits nice enough for tea with the queen; sometimes, I have literally mailed my own books, that I brought with me, to myself, because I have purchased so many new books on a trip.
I struggled with this form of literary insanity for a long time, somehow convinced that there has to be some perfect algorithm through which I can pack the correct amount of exactly the right books for a particular trip. But, slowly, I’ve come to accept that my book-reading habits defy logic. Perhaps I’m overly stubborn and unwilling to change, but this acceptance has (metaphorically) taken the weight off my shoulders (while piling it into my carry-on).
The Itinerant Bookworm 