The importance of book slimming
December 10, 2018 § 1 Comment
When I was a kid, I learned that you don’t ever travel without books. We didn’t have computer games or phones of course, and about the only good entertainment was getting into knock-down, drag-out brawls with my brother in the back seat. Those never ended well, first because he would beat the shit out of me, and second because my dad would invariably pull over to the side of the road and beat the shit out of both of us.
You don’t see a lot of kids getting the shit beaten out of them on the side of the road anymore, which is a good thing.
Anyway, in addition to the beatings we learned to travel with books. Our dad always traveled with books, plural, and the older we got and the more independent we became, the more books we took with us when we traveled.
My dad was famous for taking a small library on a two-day trip. In between the beatings and the sleeping and the drinking he never finished even one, but he always had plenty just in case there was a nuclear war and we were stuck in Uvalde for a million years, which is about how long it was gonna take him to read Marx’s Capital.
As a grown man I can’t tell you how many times I’ve traveled with books, plural, and returned home having read only a little bit of one of them. The reason is that you think you’re gonna plow through a dozen books in between here and Augsburg, but in reality you sleep the entire time on the plane or you are drunk or both. Then all that dead time in the airport? You know, the time you were gonna use to chew through those books? Trust me, two chapters and you are asleep, getting neckbone disease from hanging your head on the back of those rubber seats with the steel neck-backs.
Of course you’re not deterred; when you get to the luxury resort in Hohenkirchen-Siegertsbrunn you will flop down beside the pool and read all day. Except you don’t. You tour the town, sleep by the pool, eat way too much, sleep some more, then go to your room and sleep some more again.
On the way home you know you’ll finish at least one book but it’s not possible. The first meal knocks you out, then you watch four movies, then dinner comes, then you’re asleep again, then you wake up and thumb through the in-flight rag for an hour, then you thumb through the in-flight store mag for an hour, then it’s 45 minutes to landing and you’re home.
So a few trips ago, and it was damned hard, I decided to do two things:
- Take one book.
- Throw it away on the plane if I wasn’t finished with it by the time we landed.
And it worked! I was so afraid of having to throw away an unread book, which is like putting a bunch of kittens in a bag and drowning them, I read the lone book before I even reached my destination. And I found it didn’t matter which book I took, so I’ve learned that the key is to take a really dreadful one that’s been staring at you from under the table for a couple of years, daring you to read it.
Here’s my next victim. He doesn’t stand a chance.
END
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Cycling in the South Bay 
I was anti-Kindle for so long until my wife got me one and I realized… dude… this is perfect for traveling. Time was I brought enough books to build a fort, no matter how long the trip. Now I bring the Kindle and if I feel like reading something on dead tree carcasses I buy a newspaper or magazine.