Is it still vacation when you go somewhere you used to live? For the first time in two years, I did a bit of traveling, and it was weird. Weird to be on planes. Weird to remember all the awkward dances of cramming into tiny places with strangers, a weirdness exponentially compounded by pandemic anxiety. Weird to get on the subway, weird to return to a place I haven’t been since before the pandemic began. All the weirdnesses of the last two years, compacted and intensified in my old home, now far from home.
Traveling is reading time. All that between-time, the between-spaces of planes and airports and trains and every other mode of transit: Since I was old enough to read, I’ve filled those places with pages. Thousands of miles on Greyhound buses, moving between parents, is equal to hundreds of books read. Flying home from college, reading things entirely different than what I’d read for class. Commuting on the subway with a book carefully held in one hand. (Anyone who’s ever commuted in New York knows how many ways you can find to hold a book and turn pages single-handed, if you must. And often, you must.)
But travel reading is not unchanged by the last few years, either.
What we want in the books we pack with us, when we’re headed out on a road trip or to the airport or train station, is as varied as our travel preferences. Window, aisle, observation car. Escapism, education, a break from the norm. What I wanted was to fall into something, to repeat the experience of reading Wanderers on a flight and forgetting how long it was (the book or the flight). Reading a book while traveling can mean forever associating the book with motion; returning to a travel read can, faintly and distantly, recall that experience. American Gods is always traveling in Australia, to me, however contradictory that sounds. When I reread it, two landscapes layer over each other in my mind.
But on this trip, I skipped through bits of books, unsettled, and watched two James Bond movies. (Spectre was awful. No Time to Die made less sense but was still better. Q is perfect, no notes.) I had loaded up my iPad with library books and ebooks and yet I couldn’t tell you much about what any of them were. A wonky space opera with too much infodumping. A gentle fantasy in a world with a cruel climate. Something involving a boat. Scan a page, sigh, get woozy in the haze of white noise, try something else. Repeat until frustrated.
Is vacation reading always escapism? Is travel reading the same as vacation reading? My partner and I call trips where we stay in one place “vacation,” and trips where we roam all over, trying to see as much of a place as possible, “traveling.” I tend to read while traveling and watch TV on vacation—at night, when I’ve walked 12 miles in a strange city and just want to sip a glass of wine in my pajamas and zone out with some space friends.
This time, I didn’t want to do either. I wanted stories to download themselves into my brain and rattle around, seeping in via osmosis. The concept of vacation reading, to my fantasy-obsessed brain, never made much sense beyond the practical. (I choose traveling books with simple criteria: How much space do I have, and how many plane-hours do I have to fill?) Every fantasy novel is a trip somewhere strange and new, an escape—often an escape to a world where maybe justice is possible, where maybe change still seems like something a small group of passionate rebels can bring about. The escape is not the existence of dragons, the presence of magic, the idea of a clear and obvious (and defeatable) evil. The escape is that, by the end of the book, something is different. The world has changed. The world feels changeable, and for the better. I don’t want to be distracted, entertained, spoon-fed fluff. I want to be somewhere else, believing something else is possible.
I want that regardless of where I am when I’m turning pages, but it feels different when you’re away from home—especially on the kind of trip where it seems as if something should feel different when you return. Fantasy is full of departures, travels, journeys to places protagonists never thought they’d see; they return changed, grown, irrevocably different. Vacation doesn’t do that, usually. Traveling certainly can. But we’re not saving the world. We’re just trying to see more of it, to avoid burnout, to take a break, to experience something different.
It’s easy to want too much from a vacation read, the same way it’s easy to want too much from a vacation. But the right books can offer some of the same things: the thrill of going, of moving, of seeing something new, of being in an old place in a new way. Maybe you read Chronic City and The City We Became while in New York, or pick up Francesca Lia Block in Los Angeles. There’s Summer in the City of Roses and Geek Love for Portland, more books than I can count for England (maybe start with Sorcerer to the Crown), Justine Larbalestier’s Magic or Madness series for Sydney, We Ride Upon Sticks if you’re headed to coastal Massachusetts, Brown Girl in the Ring for a different vision of Toronto. You could make a whole atlas of these places. (Sometimes I want to.)
Fantasy has its own geography, but it borrows ours as well; you could build road trips around the towns where magic happens in books. Some are fictional, sure, but you know the types. You know where there are faeries under boardwalks and trolls under bridges, far from the chain fast food restaurants that try to make every landscape look the same. You can find these places anywhere, even if you can’t travel right now: culverts under quiet roads, arched trees in a quiet stretch of street. Learning the names of the trees is a small magic, like the smell of rain on dry sidewalks.
Maybe travel isn’t in the cards right now—and if it is, maybe it feels weirder and even more uncomfortable than ever before. Take a comfort book, if you have those; take comfort sounds, comfort smells, visit comfort places. I don’t want to go anywhere for a while, but I want a vacation. It might look like nothing more than standing under a wisteria arch down the block, listening to Tori Amos in my headphones. Can you take a vacation to the familiar? Would it look the same as it always does? Will it read like it always does?
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
Ahhh! First of all, I just want to say I’ve enjoyed the recent spate of articles about books/reading in general, not just specific books.
But I was just talking to somebody about this – one of my reading resolutions this year was to get through the Sharon Shinn backlog I’ve been meaning to get to. She actually IS an author I love for ‘travel reading’ because her books are generally engaging (there are some books that I know take a lot of concentration, thinking, etc to read that are NOT what I am interested in for travel reading) with charming settings, characters and you can generally trust things will turn out okay in the end. Depending on the series they tend to be fantasy/romance light and are more focused on the characters and relationships thatn really intense world/magic building. ANYWAY, I was just telling somebody how I will always associate the book “Troubled Waters” with New Orleans because I read a huge portion of it on the plane, as well as in the hot tub/my room during a recent business trip there while unwinding.
By travel reading, I tend to mean reading while being in transit, where I’m basically a captive audience, but might also have trouble relaxing/concentrating. I might still bring something heavier along for actual vacation reading. For example, The Letters of Edith Stein (a more serious book) I associate with hanging out on the deck in a Minnesota lake house as that’s where I finally finished it.
The Chronicles of Prydain are from a road trip out west during my youth, and I associate Shadows of the Empire with my uncle’s cabin up north (Michigan)…the first Harry Potter book I grabbed on a whim to read during a spring break camping trip to Tennesee (and was then frustrated I couldn’t find the sequels out in the sticks!)…I could probably come up wtih more if I rooted around my brain long enough.
I’m a bus commuter so I definitely find there are certain books that are ‘commute’ books (especially on the way home when I might be more likely to just want to zone out and listen to music) vs. home books (which typically require more concentration…sometimes sitting out in the yard under my lilacs with tea, or enjoying the autumn foliage).
Interestingly, it goes both ways with writing as well. We did a road trip to the Grand Canyon recently, and there are certain aspects of my story I will always associate with that as I worked on it heavily during the drive (I don’t drive so I’m always a passenger) or while in the various lodgings, and parts that were even influenced by some of the scenery. There are other certain story developments/scenes I associate with specific vacation spots or plane trips.
Before the pandemic, any traveling that I did from a child into adulthood always involved getting a couple of new books from our local bookstore. Some of those reads became treasured stories that when I reread them bring back memories of where I was and what I was doing on those trips. Now post 2019 traveling I have done involves taking a book that I’ve reread many times. I’m too unsettled now to read something new for fear that if I really enjoy it, it will still hold memories of pandemic travel. Maybe I’ll join you Molly for a vacation down the block.
The great advantage of a ebook reader is you no longer have to try to guess what you’ll feel like reading on that long flight or road trip. You can take your entire library, or a large segment of it, with you to browse.
I’ve always loved that painting of the traveling companions. Look how their hoops take up the entire coach or compartment! The women are almost certainly sisters as it was customary back then for sisters to dress alike even as adults. The skirts may be ridiculously voluminous but look at the bodices or jackets. These girls know all about wearing something loose and comfortable while traveling.
When I went over to eBooks, the travel aspect was a definite draw (the others, of course, being the ease of getting English language genre fiction from abroad, and storage space). I do still tend to plot out my reading as part of trip planning.
I like queuing up classic fiction related to the area I’m travelling – reading Sherlock Holmes while visiting London, the Brothers Grimm in the Black Forest, Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh. For planes and trains, books that are engaging, but don’t require intense concentration are needed, because my focus will be repeatedly interrupted and I’m often tired. Highly anticipated new releases aren’t good for travelling, because reading until 3am to finish something can mess with other plans. When I travel back to my hometown to visit family I take advantage of access to an English language library, and read my way through a bunch of fairly random stuff as a result.
The problem I’ve found with taking apparently-appropriate reading (per your 3rd-to-last paragraph) is expectations that the place and the reading will line up. The first two books I read during my first trip to Scotland were Kidnapped (for history) and Doomsday Book (since we were going into parts of the Highlands that hadn’t even been touched by the Clearances) — but we weren’t going to specific places mentioned in the books and everywhere we went had its own details. As a long-term Bostonian I’d see the same issue with recommending We Ride Upon Sticks — it’s very much coastal north-of-Boston, which is different both socially and scenically from the city, the central hills, the western hills, the plain between them, or even the coast south of Boston (less social snobbery, less deep history aside from the fly-in-amber of Plimoth Plantation, but surprisingly more conservative). Even worse is going expecting something that the author has made up — there’s no Goldsmiths’ Street in Stockholm’s Old Town (per a Laumer that I liked when I was in junior high…). OTOH, I regret not having any of the fiction around Portland before my visits (although they were long enough ago that the fiction hadn’t been written); sometimes the feel of something the size of a city can be captured.
I usually pack an intentional assortment — science fiction, fantasy, maybe a mystery, and variable subgenres within these — and try to avoid anything that looks like it will require all of my attention, as being able to attend to the surroundings is the point of travel. (For vacation, all I need is a book and a quiet corner — it doesn’t have to be somewhere else.) Even that varies, though; a demanding book can be right for a long train trip.
Many people have said that Agatha Christie is perfect for traveling. Engaging but undemanding. Interesting but not absorbing.
Like princessroxanna, my travel companion is an ebook reader–15-20 hours of battery power and several hundred titles in multiple genres so if I don’t like the book I thought I would love, I have options. During a trip decades ago, I lost my book in an airport and was bookless for many hours, days, in fact. I had other books in my suitcase, but couldn’t get to them. Now if I lose my reader, I have my smartphone, and that particular book was on my computer anyway.
For a travel book, I want to be engaged without a whole lot of mental work–no involved social problems, but good characters with simple names, a straightforward plot, and action. Space opera and mystery are probably my genres of choice, but suspense and romance have spots in my heart, too.
When I was a kid my parents used go put together a small holiday rucksack to keep us entertained. It would always have a new colouring book, a puzzle book, pencil, and at least 1 new book that they picked out especially for the holiday. One year my parents got us a Nintendo DS and a couple of games each but they didn’t put a book in. So we sent them to to airport bookshop to pick one out (we were only allowed to open the bag once we’d gone through security)
It’s something I miss as an adult! And definitely something I want to continue if I ever have kids
I took Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven with me to a summer semester in Wales because I wanted something long so I didn’t have to carry more. I absolutely couldn’t read about hot smoggy LA in the rolling green wonderland of Llanbadarn Fawr.