The Measure of my Addiction

I want to talk about books and traveling. Not travel books, or even travel literature, but the fascinating and sometimes frustrating process of choosing and finding books to read while traveling. Before I left on this trip I spent a lot of time thinking and talking about whether to bring a Kindle or an iPad. In many ways, traveling seems to be the ideal venue for an electronic book: it’s a lot lighter than carrying a bunch of paperbacks with you, and you’ll never find yourself stranded without a book (at some point last summer I walked out of the house to go see a movie downtown with just my wallet, phone, and a paperback stuffed in my back pocket. Kacy wondered why I needed the book and I tried to explain to her the feeling of freedom it gives me. With a book in my back pocket I feel like I can go anywhere. I could leave the movie and go sit at a bar or a coffee shop and read my book. I wouldn’t have to make awkward conversation with people. I wouldn’t have to find something else to do, or just sit there feeling bored. I could read! Or I could get on the ferry and go to Bainbridge and read on the way over. Or I could walk around all day and never have time to read, but at least I would have the assurance that I could read if I needed to. I think that’s when Kacy finally understood the measure of my addiction). The problem was, I tried to imagine myself sittingon a bus in Laos reading off a piece of electronic equipment that costs nearly half of the averageyearly income of most of the people around me (estimated to be $2,500/year in Laos), and I just couldn’t do it. Also, there’s something about the serendipity of the books you manage to find when you’re traveling.

Two days ago in Pakse, Laos, I found a small shelf of used English books at a tour agency. About half of them were Danielle Steel or the equivalent. There were also a few mystery books. And then there were the aspirational books. The books people bring with them that they think they should read, and assume they’ll finally have the chance because they’re traveling. Wuthering Heights is common. So is The Last of the Mohicans. There’s often lots of Dickens and Tolstoy. I even brought a Trollop to India (I didn’t much care for it). In Pakse I found a Doris Lessing book I’d never heard of. In India, Deepa and Ashish’s shelves were filled with the books left behind by ambitious students. They had four copies of The God of Small Things, but only one Midnight’s Children, and no A Suitable Boy's.

There's something very specialabout the way a book meshes with your experience of the place you're in. You can read so much more intensely when you're not at home. Partly it's because you have so much more time to read, of course: waiting for the late night bus to leave, waiting for the hot part of the day to be over, taking the slow boat down the river. But also I think there's something unique about the experience of being somewhere other and finding comfort in familiar words and stories. Of course it makes perfect sense to read The God of Small Things when in India- to learn something more about the place you're in through the fiction that came out of it. I feel like most of what I know about the world I've learned through fiction. But there's also something deliciously lovely about reading stories incongruous with the place. I brought The Wind Up Bird Chronicles to read for a second time while in India and Kacy just finished it here in Laos. We both read Blood, Bones, and Butter, a memoir about cooking in New York City while we were traveling through Vietnam. The mental gap you have to cross when you look up from the page somehow brings everything into clearer focus.

It’s interesting to look at at these books you find in cafe's and guesthouses around the world, washed up upon remote shores: the detritus of people’s long ago choices about what they wanted to absorb while in far off places, now sifted through by many fellow travelers. Here you find the ultimate gulf between what people really do read (mysteries, romance), and what people aspire to read (‘classics’). I hesitated for a while over the Doris Lessing book, but in the end I went with a Dick Francis mystery. I read The Golden Notebook long ago because my grandmother told me that book had changed her life. I wanted to like it, but I found it a little dated and dull. I read my mystery paperback on a grimy, hot, and somewhat disgusting 8 hour bus ride yesterday surrounded by ordinary folk from Laos (and their roosters). I didn’t feel out of place. And now I’ll have to see if there’s somewhere in this town where I can find English books. But I’ve got all day to explore.