You get to go on a trip of a lifetime. What books do you bring along?
I go back and forth about whether bringing books on a vacation is a good idea or not. I really does come down to the trip. I took my daughter to Iceland in 2024 and I brought no books because I knew we would be busy doing things every day.
If I’m going back to visit family for a holiday, I always bring a book. More downtime and more moment when you need the respite of some quiet reading time.
I relish the time trapped in a plane for reading. I so seldom get uninterrupted time like that to read and there have been times when I’ve finished an entire book on a single journey. In one instance it was a terribly frightening book, Come Closer by Sara Gran, and I was grateful to be on a plane so I wouldn’t be alone in my house feeling terrified.
When I do bring a book with me I go for something shorter, and smaller in size overall makes for good packing. For me, that means a Hard Case Crime book from back when they released in mass-market paperback size. I have the first 70 or so HCC books, and many more that came after when they moved to a trade paperback size. Vintage novels like Say It With Bullets by Richard Powell, more contemporary novels like Kiss Her Goodbye by Allan Guthrie or the Max & Angela series by Jason Starr and Ken Bruen are favorites. I still remember being on a work trip in Florida and sitting reading my HCC copy of 361 by Donald Westlake getting a respectful upnod from a passing gentleman. We shared an unspoken moment for our mutual love of gritty crime novels and of reading in public. It’s been 15 years and I still remember that dude.
Generally, I’ve never been a huge Mass Market PB reader. The smaller size only works for sticking in a backpack or carry-on. I like a larger book in my hands. But I also do lament the passing of the mass market size.
If you haven’t heard, the entire publishing industry decided to no longer produce the smaller size paperbacks. Once a staple of drug store spinner racks and dusty shelves of devoted readers, they had fallen out of favor in recent years and breathed their last in 2025.
Most of the vintage books I own, several hundred in number, are these smaller size pulp paperbacks, often one indelicate fold away from falling apart. These make ideal travel books for me. Titles by Lionel White, Harry Whittington, Day Keene and William Ard are among my favorites to catch up on while on a flight. The one caveat is that they make me nervous that I will tear them or otherwise lose the fragile binding and end up with a handful of loose pages. For this reason, the good folks at Stark House books are my heroes for re-releasing so many of these vintage classics. Favorites like The Red Scarf by Gil Brewer, The Long Ride by James McKimmey, Black Wings Has My Angel by Elliot Chaze, and any number of Charles Williams titles have all been with me on trips.
A long trip is a great time to catch up on a series. I’ll pull out one of the Hap & Leonard series by Joe R. Lansdale and happily revisit the hijinks of those two. I feel no pressure to keep up to date on that series because I like have a few in reserve like a little treat for myself.
A more controversial choice might be to dig into the pile of books I’ve gotten for free at conferences. These are books that intrigued me enough to pick them up, but they didn’t rocket to the top of my TBR list. The reason they do well on a vacation is that if I end up not liking the book, I can leave it behind. Maybe the next person at this AirBnB will like it better.
But more often than not, I start with my vintage shelf, whether an original or a re-release. If I’m going to get on a plane and be literally transported somewhere, I might as well do the same with my reading and allow myself to be taken back in time to a world very different from my own.
I have a trip across the Pacific coming up this summer where I will have a whole lot of time to read in my coach seat for 18 hours to Japan. I already bought a book specifically for that trip – Tokyo Express by Seicho Matsumoto. Leading up to that trip I may re-read my favorite Japanese novels (of which I am no expert at all) Shield Of Straw and A Dog In Water by Kauzhiro Kiuchi.
Just know that if I see you reading poolside, by your airport gate, at an outdoor cafe or on the subway I will absolutely give you a nod and a smile. Readers need to stick together now more than ever, at home or abroad.
No comments:
Post a Comment