As we start heading toward summer, many of us are planning summer vacations. And for a reader, there is nothing more important than choosing your summer travel reading carefully.
I still bear the scars of a particularly horrifying cross-country trip I took years ago. I had packed four books. I finished the first book about halfway through my day's journey. The second book turned out to be unreadably bad. The third book wasn't great, but it was very slim, and I polished it off in about an hour.
I still had three hours left in my flight, and then a half-hour shuttle bus ride to my final destination. "No problem," I thought. "I still have one book left." I pulled out that last book and started reading. Three pages in, I realized that:
A) I had read this book several years ago.
B) I hadn't liked it.
I spent the rest of the flight morosely paging through the SkyMall catalog, and whatever tattered magazines I could scrounge from that weird collection they always have on airplanes. Trying not to think about all the people who had coughed on the magazine before I read it.
LEARN FROM MY MISTAKE. I certainly did!
For one thing, I swore - as I sat there book-less at 30,000 feet - that I would save up to buy a Kindle. Taking your Kindle with you means that you have every book you've ever bought, right there in your pocket. If you find yourself in a pinch, you can always go back and re-read an old favorite, or keep reading something you had abandoned.
For another thing, I learned that you can never pack too many books. What's the worst that can happen? You spend so much time reading the other books that you never get round to reading all of them? That's not a worst-case scenario - that's a BEST-case scenario!
Image courtesy Flickr/presta
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