Travel Reading

Before our vacation, I considered what to take along for travel reading. Really I wanted a book for the return flight from Amsterdam, for on the eastward flight one is too tired to read much, and when abroad time spent inside one's hotel room seems wasted. My requirements were that the book should be light, for I would have to carry it through four airports; that it be long, to occupy me during most of seven hours; that it be readable when I am tired; and that it be new to me, or worth rereading now, to justify its space and weight. I couldn't think what around the house met these requirements.

There are histories that fail the weight requirement. There are volumes of philosophy that I cannot read unless well rested. There are novels that I don't consider that I need to reread just now. For some reason, I did not consider poetry, though I have in the past taken poetry along on trips.

On the Friday before we left, I understood that what I really wanted was some novel of Trollope's, preferably in an Oxford World Classics volume. By then it was too late to make it to a bookstore before the airport, and airport bookstores aren't that good in the US these days. Schiphol's English-language selection is not bad, but I didn't see anything I really wanted to get. The next trip we take will probably be to the west coast; I'll keep Trollope in mind for that.