Travel Reading: Hugo, Stoker, Bradbury, and Bryson

While I wait for my sister to send me photos from our excursions in Nürnberg, Germany, I thought it would be a good time to talk about something mildly psuedo-travel-related: books!

Growing up, my family would take a few trips every year. There was the schlep down to Florida for Spring Break, the two-week summer road trip in June, and the obligatory stay up at our cabin the first two weeks of August. When we first started taking our family trips, there were no video games, laptops, or iPhones which left my brother, sister, and I with three options: look out the window and count cows or train cars (much more fun than you might think!), play cards, or read books. When we were really little, we had a ton of those books where you read along with a cassette tape and when we heard the sound of chimes, we turned the page.

It started off with Disney story books and then came the adventures of "Bones and Dodo,"  a book/tape set that came in your McDonald's Happy Meal back when McDonald's was a place to go on special occasions and toys were not imported from toxin-laden factories in China. But as we got older, we phased out the Disney tapes and replaced them with our own personal reading (I should note that the "Bones and Dodo" tapes still exist, much to my Dad's chagrin).

Reading was all around us. My mom's Time and People magazines were never far out of reach nor were my dad's Guitar and Whitetail Unlimited subscriptions. Some of my clearest memories from our family trips involve listening to my mom read newspaper and magazine articles to my dad while he drove with his knees because he needed his hands to snack on peanuts. But more importantly, there were the books. No matter where we went, my mom made sure our back-seat libraries were filling up.

We kids were not the only ones heading straight for the gift shops everywhere we went. My mom was typically right behind us. But while my siblings and I headed for the trinkets, stuffed animals, and office stationary (seriously, we loved the pencils and those rulers with lots of location-based photos!), my mom went right over to the books section. It was always a struggle between mom and us over the book to trinket ratio. But in the end, it was usually 50-50.

Once Nintendo Game Boys became prevalent, my parents tried buying one for my brother and I in hopes to reduce the amount of fighting in the car on these trips. Let's just say it didn't work and we fought more and more. No matter where we were, when the fighting got to be too much, we were scolded, the Game Boy was taken away, and because Walk-Mans (Walk-Men?) were not very accessible to us in the early 90s, we spent our post-fight time-outs sulking and reading.

What we read could have literally been anything, from short-stories about the Kennedys while vacationing on Cape Cod to reading true stories of the Donner Party around Lake Tahoe; from childrens' stories from the Civil war at Gettysburg to the first three Harry Potter books flying to and from Dallas in middle school.

I've since learned that books can really be a double-edged sword to a traveler. If you are trying to travel lightly, books add bulk. But if you buy an electronic reader, you are depending on batteries lasting and must be over-observant to make sure your shiny new device is not subject to theft (I will choose not to relive my personal experience with the latter here).

As a graduate student, I never really have time to do personal reading - something I've tried really hard to correct. So when I had the opportunity this semester to spend close to 48 hours in airplanes and airports and on trains, I made the point to read. My goal was to pack lightly, which is tricky when you're bringing books along because of their bulk. With my recent acquisition of an iPhone, I took advantage of the iBooks app and downloaded some free classic titles.

So over the five weeks I was traveling, I am proud to say I made my way through three classics and one travelogue. On the way to Germany, I was determined to finish Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

I tried getting into the book numerous times before, but like Hugo's other writings, the first third of the book is filled with seemingly-inane details about the layout and architecture of Paris - names of roads and how they intersect with certain corners of this university or that park. Mostly, these details are something that were of utmost importance to the politics of the day but to the common modern-reader, really are not that important (maybe scholars get something out of it, but not me). So it was a chore to get through the first quarter of the book, but then the characters and plot comes alive and keeps your interest for the duration. I am no literary critic, so I'll just say: read it!

I finished The Hunchback of Notre Dame while in Berlin and had it both in paperback and on my iPhone - something I decided I must make sure to do each time to ensure that the book-printing industry remains alive. It was great because I could hold and read the book at home or on the plane and then while I was on the train going around town, I would pick up where I left off using iBooks. So I checked out what other free classics could be found on the iBooks store and downloaded Bram Stoker's Dracula since I meant to have read that long before now.

Having never really been into horror movies or the recent and absurd vampire-obsession, I wasn't exactly sure what to expect, but I thought it would be good to get an idea of what popularized vampires in pop-culture to begin with. Let me say that Dracula is an absolutely terrifying book! It is written through the diary and journal entries of the characters and their various correspondences to one another, so you're never actually seeing anything happen in "real-time." Everything is passive and each chapter just leaves you hanging in suspense. The way Count Dracula is portrayed and how he affects those around him is just creepy and weird!

But while I started to read Dracula in Germany, my iPhone was stolen and I couldn't read it on the plane on the ride home. Luckily, I also brought a paper-back copy of Ray Bradbury's Farenheit 451 - that's the temperature at which book paper burns.

It's a great classic you can sit down and read in a jiffy. I remember watching the movie-version of the book when I was little and was glad to finally read about Guy Montag and his wife's obsession with her "family" on the wall. Again, I suggest you read it.

I got my new iPhone and finished reading Dracula while in Australia and Singapore, but I got sick of looking at my little screen and so while in the Changi Airport, I picked up Bill Bryson's Down Under (published in the US as In a Sunburned Country) and devoured it!

Bryson just has this way of writing that keeps you captivated. He's informed, cynical, humorous, and has a gift for putting abstract knowledge and ideas into words we can all understand. I'd read his A Short History of Nearly Everything before and while that is a brief introduction to each and every modern science, I was excited to read one of his travelogues for which he is more well-known. I was excited to read about his experiences in the places I just left and gave me great ideas for things to do and places to see and how to get around for the next time I go to Australia.

Isn't that the purpose of reading anyway? To give you ideas for what to do and where to do it and see cultures, viewpoints, and opinions you otherwise may never have had the idea even existed!