![]() In 2012, I didn’t want to be weighed down with a physical book when I flew to Peru and hiked Machu Picchu, so I loaded Max Brooks’ World War Z onto my iPad. And, while I acknowledge that the democratization of self-publishing is a good thing, allowing more minority and disadvantaged voices to be heard, traditional publishers and editors serve as gatekeepers, providing some assurance of quality of the final product. A printed book, by occupying physical space, serves as a visual reminder that it wants to be read. Paper is easier to read in sunlight and to get autographed by an author. Physical books don’t run out of battery or need to be put in “airplane mode”. I had all the usual elitist objections to ebooks: I like the feel of a physical book and the ease of flipping between pages. I couldn’t lug a personal library with me across the country, and libraries would have their own challenges: getting a library card in a city where I’m not a resident is difficult (though not impossible) a book might not arrive via interlibrary loan before I leave the area and even if it did, I might not finish reading it by that deadline.Īnd yet I dreaded the alternative. Wishing to avoid growing this collection, I rediscovered my childhood joy of public libraries: all the books I could read, for free, and without being weighed down by them! I’ve bought nary a book in the last decade, preferring to use interlibrary loan to fill all my bookish needs.īut when I looked ahead to nomading, I knew that physical books, either purchased or lent, would not be viable. On a JoCo Cruise to Mexico, I sat poolside with Wil Wheaton’s Just a Geek in one hand and a Sharpie in the other, so I could ambush the author for an autograph if he walked by.īut in 2011, when I moved for the first time in a decade, I discovered how much my personal library of 600 books weighed. As I cycled 210 miles across Missouri’s Katy Trail, I would break from the summer heat to read the collected trilogy of Deep Space Nine: Millennium. When my brother and I, on our 36-day cross-country road trip, ran out of things to discuss, we would sit quietly opposite each other in restaurants, he with his Wall Street Journal and me with R.A. I have never regretted having a book with me, even when it was clumsy to do so. They boxed them up and shipped them to me, 10,480 miles away, providing me an oasis in a lonely time. And so they infiltrated my bedroom and plundered my generous shelves of unread novels - a consequence of a previous summer spent working at WaldenBooks. But midway through my ten weeks in Oz, I’d already finished everything I brought. I’d brought a few books to sustain me on the long flight to Melbourne, and a few other books for the flight home. Rather than strike out on my own, I mostly kept to myself. I knew almost none of the classmates I traveled with, and I wasn’t as interested as they were in taking advantage of the lower drinking age. Unfortunately, I was not the independent traveler in 2000 that I am in 2020. Three years later, I spent a semester there. “Gosh,” I thought “Where would I go, if I could go anywhere?” When I graduated high school, one of my classmates received a gift from his parents: a trip anywhere he wanted.
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