I happened to be with some family friends the other day. The daughter, just out of school, is soon to go travelling to various far-flung destinations and to this end she was busy assembling her backpack — a stage I remember all too well from my own first big trip.
Trying to fit everything you will need for the next six months inside something small enough to go on your back should be a liberating experience, but I found it alarming to say the least. As well as a scant assortment of clothes, I remember squeezing in all sorts of odd things like quick-drying trousers, a clothes line, a sink plug, a very peculiar and teeny-tiny travel towel, masses of insect repellent, half a pharmacy, and a terribly expensive medical kit containing my own syringes and things, as the doctor said, having pumped me full of jabs, just in case. Well the insect repellent came in handy, but the towel was as good as useless and most hostels already had clothes lines and plugs in place. Before long, I realised that I could not have been more over-prepared with expensive, unnecessary kit.
The thing for which, back then, there wasn’t a pricey travel-proof option, was a book. As well as the Lonely Planet ‘Bible’ — a huge tome of a guidebook that would see me through several months of travels — I packed a novel to read too. Travelling is a time when one can read and read and read. In fact, the thought of not having something to read while travelling is too dreadful even to contemplate. What else can you do when waiting for a much-delayed train, or while bumping along a sixteen-hour bus ride, or while ‘hanging out’ in the myriad backpacker cafes and hostels in various distant cities?
But now, rather than packing a book, it seems that the preferred option is to pack a Kindle, loaded up with masses of eBooks to keep you going for months. When I learnt of this from the example of said family friends, my heart sank. I far prefer a paper book to an eBook, but even putting that prejudice aside, I felt sad that this girl would be deprived of so many remarkable reading experiences.
For when you set off travelling with just a book or two, it isn’t long before you need to get hold of another. And, rather than just getting a new book up on your Kindle at the touch of a button, having to go out and find a new book to read when you’re the other side of the world can be a wonderful, exciting experience.
One of my favourite things to do when I was away was to go into a Paperback Exchange to hunt for something new to read. These bookshops are usually small, crammed full of books, and smell well … musty. For a start, seeing and smelling all those familiar books is very comforting in a place where everything outside is so different and foreign. Added to which, there is something pleasing about choosing a book which another traveller has read when passing through the same particular spot. And, of course, when you swap in your old book to get money off the new one, you feel like you’re leaving behind a little legacy for someone else to discover.
I remember that the Classics sections of these shops were usually very well-stocked. This was lucky for me as I was working my way through a substantial university reading list. It was bizarre and astonishing to discover a copy of Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss in Kathmandu, or Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers in Bangkok. I couldn’t help but wonder who was reading them before me, and why. Of course in Vietnam everyone was swapping copies of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and bookshops all over Asia had a wide selection of books by Paulo Coelho. After all, can anyone actually say they’ve gone ‘travelling’ and not have read The Alchemist? There were usually several works of travel writing, lots of Buddhist books, as well as plenty of thrillers and easy reads — the kind of books you might expect to find in an airport — as well as all the classics and some good new fiction. The fact that all the books on offer have already been read by travellers means that you — another traveller — are likely to find something that you will want to read, and something that you might want to talk about too.
On a bus from Pokhara to Kathmandu, I was sitting next to an American woman whose jaw dropped when I took Bleak House out of my rucksack. What an unusual book to be reading out here, she exclaimed. I gave her the usual spiel about my university reading list. Well it happens to be one of my very favourite books, certainly my favourite Dickens, she said. It transpired that she’d done a Masters in Victorian Literature, and we carried on chatting about books for a good hour of the journey.
In Dharamsala, I was sitting in a café reading when in ran a young man, soaked through from a sudden downpour. All the tables were taken, so he asked if he could join me. No problem, I said. He pulled a copy of City of Djinns by William Dalrymple out of his bag. Is that any good? I asked, having read another book by Dalrymple and curious about this one.
So began a long conversation about City of Djinns and Delhi. Apparently this book had inspired him to spend a whole fortnight in Delhi. Most backpackers are in and out of Delhi in a flash, nervous of ‘Delhi belly’, exhausted by the hassle, the noise, the size and seeming impenetrability of the city. I was surprised to meet someone who had fallen in love with it, all thanks to a book. He’d already read it once, he explained, now he was rereading it.
He asked me if I would be going there and I said that yes, at some stage, I was sure I’d be passing through. Right, he said, you must have this book; he pressed it into my hands. Really, it is the very best book about Delhi, he insisted, you have to read it and then you won’t just ‘pass through’, you’ll love it.
I thanked him and took the book but I could see he looked a little sad about losing it. Perhaps I could find a way of getting it back to you once I’ve finished, I suggested. We swapped email addresses to try and manoeuvre a crossing of paths elsewhere in India. I read the book, and very good it was too. I then emailed him my thanks and said that instead of passing through, I’d soon be spending a week in Delhi. It just so happened that we’d overlap. So a month or so after our first meeting, we met up again in a café in Delhi and together wandered around some of the places written about so beautifully in City of Djinns.
So many of my happiest memories from my travels were born of books. From the familiar bookish smell of Paperback Exchanges and the excitement of picking out the next travel-worn book, to the chance encounters that books bring with them, and, of course, the pleasure of having so much time to read, so many hours to pore over so many books.
Undoubtedly, some of this will translate on to a Kindle, but much of it won’t. A Kindle is a more introverted way of reading; it is so much more private. It doesn’t have a cover to announce the title of the book, inviting conversation from curious onlookers. It won’t allow you to lend your copy to an interested person for a few weeks, or inspire complicated arrangements to enable your meeting again. And it certainly won’t propel you into a bookshop to gaze at all those paperbacks that have been lovingly carted around by others, where you could leave your own book ripe for someone else to discover.
A Kindle is terribly self-sufficient, but perhaps what one really learns from travelling is that self-sufficiency isn’t always a particularly desirable thing. It’s far better to meet people and learn from them. And books are rather a good way of doing exactly that.
Emily Rhodes blogs at Emily Books and tweets @EmilyBooksBlog
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