 Travel ReadingbyGillian PolackWhen I was traveling last year, I collected a bunch of books on my netbook, just in case I was stranded somewhere with nothing to do. This didn’t happen. I worry incessantly about travel and undertake great preparations and sometimes, just sometimes, they’re not needed. The process, however, of collecting the electronic books taught me a lot about what books were important to me. It also taught me what books I find comforting when I’m worried about the world. I can’t give you a complete overview of these books, for I read a dozen of them (‘not needing’ is relative; I only needed a dozen, not over a hundred) and, as I read them, I deleted them from my hard drive and besides, when I worry about travel I prepare and I downloaded over a hundred books and stories onto my hard drive. I made sure I had Mark Twain and also essayists and old versions of fairy tales. These were the books that helped me wait for trains and to deal with airports. But what were the books that are still on my hard drive, waiting for my next voyage? And why did I choose them? I won’t talk through each and every book and pamphlet: there are still far too many but some of them need more friends. Or maybe not. George Bernard Shaw’s An Unsocial Socialist doesn’t need more friends. It’s not his best work. Not nearly his best work. It’s contrived and even annoying. I need GBS when I travel, however, for he was important to me in my teens. I found him contrived and even annoying then, too, but I also found the prologues to his plays the stuff of wonder. He was opinionated. This allowed me to shape opinions. And so, now, almost anything by GBS is comfort reading (not, perhaps, Pygmalion or Major Barbara, but most other things) and, because I find most of his writing rather forgettable (my lamentable memory, I assume, rather than any pedestrian prose at his end) I can re-read texts and enjoy them a second time twenty years on. I have Max Beerbohm’s writing on my netbook for quite different reasons. Beerbohm has grown with age. I’ve always loved his writing, ever since I discovered an old copy of something he wrote (I may never know what) on a relative’s bookshelf when I was rather young. I love his vocabulary and his sharpness and the grand exoticism of his world. My travel reading, for instance, included “Enoch Soames” which is about the failure of Mr Soames to impress himself upon the world’s memory and the impulsion of the narrator to remedy the lack: Not my compassion, however, impels me to write of him. For his sake, poor fellow, I should be inclined to keep my pen out of the ink. It is ill to deride the dead. Beerbohm is reassuring even as he makes me half-laugh, uncomfortably. Jerome K. Jerome is not quite as cynical, perhaps, but is equally someone who makes me happy when I am under stress. I’m afraid I also downloaded a complete Mrs Beeton from Project Gutenberg (whence most of these books and stories came). My excuse was that I might need to know how many corkscrews or tin openers to carry if on a picnic with friends, but the real reason was that substantive books of recipes and household management calm me in times of difficulty. A few pages of instructions on how to clean stoves or how to make cakes fairy-light make me feel as if all is right with the world, even if the train is late and I shall therefore miss the bus to the airport and my plane will go without me and I shall have nowhere to spend the night and my visa will run out and . . .. Excuse me, I think I might need so spend a moment with Mrs Beeton right now. Fortunately, I didn’t need her last July. I have many short stories or novellas, especially ones by authors such as Algernon Blackwood who I have always intended to get to know a bit better and never got around to. I need to travel, to read these stories, for they're always displaced by my review volumes or my research or the latest novel by a friend or by my sad library borrowing habits. Of course, in my traveling e-library, I have reference volumes for local wildlife. My favourite is Wirt Sikes British Goblins. Alas, I never encountered any goblins and so the book remained unused. I was introduced to a vampire rabbit, but the book has nothing to say about vampire rabbits. For when the universe was too mundane, I had Jurgen by James Branch Cabell (mainly because I love James Branch Cabell) and Samuel Butler's Erewhon. When the world is too big, fantasy and speculative fiction in general can make it safer and homier. I have a complete Madame d’Aulnoy and a volume of Charles Perrault for the same reason, plus a significant number of writings by Lord Dunsany. Comfort reading in two languages. It makes me wonder just how many other people find the fantastic comfortable compared with the real? (When I finish with my current reading, which is science fiction for the Aurealis awards, I might read some Dunsany, for Australian science fiction in 2011 seems exceptionally full of post apocalyptic disaster and I already feel cut loose and my mind is unsettled, which is probably why I’m talking about my planned travel reading.) Some works are there purely to mislead. I knew I would visit at least one abbey on my trip, so I made sure that I had Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey. I love Thomas Love Peacock. It was a choice between Peacock and The Monk and Lewis is florid and Peacock is clever so, really, there was no choice. I also have a slew of delightfully escapist novels: Sax Rohmer’s Brood of the Witch-Queen and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Rafael Sabatini’s The Tavern Knight. If I want to read or to re-read any of these books, I need to travel. This is what I told myself when I pulled together my little e-library. It’s so tempting, however, to dump work and give my apologies to friends and explain to the dentist that I can’t make an appointment with him because I have one with Jerome K. Jerome and with Thomas Love Peacock, with food by Mrs Beeton and elves by Lord Dunsany and a rather long post-prandial discussion by George Bernard Shaw. Books mentioned in this column:
|