It's not a Kindle, but a Library of America volume with five novels in it makes a pretty good travel book. I've been carrying one of the Philip K. Dick issues. I started Martian Time-Slip on the way to Australia and have finished that, along with Dr. Bloodmoney and Now Wait For Last Year in the couple of weeks since. I'm saving Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said and A Scanner Darkly for the flights to Colorado and Germany. PDK is good reading for flights that cross several time zones. You're feeling kind of dislocated in time and space anyway, which is essentially what his novels do to you. They start to make a deliciously uncomfortable sort of sense.
When I was going through my separation and then divorce from Sandy, I would travel with lots of books. "Transitional objects" my friend called them. The most ridiculous was a trip to San Francisco just after I'd moved out and was setting up my bachelor apartment on Compton. As I recall, I brought fourteen books with me and bought another half dozen during the trip. Some novels, several volumes of Rilke and Neruda, Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching. The first thing I'd do when I checked in to a hotel room was find a spot for my shelf of books. I knew that it was kind of crazy behavior, but when one's life is tumbling head over heels it sometimes requires crazy behavior to stay sane. The books anchored me to the things that I believed were most important about my life. The physicality of the objects themselves mattered.
Nowadays, the first thing I do in a hotel room is find a spot to set up my iPod speakers and get music going. But I still have a couple of books and a journal or two that I need to find a good spot for. It's a way of saying that for the next day or three or five, this place is mine.
Although it's one of Dick's minor works, I suggest also reading "Humpty Dumpty in Oakland." Lots of Bay Area scenes!
Posted by: Marcus Banks | September 21, 2009 at 08:04 PM
Damn the man for writing on amphetamines! LoA hasn't even started to collect the short stories, much less the minor novels... I need to retire just so that I can read for ten hours a day.... (It's not going to happen within the next decade, I'm afraid).
Posted by: T Scott | September 21, 2009 at 08:17 PM
Those Dick compendiums have been mighty tempting, though I do have plenty of Dick as it is.
I hear you particularly in using books as an anchor...they're very much that for me and I seem to buy more books (certainly more than I can read) when I'm going through harder times emotionally. They have a certain comfortable familiarity and I seem to find "shelf" space in whatever place I'm staying.
Posted by: snail | September 29, 2009 at 12:37 AM