For contemporary fiction, I rely on my Kilgore public library card and the digital collection offered by Northeast Texas Library System. But, with space at a premium and weight a pressing consideration, I brought only a handful of traditional books with me.
For the first phase of my mobile lifestyle, I mostly brought books that tickled my imagination… life on a tugboat, The Story of the World in 100 Moments, Leanings (all 3 of them) by Peter Egan, Lost Horizons, a clever book of “vocabulary” lessons, Oregon’s Outback, a couple of McCullough histories…
Leanings is a 3 volume series of motorcycling essays by one of the all-time best — likely the best, at least in my opinion– motojournalists… three years of birthday gifts from one of the most thoughtful males I know and one of my best motorcycle pals, Jeff Myers.
The tugboat thing was a gift from my son-in-law, Scott Heater, who knows I’d love to live on a boat in the Pacific Northwest.
The vocabulary book is an entertaining linguistic, tongue-in-cheek exercise. Not as fun as the venerable Almanac of Words at Play series, but I own this and I’ve lost those.
Lost Horizons is an old literary classic, recounting an accidental trip to Shangri-La… fiction with mesmerizing imagery.
Surprisingly, — to me, at least — the one I’ve spent the most time with on this trip is Annals of the Former World by John McPhee… a geological cross section, really a geological dissection of North America and its plate tectonics influences. The book was a gift several years ago from Kilgoreo Mark Rosen and in my travels across recent years has offered insight into the geology of the terrain at hand, wherever that might be.
All that, of course, is apropos of nothing beyond tonight’s mental meandering.
You have spurred me to reread, “Eyewitness to History”. I found it in a Stars & Stripes Bookstore in Spain about 30 years ago. First hand accounts of the eruption of Vesuvius, ancient Greeks, Atilla the Hun, running from B.C. to the 1980s. I’ll have to loan it to you when you get back down south.
I’m completely unfamiliar with it. I’ll look forward to it.