Travel Reading: Holiday Edition

(Or, 'On Convincing Myself to Travel Lightly')

I've written a few times on travel reading. Last time, I discussed a number of constraints involved:

there are numerous external limitations to what one can plan on reading: the size of one's luggage or carry on bag, the size of the books, the time of the flight, layovers, etc. Each has their own specific challenge. I find that if I fly early in the morning, or red-eye, novels are probably the best, but no James Joyce or David Foster Wallace. 

That post was for a trip to a conference. Since we're going to visit family, I would say that there are a few additional constraints, like the expected amount of time that family members will not be vying for your attention, subtracted by time visiting friends. Or, more importantly, the number of books on departure in relation to the number of books expected to be acquired at destination (or, at least in this case, in Berkeley and San Francisco). Due primarily to that latter point, I've narrowed this trip's selection to four books and on photocopied essay:

• David Mitchell, Black Swan Green. Still working my way through Mitchell's novels, still not sure what I think about them, except that they are worthwhile enough that I will have read three of five.
• Jacques Rancière, Short Voyages to the Land of the People. As you know, I'm writing a book on JR. If you're wondering why I chose this book for this trip, check the physical dimensions: 4.5 x 7 x .5 inches.
• Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It's the Oxford World's Classics edition, so A Vindication of the Rights of Men and An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution are included as well. I'll be teaching MW in my 'Great Philosophers' course next semester, so I am brushing up on her work now (or so I hope).
• Finally, two research selections for my paper with Sean Moreland, "Urged by Schelling": Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka (a critical edition),
• and, a photocopy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "On the Prometheus of Aeschylus." I was writing about this essay this evening, and then I hit a wall, and now I'm blogging. If I don't get around to discussing it on a subsequent post, I'd like to underline that this essay deserves a place among the best of short essays in/on German idealism. It's not immediately clear, but on a second read, one discovers that Coleridge is continuing his conversation with Schelling's work, this time with the often-neglected Deities of Samothrace (1815).

Travel Reading

Traveling imposes its own kind of reading schedule, being that there are numerous external limitations to what one can plan on reading: the size of one's luggage or carry on bag, the size of the books, the time of the flight, layovers, etc. Each has their own specific challenge. I find that if I fly early in the morning, or red-eye, novels are probably the best, but no James Joyce or David Foster Wallace. Nabokov works sometimes (I read Laughter in the Dark on a red-eye), so does Michel Houellebecq (just read one though; my friend Mark reports that he's crossed parts of The Possibility of an Island and Whatever, because he read them on the round-trip from Ottawa to Glasgow for a conference) but I've probably read more Vonnegut novels on airplanes than I have any other author. That includes parts of Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Timequake, and maybe also parts of A Man without a Country. For my morning flight to Memphis, I've decided to try Jailbird. It's not that my decision is based on ease. It's based on organization: Vonnegut's short chapters and sections make for a good read when there are constant interruptions to one's attention span.

I'm also taking Zizek's First as Tragedy, Then as Farce for my flight back (in the afternoon), and Michael Lowy's Fire Alarm (on Walter Benjamin), so that I can try, unrealistically, to work a bit on an abstract about Benjamin's concept of history.

And then, of course, there's the whole Sartre conference...which is why I'm going in the first place.

Tomorrow, I will have a post up about Nepal, thanks to Blogspot's ability to schedule the publication ahead of time.

The Hitchens Travelogue: god is not Great

I am about half way through Christopher Hitchens' god is not Great, and I can admit that, at this point, it is well written; much better written than some of his lesser (h/t to Caroline), um, accomplishments. The most distracting, and annoying part about his narrative is his insistence on telling the reader about how many places he has visited. Great! You're a jet-setter! Hell, you might even get yourself waterboarded at about the same time you have decided to change your mind about the Iraq war! It's a lot of work to recreate yourself from something like a Marxist, to G.W.Bush and war on terror advocate, to 'shoot-from-the-hip' atheist. If you want to know what the latest thing is, Hitchens is there, about 3 months to 5 years too late. To think, this guy once wrote the sharp and polemic The Trial of Henry Kissinger.

So, by the time god is not Great gets to the interesting anecdote about "representing the devil, as it were, pro bono" (the office of the Devil's Advocate having been recently abolished) in the process of the beatification of Mother Theresa (p. 145), he's already visited, in the narrative, Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, Baghdad, Bosnia, Calcutta, Damascus, Tehran, Doha, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Malaysia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and the Vatican (and I may have forgotten some). Hitchens, we know that you're a journalist; you don't have to tell us that you have traveled.

Update: He has also managed to mention trips to Hebron, Uganda and Afghanistan in subsequent chapters.

Update #2 (September 24, 2009): Add a mention of North Korea. His 'new' Afterword (taken from a piece in Vanity Fair) is an account of his book tour. So that adds Little Rock, New York City, Austin, Raleigh, NC, Atlanta, Coral Gables, FL, Los Angeles, Seattle and Canada. And just when you thought it couldn't continue, in his Acknowledgments he references a trip with Ian McEwan to "that remote Uruguayan coast where Darwin so boldly put ashore and took samples."