The Book Nerd’s Guide to Air Travel

Welcome to the Book Nerd’s Guide to Life! Every other week, we convene in this safe place to discuss the unique challenges of life for people whose noses are always wedged in books. For past guides, click here.
By the time you’re reading this, assuming all has gone according to plan, I will be on an international flight to jolly old England. Subsequently, by the time you’re reading this, I likely have already instigated or escalated several disagreements about what kind (and what number) of reading materials are acceptable for a one-week vacation.
Traveling is an anxious and hectic process, filled with a great many decisions, any of which, if decided with haste or haphazardly, can ruin your vacation. This is never truer than when you’re flying. There are more constraints on air travel than on a Bennet daughter’s marriage prospects. Your space, your time, your patience, they’re all under stress on an airplane. The way I usually mitigate this kind of stress is with a good book or twelve—but good luck with trying to cram that mini-library into an overhead bin–compatible rolling suitcase.
But you’ve got to make it work. You can’t spell “vacation” without “cat” or “taco,” and the only thing you love more than those things are books. But there are so many considerations to be made.
Because of space limitations and the nickel-and-diming of baggage fees, the idea of carting hefty hardcovers is right out. Pliability is the name of the game, which means all those wonderful, exciting new releases you’ve lined up are probably going to sit this trip out. It’s in their best interest, anyway. Do you want to risk messing up the dust jacket this soon into a book’s shelf life because your soft-sided suitcase was slung onto the baggage carousel like, well, like a younger Bennet daughter entering the marriage market?
Then again, maybe it’s your e-reader’s time to shine. Its sleek flexibility is what attracted you in the first place, and you did download all those canon classics before the holidays. They haunt you still. When the wind is right, you can still hear Tess of the d’Urbervilles call your name. At least until your battery life runs out mid-flight because charging somehow escaped your pre-trip checklist.
Clearly it’s not safe to rely solely on your e-reader to get you through several days spent separated from your personal library. It’s best not to leave these things to chance, and to always have backups, as if you’re Mrs. Bennet chucking dispensable daughters to eligible suitors.
The other downside to ereaders is that no one can see what you’re reading. Occasionally, you’re perfectly content for this to be the case. You don’t need strangers on the train to see you whipping out Flowers in the Attic. But sometimes, you’re reading something that’s trendy, edifying, or otherwise, as the kids used to say, on fleek. Many have been the times I wanted to indicate to others, subtly and tastefully, that I too am familiar with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s work and, because of this, we share a common bond. How am I supposed to make this announcement if I have neglected to make room in my suitcase full of crap for some dazzling paperbacks?
There are people in this world who think “the essentials” are socks, toothpaste, a passport. They’d rather struggle to fill their finite packing space with extra pairs of underwear and versatile shoes. I am not one of these people. I’m the type of person who’s easily able to devise an annotated list of 12 to 14 situations in which I could conceivably run out of reading material, including plagues of paper-eating locusts, being trapped in the hotel elevator, accidentally dropping my e-reader from a scenic balcony, or the sudden onset of a sleeping sickness that infects everyone but me.
This is all to say there are four physical paperback novels in the cargo hold of this airplane, one in my carry-on bag, and half a dozen ebooks in my purse. My bags are as crammed full of reading material as a country ball is with Bennet daughters. My only concern now is what I’ll do with all the books I buy during the course of this vacation.
I hope to see you in London. I’ll be the woman walking around Trafalgar Square with no jacket or pants, clutching all 768 pages of The Heir Apparent.