Three weeks of travel, a lot of it on trains and in places with no signal, and I am carrying one small bag so weight matters. I read maybe an hour a day normally but on trips it goes up to three or four. The appeal of a long series is not running out and not having to choose. The worry is getting stuck with 900 pages I am not enjoying on day four with nothing else. How do people usually get this wrong?
Counterpoint for the series, since nobody has made it. Three or four hours a day for three weeks is a lot of reading, and there is a specific pleasure in living inside one world for a whole trip that five separate books do not give you. If you already know you like the author, the series is the better experience. The rule I use is: only commit to a long series if you have read and enjoyed something else by the same writer.
Read three or four sample chapters before you go, from more books than you plan to take. It takes an evening and it removes most of the risk from either strategy. The book you thought you would love and cannot get into is a much bigger problem 400km from a bookshop than it is at home.
And pick at least one that is easy and fun. Travel reading gets interrupted constantly and a demanding literary novel that needs an hour of quiet to click is a bad fit for a station platform.
Whatever you take, bring at least one nonfiction thing. Three weeks of one register gets tiring in a way people do not anticipate, and switching to something factual for an evening resets the appetite for stories.
Practical note on the one small bag constraint: mixed formats work well. One physical book for planes and takeoff, everything else on a phone or e-reader. The phone reading app is a decent fallback for queues and waiting rooms even if you would not choose it for an evening.
@slowtrainjo · 4mo ago · 3 replies
Standalones, and the reason is exactly the risk you already named.
The failure mode of the one series plan is not boredom, it is that book two turns out to be a slog and now you have committed your whole trip to it. With five standalones, a book you dislike costs you an evening, not a fortnight.
On the weight problem: an e-reader solves this completely. Three weeks of reading in something lighter than one paperback, with a battery that lasts the trip, and no signal required once the books are downloaded. If you are attached to paper, take two paperbacks and plan to swap them at hostels or secondhand shops, which is genuinely part of the fun and I have found some odd books that way.
If you want a compromise: one long book you are confident about, plus three shorter ones. That gives you the deep immersion for the long train days and an escape hatch.
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@margin_notes_mo · 4mo ago
Second the e-reader, with one caveat: download everything before you leave and check they actually downloaded rather than showing as available in the cloud. I discovered mine had not synced while sitting on a train with no signal and eleven hours ahead of me.
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@capsule_curious · 4mo ago
The paperback swap thing is real. Hostel shelves are full of abandoned books in five languages and it turns the problem into a small adventure rather than a logistics exercise.
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