Travel Reads

It's not my intention to turn this into a travelogue (or a travelblog), and am keeping a notebook of observations, impressions, etc, which I might return to and use in some form or another at a later date. But thought I should pop my head up on my travels to say 'Hi' and talk about some of the books that have accompanied me so far.

One of the many, tremendous things about travelling is that I always read much more than I can usually find the time for. I'm not much good for anything on long haul flights, but train journeys and waiting for planes is a great time for reading, particularlarly once I've had my fill of looking out the window or observing people. Reading is also a great defence against jet-lag - to stave off sleep at 8 o'clock of an evening... for an extra 20 minutes or so!

The two PaperBooks titles I packed to accompany me were Michael Marr's Three Jumpers and Jon Haylett's Black Mongoose. I figured these would last me until we reached the UK at least, but I enjoyed both so much that I finished Three Jumpers in Hong Kong (Kowloon) and Black Mongoose in Italy (Rome, La Spezia and Cinque Terre, Siena).

Seeing the way things were going, and itching at the relative cheapness of books anywhere outside of Australia, we couldn't resist buying Tim Winton's Breath in HK airport (a book I've been after for a while, but couldn't afford the hard cover edition) and Haruki Murakami's After Dark - another author we both enjoy.

The slim After Dark saw me out for our return to Rome from Siena and flying across to the UK, and Breath has accompanied me from London to Wotton-under-Edge to Cardigan. All this tremendous literature is, of course, generating ideas and strings of words of my own, and so my notebook is rapidly filling with phrases, descriptions, story outlines, notes.

And now, with my internet time about up, I want to wander about the town, find a bookshop and pick up another couple of titles for the next leg of our journey.