With two European trips in succession this year, I’m tired of packing and unpacking, and I’m wondering how many more times I’ll want to put myself through these long jaunts. Is it time to hang up my carry-on and settle down in Magee?
But if I don’t keep traveling, how will I add to my souvenirs? I don’t want shot glasses from Fairbanks or wooden shoes from Amsterdam. So I’ve developed the habit of shopping for two things when I travel— Christmas tree ornaments and books. When I get them home, I never say, “What was I thinking?” if I have a new ornament with “Finland” etched into the glass ball or if I have a new book.
I’ve collected the travel ornaments for years, but the book buying started on a Mississippi River cruise in 2014. We were in the once-French town of St. Genevieve, Mo., and I saw a beautiful blank book of very fine paper bound in Italian leather. I use many such books for journals and ideas, so I bought it and brought it home to use for recording quotations I liked from books I was reading.
I know a blank book doesn’t count as a “book,” but once you write in it you can read it, so that got me started looking for books as I travel. I bought another blank book from the World War I Museum in Kansas City, Mo., on a 2016 trip. Its cover was a montage of red poppies, which was the symbol of WWI. I also used it to record quotations.
On my next trips I began to look for real books with words already in them.
On a Columbia River cruise in 2017 (alot of cruising going on here, I know) I found the oldest book store in Oregon. Klint’s in The Dalles is every reader’s dream bookstore: worn wood floors, books stuffed everywhere, the smell of paper and ink, and a bookstore dog who seems to live there. I looked for an hour for just the right book about Oregon or by an Oregonian, and I found exactly what I knew I would love—A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman (yes, the Swedish author I keep trying to get you to read). It isn’t about Oregon or by an Oregonian, but I had been looking for it. And book collecting doesn’t have to be logical.
In 2019 we toured the western national parks and found ourselves at the Crazy Horse Monument in South Dakota. In the museum store I bought The Strongest Indian in the World by Sherman Alexie. It’s a collection of short stories about Native Americans, some who are well assimilated into modern mainstream American culture and some who are not. Alexie writes about modern Native Americans with great insight and sensitivity, and you’ll learn much about them from his books, especially his novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. This one is billed as a young adult read because the story is told through a teenager’s eyes, but it’s very adult and very real.
In 2022 we were on a bus trip to Waco, Texas, to see sites popularized by home redo experts Chip and Joanna Gaines and to Pawhuska, Okla., to see where the “Pioneer Woman” cooking shows are filmed. I kept hearing about a book, Killers of the Flower Moon, a true story from that area of Oklahoma about what happened when the Native Americans found themselves on rich oil land in the oil boom of the 1920s and the plots by white men to marry — and murder — Native American women to inherit their oil lands.
My grandfather worked in those very oil fields in the ‘20s and he and my grandmother lived in towns nearby like Okmulgee and Muskogee. I wondered if he had heard the stories of these murders, so I had to buy and read the book, which I very much enjoyed despite its grim subject. I think a movie has been made from it—but just watching the movie is cheating!
On our trips this year I found that Dutch bookstores only sold books written in Dutch, and Sweden bookstores sold books written in Swedish. Imagine that. So for our April trip to the Netherlands I took The Hiding Place about Corrie ten Boom, a Christian who hid Jews from the Nazis. In Sweden last month, I was reading the Fredrik Backman book Beartown, that I reported on last week. It brings a small Swedish town to life.
Stop filling your house with cheap souvenir magnets and make your travel souvenir a great book to focus on under your reading lamp — one with or without writing in it.
