As I write this, I’m sitting in an apartment a couple hundred yards away from the beach on the Bay of Biscay in San Sebastian, Spain. We landed a week ago in Lisbon, drove through the north of Portugal, and now are here for a few days to explore this city we’ve never visited before.
It’s been a long time since I traveled this way: sightseeing, navigating in a foreign language, constantly on the go. Since having kids over a dozen years ago, vacations have been spent on beaches or ski mountains with not much in between. Packing for this kind of trip is different, especially when it comes to books.
At home, my to-read pile is actually about four piles in various places around my house and in the back office at the bookstore, as though by spreading them around my husband might not notice how much they grow week to week and threaten to overwhelm our living space. I pondered these piles in the month leading up to our departure, initially planning to pack three—or probably four—books.
“You’re only going to pack one book, right?” my brother asked when we spoke shortly before I left.
I thought he was joking.
“One for the plane to get you there and then you pick up what you need as you go,” he added. “That’s one of the enjoyments: finding those weird English-language book shops and buying a book you never would normally have picked out, but it’s just there so you get it and it’ll be awesome.”
He had a point. I have long thought there are right times and places for certain books in my life. Usually it’s possible to orchestrate that—to put the book down and pick it up later if it’s not the right time. But I had temporarily forgotten the joy of being forced into a book through serendipity.
So I packed Delphi by Clare Pollard, a book that was not too thin or easy but also not too burdensome in topic or page count either, and read it after long days of walking through the busy streets of Lisbon. The narrator was an enjoyable companion, full of wry humor and intelligent facts on an array of topics, but with a focus on mythology. The novel takes place over the course of the long Covid lockdown in England and is about a classics professor whittling away at a project about prophecy in both the ancient and modern worlds. She’s also a wife and a mother and she memorializes those isolating, work-from-home days, that turned into weeks, that turned into months, that turned into years. Yeah, I didn’t think I wanted to read about that either, but she does it so, so well.
We passed many lovely bookstores in our perambulations around Lisbon, but I discovered that our hotel was less than a block away from the oldest bookstore in the world, Livraria Bertrand. With only a few pages left in Delphi and our departure for a remote village in northern Portugal imminent, I perused the small English-language section in a bookstore that has been in operation since 1732. Most of the options were UK editions, lovely paperbacks covered in sans serif fonts and interesting designs. Many of the titles were familiar to me, looking different on the outside but otherwise the same as many of the books we carry in the Book Shop of Beverly Farms. I chose a book I hadn’t heard of before, Class Trip by Emmanuel Carrere, originally published in France in 1995 and in an English translation in 1997. Though the class trip in question was a ski trip and incongruous with my current setting on the sunny coast, I went ahead with it. I love skiing and there are so few good books about the sport. Then we packed up, picked up our rental car, and hit the road.
Stay tuned for next week, when I’ll share my thoughts on Class Trip, book shopping in San Sebastian, and listening to audiobooks while driving through the Spanish countryside.