The books you take on vacation say a lot about the way you pack for vacation in general.
The kind of person who forgets a bathing suit is the same kind of person who packs at least one if not three overly ambitious books (I’m just saying, if you’ve got Anna Karenina or Gödel, Escher, Bach in your stack, make sure you double check for your bathing suit).
The kind of person who also remembers their bathing suit is the same kind of person who packs a balance of ambitious, familiar, and mood-varied yet vacation-time only books (I’m just saying, if you’ve got a Shakespeare play, Sudoku puzzles, and some Murakami you’ve been meaning to realize, you clearly not only have a bathing suit, but you have the new one you ordered after you realized, weeks prior, that you’re too fat for the old suit. Well done!).
As a recent vacation taker, I’ve given this a lot of thought in the past few weeks. It feels almost like the mixtape rules. They’re not as refined, but they’re coming together nicely. I haven’t perfected the technique, but I have flattened the approach to the point I can see it’s four corners, and know how to get it to fit in the drawer without crinkling it up, if that metaphor makes sense to you.
I figure I’m at this level because it’s rubbing off on my wife. As she stacked up our books on the table in our Joshua Tree Airbnb, after questioning what I had coming out of my bag in the airport, including some questions about where and how I fit all that stuff in, plus a possession of bathing suit confirmation, because vacations are for vacating work, aka not working, aka relaxing and doing things like SPA and SLEEP, she declared that I should at least explain my theory for how this came to be, because something had rubbed off on her too, and she’d like to at least attempt to understand the chao…err, technique, maybe even charming brilliance, I suggest, that she married into.
Yes of course there’s a technique. Yes of course there’s strategy and chess and obsessively compulsed details. Yes of course I’ll sheepishly own up to them even if it’s a tad bit embarrassing but I like her amusement at these moments even more.
Before I share those with you, as I shared them with her, here’s a picture of our mutual book stack. As a bonus, I invite you to guess who brought what. You already have some clues, and so you know, the Sudoku book is off to the side out of frame, and the black book is one of two moleskin journals I packed (one for each of us), but that’s all I’m going to tell you.
Without further ado, THE VACATION BOOKLIST GUIDE ACCORDING TO CULTISH CREATIVE:
Pre-note #1: this list assumes you have airport and airplane time.
Pre-note #2: this list assumes you have only a moderate level of distraction with you, and not, say, a toddler or anything dependent on you for life, in which case, this is not the list you’re looking for.
Pre-note #3: I don’t know why I feel like there should be an odd number of pre-notes, but I do, so now that we have this out of the way…
ONTO THE LIST.
You need to start with range.
I like to think of this in terms of time-to-kill-time and time-to-live-time. Time-killers are pure entertainment escapism. They’re easy to read and you don’t worry much if you missed a page or a detail of the story. Time-livers (ha, gross, but this feels like a bit so I’m not changing it) are soul-level immersive, where even if they don’t remind you of specific things in your own life, they bring out big feelings in you that you don’t normally get from your highly distractible day-to-day work/life (im)balance.
So you head to the shelf and you pick from this range. It can help to start with the extremes and then work inward. Once you have the most time-living book ready, you pick the most time-killing book that’s calling out to you, and then you pack the middle in.
Quality first with your choices, quantity second.
If you only have two books, you pick one time-killer and one time-liver. If you need 5, pick the outer extremes first, and then fill in the gaps with lesser ideals. You don’t want to be too heavy handed in equals on the extremes. This will lead to vacation becoming work and you can’t have that. Also, you know how much you might read, so choose quantity accordingly. You’ll want to consider suitcase space as you go, which I’m never good at, and always inevitably produces a cramming problem for me, but, I survive, and I remember my bathing suit, so I must be doing something right.
A quick note on old books versus new books is in order. I’m a big fan of the re-read. I know not everybody does that. If you are, this is your permission to pull a book off the shelf that you loved at least 2 years ago if not 20 or 30. If you're not, you've probably got a stack of books you said you’d get to, or even that you’ve said you’ve read. Well, now's the time, baby. Stand in front of the shelf and judge them by their covers. Think: live- or kill-time?
Once you have your books selected, and have assured they all fit, you’re ready to start thinking about sequencing.
My approach to sequencing is to return to the time-liver and time-killer parameters and make a pact with myself that I’ll start with the time-liver and end with the time-killer. The reason for this is pretty simple if not downright obvious: pre-vacation I haven’t vacated work-brain yet, and work brain is ready to put some effort in before it’s pushed out on vacation and full of cocktails and wines and new local beers I wish we could get back home. The liver thing is suddenly making new metaphorical sense here, too. So, yeah.
Start with the hard one. End with the easy one.
By the end of vacation you’ll be max-relaxed. The easy book will help you miss vacation even more. Even if you didn’t get through your whole list, you’ll be ready for this one. If you time it right, you won’t even finish it. Instead, you’ll spend the next week trying to squeeze in a page here and a paragraph there, the last vestige of vacation, and it’ll serve as a perfect off-ramp back to real life, and sobriety (which your liver will thank you for).
That’s it. That’s how you pick a vacation booklist and sequence it for maximum enjoyment.
Find a time-killer and time-liver on your shelf, pull some less extreme books to pair with them, and pack your suitcase with the time-liver in the easiest access spot you’ve got left.
Vacations are for vacating regular life. I don’t know if I’d appreciate reading time as much if it wasn’t scarce. I do intend to make more time for it, as usual, after this trip, but we’ll see what sticks. Books are such special ways to kill time and find feelings inside of ourselves we don’t often have the space or attention to access. This is why you need a stack of books. This is why you need an order. This is why you have to do this in preparation pack mode, to get the most out of whatever precious time you have, away from the regular time.
If you know that feeling too, I’m happy to share this with you.
Oh, and a reminder to not forget your bathing suit if this is a bathing suit type of a trip.
READ MORE BOOKS. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood, after all. And, you know what love is.
Ps. Success looks like this (photo credit: loving wife who understands my madness):
P.p.s. That’s your one other hint for what books came with each of us. Go ahead and guess. I’m very amused by this.
