markk

Currently our household is abuzz with the building anticipation for our upcoming summer trip. This year we're going to Texas to drop off the kiddo at the farm with the grandfolks, then we're flying to the UK for two weeks in Bath, the Cotswolds, and London.

No trip is complete without the perfect reading material, of course. Since we're traveling light, I'm just taking a couple of paperbacks and planning on replicating my experience from my last overseas trip of simply ditching the books when I'm done with them (someone in the Underground may soon stumble across a special find!) and buying another book there when I finish what I've read. The first book I'm taking is a history of role the British railway played in the Second World War, which looks engaging and a quick read, but which also means that I may finish it before I can make it to a bookstore, so the second book really needs to be a good one.

Given our destination, I thought that book #2 should be a nice, fat English novel, preferably a classic. And when I think of reading a nice, fat English novel, my thoughts immediately turn to Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, which I have had on my shelf for years and have long been wanting to read. Of course, I was loath to ditch my nice new Oxford World Classics edition, so I spent the past couple of weeks popping into local used bookstores searching for a cheaper copy that I could abandon in England without a tinge of regret, before realizing that I was being a fucking idiot about it and that I should just get over it and just use the copy I already own.

When I went to my bookshelf to pull it down, though, I spotted these two:

Galsworthy's novel has been sitting on my shelf for so long I forgot I even owned it, which in combination with its subject matter would make it a perfect addition to my trip. And yet Vasily Grossman's novel is one that I have wanted to read for years, and I doubt strongly that I will finish it before I have a chance to peruse the used bookstores in London. So I have a decision to make, and hopefully it's one that I can make before our ride shows up to take us to the airport.