John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie is a voting member on the Board of Directors here.  Unlike Kerouac, Steinbeck set out as a wizened, sober man looking for an America he felt he had lost touch with and could no longer write about.  If you haven’t read Travels with Charlie, I recommend it.  The only thing wrong with that book is that it’s too short.

An early chapter of the book details the outfitting of a Ford truck that will carry our author and his dog through the story.  The truck itself is a compact caravan featuring a sleeping berth, bookshelf and dining table.   Influenced by that example, I made sure to include in my own truck a bin of edible treats to share with fellow travelers and roadside innkeepers.  I’m looking forward to trying John’s back-of-the-truck laundry solution (it involves a trash bucket, a lid, and some rope), and I look forward to one day cooking my dinner in tin parcels on the engine bay.

However, I differ from J.S. on a few counts.  For one, he lamented overpacking books.  No such thing.  I should have packed my Arabic and German language texts, all my cookbooks, and those extra volumes of poetry I pondered over the night before departing.

Here, in no particular order, are the books now in my hands, being read:

Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Death
Thomas Dumm, Loneliness as a Way of Life
A Woman Alone: travel tales from around the globe
The Essential Jung
Hafiz, trans. Daniel Ladinsky, The Gift
Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen Mitchell
Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments: honor and poetry in a Bedouin society
Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul