It's often the last consideration when packing for a holiday: the holiday read.
Passing though an airport is a last chance to pick up a lascivious pool-side page turner, or some highbrow intellectual skimmed from the top of the duty free best seller pile.
However well intentioned, travellers often have little time for reading.
They can often find themselves picking up more reading material than they can get through.
And that's to say nothing of that pile of paperbacks you have, untouched at home.
To describe this phenomenon there's a Japanese phrase that Bibliophiles should add to their lexicon: Tsundoku.
Literally a "reading pile-up" the word describes an out of control reading pile which lies untouched and unloved.
Never fear! We have a guide for travelling readers to help them turn over a new leaf and find a new home for their unloved stories.
Audiobooks
The best and worst part of reading is that it takes up a lot of your attention. You can only really burn though the pages when you are truly at your leisure, in the hold of a plane or by the beach.
Audiobooks frees up your time, eyes, and hands while you're on your way. If you're an avid reader and traveller audio apps or public domain audio libraries such as Librivox.org might be your next port of call.
Staring out the plane porthole allows you contemplate the profundity of each phrase, while also not having to lug around the back catalogue of a small lending library make it a game changer. Plus many apps such as Amazon's Audiable allow you to speed up playback. You'll be burning through Proust and Tolstoy in no time!
Be willing to abandon a bad book
In Sun Tzu's great tome The Art of War, he declares that the "best surrenders come without bloodshed."
There's no shame in admitting defeat. Sometimes we can be duped by the cover on an airport bookshelf, or drawn in by the opening pages of a book only to find it runs out of steam.
There's no point in suffering through a pulp novel for pride. It's time to find a new read.
Book Crossing
What to do with your books, both hits and misses, once you've reached the back cover?
BookCrossing.com is a website that helps old books find new readers.
Operating under the slogan "if you love your books, let them go!" the website allows travellers to pass on a book "into the wild."
Let loose in the reading piles of hotels and hostels the project, readers are encouraged to post a review to their website with a message as to where it was found.
By labelling a book you can keep track of your old book and check in on its progress around the world.
It allows a good story to start a new chapter on the road and another chance at a happy ever after.
It's certainly puts a full stop to travelling Tsundoku build up.