When you set out on the road as a perennial nomad, your pack on your back or your duffle bag slung over your shoulder, much of your time is taken up with day to day decisions and activities such as deciding where to go next, finding transportation and victuals and a place to stay, seeing sights, making new friends, avoiding dangers, and so on. Sometimes necessities of survival keep you busy from early morning until you crawl exhausted into your sleeping bag at night. However, you will discover too that periodically, often unexpectedly, you will find yourself with a considerable amount of down time. For instance, you might be waiting for a bus or a train or a ship or a plane; you might be traveling for hours on a bus or a train or a ship or a plane; you might feel like resting up for a few days between adventures. Hopefully you won’t have your passport stolen in an out of the way place like Tehran, Iran, as I did in the 1970s, and have to beg on the streets for two weeks before being able to move on. I found that one way to relieve the ennui under such circumstances was to go to movies; in Tehran back then admission only cost a few cents, but I have to confess that the film options were uniformly terrible, with one or two notable exceptions. As a source of entertainment, books are far more reliable.

When I was a fulltime traveler, I always carried a book in my bag. One book: that was the limit. After all, books are heavy. But as soon as I would finish one, I would abandon it and find another, preferably used, in a hostel or market stall or bookstore. Because of my self-imposed limit of one at a time, I would seek out thick books, the thicker the better, so they would last longer. I think that the page-count record was set by a mass market paperback edition of Shogun by James Clavell. I can’t remember how long it was, but it ran well over a thousand pages. Not all the books I carried were such doorstoppers, but most were substantial.

Nowadays, I suppose you could save some books on your phone or on a tablet. Back then, I didn’t have the option of that luxury. And besides, if I am being honest, I much prefer to read old fashioned paper books that you can hold in your hands, with pages that turn. For me a physical book is an essential aspect of the reading experience. You may disagree, and that’s fine. Just be sure to keep your electronic device well-charged, because you never know where or when you might have a few hours free.

Regardless of the method by which they are read, to me books are an indispensable aspect of existence. I’ve been an avid reader since I was a kid; in fact, I’m a bookaholic. Without shame I admit that I am addicted to books. And on the road you can never be sure that where you are going you will find some in your language of choice, and so you have got to carry them with you. This is one burden that I never begrudged bearing. At one point during my hitchhiking days I stopped wearing underwear so that I would have less clothes to wash, but I never, ever, went anywhere without a book. “Feed your head,” Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane declared in their iconic song “White Rabbit.” Everyone assumed they were referring to psychedelics and other drugs, and that was partially true, but in an interview Slick, who wrote the song, once said that the phrase was “about reading and psychedelics…feeding your head by paying attention: read some books, pay attention.” Here you are out in the wide world, traveling and absorbing its multitudinous wonders. Why would you not also want to go a step further, open books, and travel the multiverse of human thought and experience that you can find within their pages? With books you can go anywhere in the world; you can time travel; you can dive deeply into the psyches and spirits of the authors. Books are an essential component in the journey of a perennial nomad.