While rummaging in my car the other day I discovered Eudora Welty and James Herriot pressed together intimately in the trunk, which I bet is a sentence never written before. My first thought after finding them face to face was who would win a fist fight between Eudora Welty and James Herriot’s wife Joan. My next was to wonder if anyone other than me carries books in their cars in case of reading emergencies and unforeseen opportunities. So I took it upon myself to ask, being a responsible literary citizen. Interestingly, the answer turns out to be pretty much universally yes.
Also interesting is the vast range of books themselves. They included dictionaries, novels, atlases, cookbooks, phone directories, comic books, histories, biographies, audio books, manuals of all sorts, bibles, wine-tasting notes, books of knitting patterns, books of sheet music, books about breastfeeding, and a handbook on vipassana meditative practice.
A naturalist in Hawaii had two notebooks of her own research into how one in five albatrosses is gay and only female frigate birds are thieves. A novelist had Evelyn Waugh and The Rules of Golf.
A dentist had books about railroads and circuses. A doctor had only books by doctors. A chancellor had comic books.
A publisher had 20 copies of one of the books he had published. A great novelist had 20 kg of string quartet music. A woman in Alaska had every single book she owned because she was moving from one apartment to another. A winery owner had wine-tasting notes which he noticed were all garbled at the end. A baseball maniac had David Shield’s oddly hilarious Baseball is Just Baseball, the gnomic sayings of Mariners’ outfielder Ichiro Suzuki.
A friend in Australia had The Story of the tMelbourne Cricket Ground. Another Australian had the wild American jazz poet Mezz Mezzrow’s Really the Blues. The greatest travel writer in the world, Jan Morris, had dictionaries in French, Spanish, German, and Italian. One woman in London had books about Margaret Thatcher and rats and another had Baby’s First Catholic Bible and Salmon Fishing on the Yemen. One priest carried a manual on how to preside over last rites and another books about how to preside over weddings and how to grow camellias.
A Canadian friend had books about tractors and sake. Another friend in Canada had Nietzche’s Ecce Homo. A friend in Belize had a novel in Belizean English, as he said, which