Ode on an airport bookshop

Looking for a books to bring with me on vacation earlier this week, I came across the second volume of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle. I bought it a couple years ago after finishing the first book, but never got around to starting it.

Reading it now, I’m about 100 pages in and liking it quite a bit. I don’t remember much in the way of detail about the first volume, but so far, at least, this one seems a lot funnier. Maybe it’s just that his descriptions of extremely awkward children’s birthday parties and library song-and-story hours are spot-on to what I remember from when my kids were little and I was carting them around town to such affairs, but I have found myself laughing out loud more than once while reading this book. That was not what I was expecting going in.

Tangentially, I feel the need to note once again how annoyed I am by the closure last year (?) of the bookshop in the Hartford airport. One of my travel rituals was that rather than brining books with me from home, I would stop in this shop to buy a few books on the way to my gate; those would be my reading material for whatever trip I was headed off to.

Now I have to think about it ahead of time. It’s not like I don’t have plenty of to-be-read books pile up at home to select from. There are more than enough and obviously I was able to find books to bring on this trip. But what I liked about the airport bookshop—aside from the ritualistic aspect of it—was that the selection and time limitations there served as a helpful constraint in making my decision about what to read. Often it led me to pick up books I might not otherwise have selected.