This week I’ll be spending 52 hours in Lucca, a Medieval city crowded with cosplayers, comic book fans, roleplayers and assorted geeks.
To spend these 2 days and spare change in Lucca, I’ll have to spend 11 hours on different trains.

And while I might certainly slip my old Kindle reader in my bag, I think I’ll go for the old school solution, and pocket a big, fat paperback.

As I discussed at length in the past, a big fat paperback has a number of uses, while traveling – it can hold train tickets and receipts, you can slip business cards between its pages, you can take notes on its margins.
You can use it as an emergency pillow while laying belly-up on a bench.
In case you need to spend some long hours in waiting rooms, it serves as an excellent barrier between you and other “fellow travelers”.
Also, if it’s in a language different from that of the natives, it will help you avoid unwanted conversation.
And of course you can read it.

For this trip, I’m carrying along The Adventures of Indiana Jones, a nice fat omnibus of the novelizations of the three Indy movies.
Now I like novelizations – and I actually went through the book version of Raiders of the Lost Ark before I saw the movie, in 1984.

Now I’m pretty curious about the other two.
If there’s a thing I missed in the two Indy sequels is the darkness that surrounds the main character – Indiana Jones in raiders is a hero but a hero with a past, and not necessarily a nice person to know.
That darkness was toned down in the following movies – and I think that was a loss.
The Raiders novelization, if possible, makes the whole story darker, and adds a few extra scenes.
I wonder if peraps in the follow-up novels this remained.

Anyway – the book will be in my bag, together with my dice and my netbook.
I’ll read on the train, I’ll play at the fair, and I’ll write whenever possible.

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