When you think about the holidays, you tend to associate memories to those locations; the foods you ate, the sights you saw, the moments in your life that are special. I’m not sure if I’m a little different or if there are others but I also associate a book or two with the holidays. Now I was away in Adelaide recently and I got to thinking about this and wondered which books I might associate with this trip.

It is not just the books I’ve read while on holidays, it could all include the books I might have bought while there. It is weird; I associate my honeymoon with Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, while that is nowhere near romantic it was what my new wife was reading when we first got into America. If I actually want to break up my honeymoon a little further so the whole thing is not associated with Vonnegut, I could say I associate Los Angeles with Breakfast of Champions, A Study in Scarlet for Las Vegas (I believe I was reading that at the time) and San Francisco is associated with poems by John Keats, which is more romantic, we saw a movie called Bright Star while in San Fran and I brought a collection of romantic poems from City Lights.

It is not just my Honeymoon; Spain reminds me of The Long Goodbye, driving to Paris reminds me of the God-awful Nowhere Man and Paris itself reminds me of Red Harvest. Two trips to New Zealand included Blood Meridian the first time and The 5th Wave the second (with TransAtlantic the perfect book for the flight). Then there was a recent trip to Melbourne that reminds me of Burial Rites but the lonely trip home reminds me of The People of Forever Are Not Afraid and the list goes on. It is interesting how I associate these experiences with books and wonder if people do this with holidays or other moments in your life?

I wonder what my recent trip to Adelaide will be associated with; could it be Barracuda, Solo, Paddle Your Own Canoe or even High Fidelity? Let me know in the comments if you do something similar? I have to think about some key moments in my recent life and see if they are associated with books. I’m not too sure, I do associate one wedding anniversary with a beautiful copy of Frankenstein; I wonder if all those weird books I associate with my marriage says something about me or my marriage?