Road Trip Books

I'll be making two Via trips out to Ottawa fairly soon, which reminds me that I really do need to book the first one right away, ideally tonight.

I haven't exactly hidden the fact that I thought Austen's Mansfield Park was a dud, or I might be inclined to bring Emma along.  However, that is going to get pushed back at least 6 more months and probably a year or more realistically.

In fact, my next significant road trip is out to Stratford this weekend, which generally works out to two hours in both directions.  We're also staying overnight, so I will likely have some extra reading time between plays and meals.  What I am tentatively planning on bringing is Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, which I have only just started, and Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence.  While Victory City just turned up, I think/hope that I'll be able to make more progress on this under normal reading conditions.

For the first Ottawa trip, I am leaning towards taking Perec's Life: A User's Manual and possibly something short from my TBD pile, possibly Lahiri's Whereabouts.

For the second trip, I haven't really decided, but I am leaning towards Dickens, with Dombey and Son being the logical choice, even though somewhat out of sequence.  I might need to bring something more contemporary in case I find it too hard to get back into a Victorian frame of mind.  (Waugh's Decline and Fall might be just the thing.)

I have three other long novels that I would like to use a long trip to "jump start": Fante's The Bandini Quartet, Fontane's Before the Storm and Steinbeck's East of Eden.  There are quite a few other really long novels that I plan to tackle, but I think these are the most pressing.  I have extremely tentative plans to take the train out to Montreal or the bus to Buffalo or Windsor/Detroit, and if these plans come through, then I already have my reading list ready...