A traveler should probably have wide interests, perhaps even to the point of enjoying cities. I got my annual Tucson fix yesterday. It took three hours. I did enjoy hitting up a popular bagel chain.

Then I walked through a book superstore, armed with a gift certificate intended for movie soundtracks. The remainder would be squandered at the cafe. Thus I would be spared the moral stain of reading any of their books.

It used to be exciting to go to these book superstores when they were a new thing. I've actually been to their progenitors in Ann Arbor and Manhattan. Lately I wander hopelessly from aisle to aisle until I capitulate by finding a dog magazine and going to the cafe.

The subject of reading is important to full time RVers and other travelers. At first glance books would seem to fit in beautifully with our lifestyle. But they disappoint.

First, there's the content of books--the trivial subject matter. Then there's the slavishness to publishing industry fads and trends. But it would be easy to tolerate these foibles if books just weren't so thick.

The first book of importance after Gutenberg was the Bible which is about 2" thick if the leaves were the thickness of most modern books. This proves that, however inspired its authors might or might not have been, its editors were blockheads.

Then in the 1600's and 1700's precedents were set by Cervantes, Richardson and Gibbon. They graced the world with ponderous books as thick as the hulls of ships.

But as book printing matured, why didn't it outgrow the tendency to make books as thick as a Bible? In the 1800's certain blockbusters were a thousand pages thick, like Tolstoi's War and Peace. Perhaps that established a trend. A century and a half have passed, but this book, Karenina, and the tomes of Dickens are as good at propping open windows on hot summer days as they were the day they were published.

Why are most modern books 300 or 400 pages? I suppose it's because the crucial step in selling a book is getting the customer to reach out and pull it off the shelf. A book is more tactilely appealing when wider than an index finger. This also leaves room for a catchy title and graphic design.

Then the sucker looks at the opening paragraph and is charmed by the lucid and inspired writing--the last to found in the book, in all likelihood. Recall Moby Dick. I've overcome this trap by making it a habit to open prospective books in the middle. Do so and you'll probably never buy another book as long as you live.

In our own age the thickness of books is determined purely by marketing and economics. A 500 page book probably costs little more to manufacture than a 50-pager, once the fixed costs are considered. And in New York, those must be considerable. The world of books and thought, for all its pretensions, works like super-sized fast food or 50 pound bags of dog chow at Costco.

I never liked the physical act of reading a book--the endless sitting and the mechanical rastering of eyeballs across a page. It sucks the very life out of me. It makes me feel like I have a disease that can only be cured by walking outdoors, where I can look off at a distance and think.

It is odd that reading books has an intellectual image, when in fact it is the opposite of thinking for yourself. This was the theme of Schopenhauer's essay against reading. Reading is passive. Information flows in only one direction.

Of course the polemics of the book biz are neither here nor there. It is a subject onto which we project our personalities. Most full time RVers are proficient downsizers compared to the population as a whole. Why should downsizing be limited to household clutter alone?