Reading in a Foreign Country

One of the biggest challenges for me before my intercontinental move was whittling down my book collection. Growing up a reader and having various careers in and around the book industry meant I had quite the mountain of books to sort through. Which ones would I keep forever? Which ones would I donate, or let friends or family have? Which ones did I want to take with me in my suitcase? (why isn’t “‘all of them” an option??)

After much consideration I stored a few boxes at my parent’s house for later retrieval, donated the vast majority to friends and family, and selected a few precious volumes to carry with me on the plane. Unfortunately, books are not light and I had to make some tough decisions between clothes or books. It wouldn’t all fit, as hard as I tried! In total I brought around 7 books which isn’t nearly enough.

A big comfort in the early days of our adventure was diving into a book at the end of the day, which means I quickly went through my slim stack. The best investment I made before leaving the US was buying a Kindle Paperwhite. eReaders had never been my thing when I had endless paperback or hardcover options at my fingertips. Now that physical copies were largely out of reach in my native language I relied on using my Kindle to download books in English. 

I could take it with me to read while waiting in various offices of the bureaucratic process of getting established in a foreign country, at night using the dark mode feature to reduce eye strain, or on the plane for a visit back to the US (to stock up on more books of course). 

Luckily I have been able to pick up a few more books when I’ve seen them in bookstores here, often in a very small Foreign Languages section. There was one glorious bookstore in Barcelona that had so many books written in English that I nearly spent half a day deciding on three titles to buy. (Full details of that visit will be revealed in an upcoming post!) 

If it wasn’t for my Kindle though I would be a reader without books, and that’s one of the saddest ways to live for any bibliophile.