The heft of choice

What books to take into the thunderous mountains?

Gertrude Stein was a possibilility, but "The Making of Americans" which he'd lugged around France, was heavy at 925 pages.

He'd been meaning to read "The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales" with the commentary by Joseph Campbell, but it too was thick.

"Tristam Shandy" which he read loved to read in small doses, was a shoo-in, for Sterne always makes him laugh.

Quality lit weighs a ton. Better to take paperbacks, like the James Bond novels he'd been re-reading for the first time since his teens or a detective novel.

Issued in slim editions, poetry made the cut. Volumes by Inger Christensen, Tomas Transtormer and Basil Bunting together weighed much less and took no more room in his bag than the collected novels of Samuel Beckett.

"Poetry is the sound of an elephant learning how to swim", wrote George F. Butterick in a poem included in his selected poems.

And so on to to Wyoming, land of dinosaurs, with a nice bag of real hand-picked books.