Capital City Reads

What is harder than picking your next book on your TBR?? Deciding what or how many books to bring on a trip with you! The amount of times I change how many books I will bring with me is insane. What is worse, is half of the time I don’t even have time to read on these trips (I will fall asleep in a car or plane, so I don’t really read during the travel part). But, I recently went back to Ohio to visit my family and I thought I’d do a quick round up of everything bookish that I brought with me.

1. Books, obviously.

Normally when I travel I will only bring 1, maybe 2 books, depending on how long I will be gone. Otherwise, I will likely only bring my Kindle, after loading it up with library books from Libby. For this trip I tried to keep it simple. I brought 1 book for a fun read & 1 book that I needed to finish for a book club book exchange. Can you guess which book is which???

A Fate Inked in Blood is the first book in a new series by Danielle L. Jensen. I have seen everyone on instagram RAVING about this new book & couldn’t stand the idea of leaving it partially read at home if there was a slight chance I had time to dive in while away. I’ll link the books Goodreads description here so you can check it out for yourself, but it’s based off Nordic mythology, has forbidden love and of course, magic.

My bookclub is doing an exchange of books where we each annotate a book that another member has picked, then rotating the books between the 5-6 of us. So in the end, you get a fully annotated book and can read everyone’s thoughts on the story! My first book in this exchange was Clade by James Bradley. I was able to get a huge chunk of this book done while I was gone, so I did get some reading done! But this one leads me to….

2. Annotation Tools

I don’t annotate often, but when I do, this is what I like to use. Like I said, I had to annotate Clade to share with the next person in our bookclub rotation. I was designated to use orange throughout each of the books we are reading. After finishing Clade, I realized I needed to order more orange tabs because I went through so many. But my handy Sharpie highlighter is still holding strong.

3. Accessories

And lastly, the accessories! Aside from actual reading material, every big reader knows you need a good pair of headphones for either background music or audiobooks. I have been using these headphones since Christmas, shoutout to Coleman for the birthday/Christmas gift. Again, I love utilizing Libby for audiobooks and have recently been taking advantage of Spotify‘s audiobooks that are included with the premium membership. This is a feature they recently rolled out for their US subscribers (I believe they will be expanding this soon!). With a premium subscription you have access to a large selection of audiobooks, the only draw back being that you only get 15 hours a month. You can pay to extend that time or just pay for the book itself, but I’ll take what I can get for now.

Obviously, no bookish person travels without some sort of bag to keep all of this in. I actually stumbled across this Bookish Goods bag on instagram and I could not resist. I am not really a bag person. I don’t typically carry a purse at all, but I knew this would come in handy for day to day use and it’s spacious enough for travel! It has 2 internal pockets for my pens, wallet and inhaler. And a zip pouch for more secure storage. It is described as being large enough for even your thicker paperbacks. Let me tell you, it holds a lot!

Now tell me, what do you tend to bring when you travel? Are you a kindle only traveller? Or do you try to sneak your entire TBR into your bags?