Why are travel books still so much better than websites when it comes to inspiring you on where to go and what to do?  I keep trying to use the web for various destination recommendations but I always resort back to the Fodors guide books and the “if you only have 3 days in Barcelona” type lists they provide.

Should we try and bring our guidebooks?  I really want to but they are super heavy.  The biggest pro of travel books is that they don’t need a power cord J   The biggest con is the weight.  I’ve looked for the Kindle edition but many are not there…..oh well.  Right now the plan is to bring a few and discard them along the way.  My mom and dad can bring some too when they meet us in Morocco.  Mouni and Kim can bring the rest when they meet us in Vietnam.

Anyone have any better ideas!?  Love to hear them!

The luxury of being able to read all the books now. Trying to jam it in so I don’t need to bring them :)

What is a “family book club?” Quite simply, it is a list of books we are all going to read together.  Each person will be able to read the book with their own Kindle Reader and then we can discuss each book as part of our daily routine.  The twins are going to skip the book club and use Duck, Duck Moose apps while Wescott, Yve, Otto, Cliff and I participate.

I enlisted my sister, Kaarina, who is a high school English teacher to help us put together a book list that would be appropriate and fun for the whole family.  We tried to pick many different types of books…some classics, a few recently published titles, non-fiction, fiction, etc.  We deliberately picked some titles that thematically went with some of the places we are visiting.  Finally, we tried to pick books that not everyone had read, which is tough since Yve has read everything.

The next step was to see  if we could get the books on the Kindle.  By now it seems like every book SHOULD be available on the Kindle but there are still a lot that aren’t including classics like Catcher and the Rye…..oh well…scratch that one….

We have roughly 45 books in our booklist and downloaded on our Kindle readers.  We may use them all or we might come home having only read half.  We aren’t going to stress about it but I thought some of you might be interested in a random sample of a few of the titles..

• 1984
• Night
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower
• The Giver
• Tuesdays with Morrie
•  The World’s Strongest Librarian
• The Color of Water
• The Voices of Marrakesh
• A Girl Called Problem
• The Last Lecture
• In Defense of Food

For those of you who want to go crazy and see the whole list, feel free to “friend” me on Good Reads (http://www.goodreads.com) and check out my “to-read” list.  My profile name is: Misopiso.