Things are packed, tickets and documents are in a closed pocket, shoes are polished. It remains only to come up with an interesting activity for the next few hours. Music in headphones is good during walking, but if you have to travel by bus, car or train, this is a great reason to read something that you didn’t have enough time for before. Or choose something fundamentally new.
1. "Zen in the art of writing books." Ray Bradbury. Perhaps this work will become the beginning of your path as a writer, help you create beautiful texts for posts on social networks, or simply allow you to see the "inside out" of the work of a recognized master in the field of fantastic literature. In a thin book there is a place for a sense of humor, the voice of a wise old man, an innocent, childish view of the world. This is not just a list of notes, but another amazing story of the life of the writer himself, as well as "Fahrenheit 451", "Dandelion Wine", "Martian Chronicles" - from birth and all the way to the present day.
2. Collection of stories by Anton Chekhov. Anything you can find in a bookstore. Even if the trip ends earlier than the book is not a problem, each chapter is finished here, concise in content and meaning. Easy, unobtrusive, vital. Familiar types and characters, a simple, understandable language that speaks to the reader about love, the vicissitudes of fate, joys, disappointments, stereotypes, art and much more, which today is an integral part of human existence.
3. Collection of stories by O'Henry. Chekhov's European "colleague" on the issue of short prose. Openly, as if with a smile, he talks about the most important things that are invisible in the variety of everyday problems. The comic cover hides the most serious underlying reason, and the obvious, at first glance, meanings are almost a detective subtext. Unpredictable endings make you rejoice, cry, go in search of adventure with the heroes, see happiness where there used to be only routine.
4. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. A good way to get a thrill while traveling by train or find differences from the film adaptation of the same name in 2018. For a couple of hours you will become a full-fledged passenger of the Istanbul-Kale carriage and you will have all the cards in your hands to find the criminal before the world famous Hercule Poirot. And he is not French at all, but Belgian. The book is a classic of the genre that evokes the same thrill both when first read in school and many years later.
5. "The Melancholy Cure" by Ray Bradbury. The collection of stories closes this list for a reason: good miracles, everyday magic and eternal hope for the best remain with the reader for a long time. This is a source of new strength, an incentive to change reality, to dare to let new, still unfamiliar people into it. And then life after the trip will retain all its brightness, or maybe it will become even a little more colorful.
