There are a gazillion things to observe when on the road, and here's one of my favorites: the books people read.

Anytime you see someone reading a book, they're traveling. There is of course the geographic location in which they are actually reading. The English fellow above, for example, is sitting on the upper deck of the restaurant at the Penguin Village in Dahab, Sinai. Behind him is the Gulf of Aqaba, and were he to turn his head 90 degrees to the left, he'd be looking across the water at the barren mountains of Saudi Arabia, and perhaps at a cargo ship en route to or from Eilat, Israel or Aqaba, Jordan. Not a bad place to read.

But there is also the mental journey that a book takes people on. The English fellow in Dahab is reading about Paul Theroux traveling overland from Cairo to Cape Town, and based on where the book is open to I'd guess he's somewhere around Tanzania or Malawi. Any genre, not just a travel narrative, takes the reader on a journey of some sort. (I could say a lot about Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov at this point, but I'll resist the urge.)

Once at a cafe in Beijing, sipping coffee at the start of what would be a 14-month journey across Asia, I was reading Theroux's Fresh Air Fiend and underlined many lines, including these:

Losing a friend to death or absence or misunderstanding is not only a blow to self-esteem but a stun to memory. The sad reflection that we are losing a part of ourselves is true: part of our memory has departed with the lost friend.

I was traveling in China, but with these lines I was traveling elsewhere to, considering the truth of the words — the ways in which relationships make us who we are and the dangers of neglecting or scuttling them, the risks of extended trips away from home, the multi-dimensional tragedy of a childhood friend's recent suicide.

Books are a gift, a way of enriching and shaping our physical journeys. Any books or lines that have struck you? If so, please leave a note in the comment section.