Reading's annual journey

hotspurbooks.com Summer 2026 Book Report

On a cycle tour, you don’t have much space for books. But there’s always plenty of books around. There are always book-lending stations, official or not, along the way. There are the cafe corners, park benches, those little community-based corner lending boxes, and, of course, the official PUBLIC LIBRARY (Actually, one of the Library’s functions in the digital age is as a publicly-funded DVD exchange center, they retain all the charm of the old video rental place where you can browse really off-the-radar films of all sorts.)  I love these kinds of document distribution services, because if you’re biking through a place it really is a give or take spot. You find out what people are reading and giving away around town. Of course, there are also the personal libraries of the friends you stay with or whose homes you visit. Those books are the ones people hold onto, even if they’re never going to read the second hand copy of Les Fleurs du Mal again, or even for the first time. You might grab it up one afternoon off a friend’s shelf and practice your French for an hour. Or read a stanza and realize Baudelaire was never your man. That was a nice coffee date with Baudelaire.

Anywhere you go, there are always books laying around when you get there, and there are places to lay books when you are finished with them. Books are one of the ways I temporarily ‘decorate' a space if I know I might be somewhere for a few days to months. Often, I go out to the local shop and gather up a few of the local titles on offer. This is how you follow the news where you go, or build connections without having to engage in small talk with endless people. You can have a discussion. (Often, if it’s a second hand book, you  can literally have a discussion with the degenerate intellect who left the most ridiculous footnotes in the margins.)

A discussion of books follows, just here of some of the books I encountered on tour Summer 2026. Some I read whole, others I perused, still others I simply had around to glance at. As I pack up my stuff at the end of the summer, I am deciding what to leave here in the gear stash here and what I should give away. The same goes for the little stack of books I accumulated.

Some of the remarkable titles I picked up at the bookstore at the beginning of summer here were Stoner,  by John Williams, The Postal Paths by Alan Cleaver, The English House by Dan Cruickshank and the House by the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune.

I read Stoner right after arriving here and it left me melancholy, sad. It’s about a normal life, but one that seems to not reach enough and then all that’s left is a pile of unread or half-read books. But that’s the way life goes. One reads all the books, teaches the literature classes and gasps at the titles left unread. 

As an antidote to this bleak read, I read the House by the Cerulean Sea. It’s a great summer read, it includes the right mix of imaginative fantasy, paperwork, and philosophical references to make anyone feel smart, no matter their reading level - that’s kind of the point of the story, I suppose. 

Summer had come into full by this point and so I skimmed Cleaver’s The Postal Paths over several weeks, taking it out to breakfast and picking it up on an odd afternoon and reading about one of his collected adventures tracing the men and women of the UK postal service who did it by foot. Naturally, this appealed to me as a bicycle messenger. The footpath postman and the bicycle messenger are both quaintly an entire communication infrastructure that are disappearing in favor of faceless meal service by app. I did bother to buy an Ordnance Survey map of the area for biking around here, so The Postal Paths definitely served my purposes for reading the landscape while biking around

The last of my bookstore purchases was The English House by Dan Cruikshank. I didn’t really take to the discussion in The English House and I admit, I only read a few pages. It’s a dense history and I often get lost in the gossip in romances like this one presents. I lost the thread quickly in the discussion of how these houses were financed and how the styles change over time. Usually I love biking around and looking at architecture. Grant it, I am in Scotland, not England but don’t tell me, show me. I wanted more pictures to go with the discussion of the architecture. This one sat around in my room this summer and kept sort of reminding me: ‘shouldn’t you really be reading me and not that trite fiction, fantasy, and adventure? I am well-researched!’ So I flipped through it and read some of the text surrounding the pictures. I was a total tourist Cruikshank’s history of the English House, I read the highlights. 

This summer I found that I often need a different read. My eyes are often tired at the end of a day of biking, I often don’t have the mental strength required just then to read pages of dense history, or even light fantasy. It might have gotten dark if I am camping out. Or perhaps the light is dim in the room I am staying in. That’s when one needs the ‘easy read.’ That’s the appeal of more visually-driven texts. These are shown books, not told books. This was, after all, my problem with the Dan Cruikshank work. it was a lot of very precise, archivally researched history. It might as well have included a 200 page supplement of lugubrious Jane Austen gossip for added appeal. I need a “graphic novel” something with “visual appeal.” The archivally reconstructed English house was actually a bunch of cards, I found out. It’s summer, I needed to go where the wild things are.

Where the Wild things Are. This classic of modern campfire reading represents a second kind of book. Composed and arranged by Maurice Sendak in the 1960s, this is a gem of symmetry and graphical alignment that visually presents a wild adventure in a fantasy realm. Books like Where the Wild Things Are is often sold under labels like ‘picture books,’or  ‘children’s books.’ If they are more sophisticated, we call them ‘graphic novels,’ or ‘comic books.’ If we are looking for the  high art of the genre, then it’s ‘coffee table book.’ The coffee table book is a curious member of this class. They buyer probably still complains about the price of textbooks in college, but it turns out that was only practice for home decor, later in life. I’d like to discuss the short list of ‘picture books’ I read this summer. These were definitely the more significant reads for me. They are lightweight, light on price (usually under $20.00), and one spends longer with them than on collected notes like Cruikshank’s the English House.

One recent classic in the visual lyrical genre is The Tree and the River by Aaron Becker. This particular volume could be glossed over as some post-Giving Tree piece of naturalist environmentalist propaganda, (The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein tells the story of a doormat tree that literally gives everything away.)The Tree and the River goes deeper than Silverstein’s dreams, though. It’s about a tree and a river and the space that springs up around it. There’s all this decoration that goes up around the tree - all this cityscape and hype and traffic, then it all floats away visually down river. The reader is invited to draw whatever words they like from the images provided. The tree turns the city into marginalia where it usually is the marginalia. You’re following the traffic and you can’t see the tree, this is the classic problem with forests and trees presented in wordless form. This kind of a trip in images  appeals to me as a bicycle messenger. You see all this stuff passing by you, and you know each tree is having the time of its life. You’d love to stay and watch for a season, but you only have an afternoon.

Another favorite of mine in the genre is A Year in the Castle by Nikola Kucharska, in this one we are invited on a whimsical journey through a cross section of a year in an illustrated fantasy medieval castle. It tells a story of a bunch of marginalia all running together, from the cellarars all the way up to King Belabor who is called on to wisely defend his space. And he does so wordlessly and with the sort of solomonic mind we expect from a kingly character. Now this one does have words.  The author (or more likely the producer) provides a description, in text, of the main characters that pass through on the next twelve months’ stage up at the front of the book as a sort of artist’s statement or prologue. But I would imagine that many people could discover the backstory to all these characters just by perusing the images in the book and skipping the text. Of course, because it is a picture book and not blind text, we can pick and choose and flip through the pages and build the stories backward or from the middle from the images. The nice thing about this one is that we can see how every character is doing their appointed thing and there are bigger conflicts circulating. This is precisely the ‘best of times/worst of times’ gist of any good novel. In a Year in the Castle, luckily, it all comes out all right in the end, as with most marginal fantasies. It’s a satisfying one to take to the park on a sunny day and peruse when you want to extract some new little detail from the year’s worth of images. The reader can really see themself in it.

My final offering in the genre of ‘illustrated for non-readers’ genre is Anno’s Journey by Mitsumasa Anno. We well-read literati might glean from the dust jacket that Anno is working in the tradition of Japanese scroll painting. We don’t want to go wandering into the museum without reading the publisher’s statement first. But one needn’t go as far as scrolling the dust jacket to confirm that. Just look at the images! Anno’s Journey is a delightful walk, a jaunt, through various European landscapes. Anno has set the entire scene of his own semi-autobiographical journey in a mixed technological scene, so there is a pastoral steam punk going on in there. I think this is why travelers and tourists seek out a ‘European,’ ‘walkable’ environment. I recognize some of these European landscapes from my own bicycle jaunts in the same topias, U- or Dys-. These or those. I wonder what Anno would do with illustrating Essen, Germany?

Following is my own visual exploration of this text, go read it for yourself first, then read my interpretation of the images [Spoilers have been alerted!] 

There is something mystical, metaphysical about Anno’s delicately drawn and carefully done journey that goes beyond the quaint, romantic European pastoral. Visually, our main character arrives in a small rowboat, buys a horse, rides through a countryside that is notably not motorized. There’s not a build up and teardown of cityscapes like we saw in Becker’s The Tree and the River. There’s no conflict over castles like we saw in Kucharska’s Year in th Castle. This book was published in 1976 - there were already automobiles and chainsaws and lots of bicycles, but Anno has set us firmly in a world without those things. Everyone is walking, there’s a playful attitude among the villagers and peasants it appears - just like from a Brueghel painting. We do see some occasional horse drawn carriages, but no automobiles or motorized traffic anywhere. There is a cycle shop in one of the town scenes that looks a lot like central Bonn, Germany. But even the cycle shop has signage featuring a unicycle, but we don’t even see any bicycles typical of the north Rhine area of the 1970s or today. There’s almost nothing with wheels at all. There are no words and lettering either. There are some trailers and carts in the circus scene - this is one of the scenes that even features any words and lettering - we see ‘ABC’ on the bookstore, we see ‘Circus’ on the circus tent and we see ‘Stagecoach’ Now, our author/illustrator does something cute on the very next page: featured prominently on a Renaissance style town gate it says “Anno 1976.” That is a delightful play on words just there to match the visual lyrical world that Anno has drawn us into. It’s also a practical way for the artist to sign their work in all the ways that means for this extended landscape painting.

On the very next page, “after Anno 1976”, we see a train station and a red train appears. The train will move us on to the next page. The train is a traditional steam-powered one and it moves blindly past some village scenes resembling the ones we saw from the beginning, just after Anno arrived in his boat. Just here, another little Easter egg of Anno’s appears as a red balloon, we follow that to the next page, miss the train and where it was going, the red balloon rises into the sky. That’s it, Anno’s  journey. Where did he go? We see a horse grazing in a pasture, some people doing work. 

When we reach the last page there is an even bigger ‘explanation,’ a kind of footnote that Anno traveled to Europe to study famous European masterpieces and they are referenced in this work. It also tells us that “each traveller with Anno can create his own version of the story.” This footnote is kind of insulting. It pulls us into a practical archival search forvmeaning now. We already had all the meaning, now I am being asked to do art history trivia! I read all this way and I didn’t realize the rules to the game would be buried in the footnotes! I didn’t want this to turn into a book group! Leave the footnotes, just enjoy the drama Anno has laid ff your eyes are not too tired. My conclusion here is that there is always a lot to read into, in almost any book we pick up. there’s a story in images, a story in footnotes. Perhaps a book like Cruikshank’s is a book of hastily pulled together images and lots and lots of footnotes, for Anno, Kucharska, Becker, and Sendak, it’s hastily drawn together notes and painstaking images. I know which ones I’d rather look at after a long day of biking!