Ah, books. They're the portable paper movies of the travelling world. You will probably find, as most people do, that the majority of the weight you are dragging round the world with you is made up of bookage. Send 'em home, that's what i say, but i never do. I've got a bad back these days, and books are probably at least partly to blame. Still, you gotta love 'em.
There's basically three types:
A lot of people think they don't need guides, and that the mere act of owning one dooms the bearer to a trip that includes only the touristiest (ooh, i made up a word!) spendholes in the region. Well, that's toss.
I've pesonally travelled with and without guide books, and i can attest that exactly the opposite ends up happening. If you've not got a guide book then you end up only going to places recommended by people you meet on the way, and so you don't get to go anywhere new or research the place before you arrive. Sometimes picking an interesting-sounding but unheard of (on the travel circuit) location out of the Lonely Planet can give you the most interesting and anecdotally-worthy experiences of your time away. Honestly, try it sometime. It really can make your trip.
The most commonly-used series of guide books are:
The Rough Guide
The Lonely Planet
Goes without saying, really. Novels, novels, novels. The good ones cost a fortune (more second hand that brand new back home) at travel friendly book shops along the way. You can usually sell them back to the shops for half the price you bought them for, but that rubs a bit when you've only had it for a few days and didn't even like it. Still, you've gotta read, so grab a decent novel or two from a charity shop before you read and get ready to spend a bit of moolar while you're away.
It's up to you if you want to always cash in your books at shops along the way, but personally if i've read a really good novel i like to pass it on for free to a deserving fellow traveller. What goes around comes around, even if it does have a few pages missing near the end.
Some travel favourites include:
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
Are You experienced?
The Beach
The Lonely Planet
Spiritual hocus-pocus - where would we be without it? Back home is probably the answer, filling in a CV. This is the section of your backpack that's likely to be the fullest, partly because you don't want to give up the gems of enlightenment you've collected along the way, and partly because some books are just too boring to finish. If they don't enlighten you, at least books about spiritual advancement are something to slip into a conversation with fellow travellers when you're trying to prove you've seen a little further than most, albeit with the aid of a bestselling telescope. What? Did that last sentence make sense to you? It didn't to me, and i wrote it.
An essential reading list (if you don't want to appear too much of a banker) might include:
The Celestine Prophecy
The Road Less Travelled
The Way of the Peaceful Warrior
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Lonely Planet