Although I love this Object Lessons series, it has to be admitted that some of the titles are much more successful than others. Unfortunately this is one of the less successful ones. In it, Susan Harlan unpacks (sorry…) the etymology, history and significance of luggage and its corollary baggage, and intersperses the text with personal anecdotes and reflections. It all amounted to very little, really. I learnt some interesting little nuggets of information but I was less than interested in Harlan’s own travels and packing quirks, and the whole essay seemed a bit too discursive and rambling to sustain my attention.

I have really enjoyed the Bloomsbury Academic books I've read so far, but this one fell a bit flat. It seemed to be missing the spark of whimsy and wit that were prevalent in the others and was more philosophical musings and internal monolgoues as the author embarked on a roadtrip. It was full of rambling thoughts which would quickly get off topic. It jumped from Steel Magnolias to WB Yeats poetry to I love Lucy all within the one paragraph. I did enjoy the historical references to luggage, but overall it was a bit dull.

I enjoyed this book and, as a traveller, loved examining something that is usually very utilitarian. I compare this book to Souvenir in its focus on how we buy and use luggage and what different types of luggage says about the traveler using it.

“Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between a traveler and his or her luggage. We become our things.” Harlan muses on how luggage becomes ‘baggage.’ Coming from the verb, ‘lug’, to pull laboriously, it can imply difficulty and challenge.

I enjoyed this short book/essays about luggage, moving from trunks and chests to roller-boards and backpacks. (My favorite suitcase is Rick Steves backpack suitcase. I can travel for 2 weeks with only carry on! It’s nice to have backpack straps when walking through old cities with rough sidewalks or many curbs. Lots of handy compartments with easy access.)

As travel changed to trains and then automobiles and planes, so did luggage needs. Luggage not only protected your possessions, it proclaimed your class/ wealth status. Fun fact: “On ocean liners it was standard for a first-class passenger to bring 20 pieces of luggage containing 4 changes of clothing per day.” Yikes.

In the 1970s, a baggage rule was two bags weighing up to 70 pounds each – free of charge! I remember having blisters on my hands from my 50 pound suitcase – almost everything I needed as an exchange student for a year in Germany. No wheels.

Luggage holds secrets. It is private even though it goes with us in public. The author relates brief stories about letters and stories found in suitcases and trunks. She unpacks ‘packing,’ “an exercise in anticipation, in imagining the unknown and attempting to account and prepare for it.” Packing is a learned skill. I taught my kids to pack when they were young with a list. My son learned to be a good borrower or do without ; )

Harlan even elaborates that “Samsonite’s designs from the middle of the last century make it abundantly clear that men are supposed to travel one way and women, another.” I wish there would have been more pictures!

This would make a nice gift for a traveler. The essays are interesting, well-written, and easy to read in little pieces while traveling. Include some real luggage or a ticket for an extra special gift!

Thank you to NetGalley, the author and publisher for granting access to an arc of this book for an honest review.

I did not think I would find this interesting, but boy was I wrong! I read this on a flight back from Alabama where I had visited the Unclaimed Baggage Center the author writes about. I went to Alabama for a week for work and brought only a carry on bag as I did not want to pay to send my luggage with the cargo. Meanwhile Harlan is reminding me of how steamer trunks and the amount of luggage you had were a sign of luxury... Before I knew it I had finished the book and, having had read Souvenir, wanting more from this series.

Interesting essays about Luggage both real and psychological. The author includes a history of luggage, essays on what luggage has carried through the years, the luggage we all carry around with us and even helpful packing hints. As a Alabama residence I did enjoy reading the chapter on Lost Luggage. Overall the essays were easy to read and it was a quick read there just not a lot here.

Luggage is an interesting look into the luggage we take with us when we travel, how they are filled, by what and what happens to them when they are lost. It has some great thoughts on travel and luggage for the eager travellers like myself.

This is the second book I have read in the "Object Lessons " series, the first being Souvenirs. These books are an interesting look at the meaning of certain objects both in history and in our current lives. Although I found Souvenirs more intrinsically interesting, I enjoyed this book as well. Well-researched and written.
My thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC in exchange for my honest review.

Thank you to Bloomsbury Academic for providing me with an advance copy of Susan Harlan's book, Object Lessons: Luggage, in exchange for an honest review.

PLOT- Object Lessons is a new short book series that explores ordinary objects. In this edition, author Susan Harlan writes on luggage, sharing the history of luggage and how it relates to her own travels.

LIKE- I like the concept of the Object Lessons series; an in-depth exploration of an ordinary object. Object Lessons: Luggage blends historical information with personal thoughts, via an American road trip that Harlan takes while writing the book.

I was most intrigued by the history of luggage. For example, there is a short section talking about luggage that was brought on the Titanic and the fact that one single piece of luggage survived the sinking. I also learned about the origins of Louis Vuitton steamer trunks and that you can currently buy retro versions of the trunk and the company will customize your suitcase with travel stickers. You can have stickers that reflect your own travels or even create a fantasy of where you would like to go. This is a great book for building your repertoire of trivia knowledge.

I adore travel writing, but I was less interested in Harlan's journey. However, towards the end of Object Lessons: Luggage, Harlan visits the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Alabama. Airlines sell unclaimed luggage to the Unclaimed Baggage Center, which then sells the items to consumers at a great bargain. This is a huge tourist attraction and special items have even earned themselves a place in an onsite museum. I thought this was fascinating and certainly a reason to consider visiting Alabama. The museum sounds quirky and my kind of place.

DISLIKE- I was unevenly interested in Object Lessons: Luggage. I felt that some of the references, especially quotes from movies and pop culture, provided tenuous connections. The tone of the book flipped between academic and informal, where I wish it would have picked one style. I think academic would have been the way to go. 

RECOMMEND- Maybe. I definitely learned a lot of interesting tidbits while reading Object Lessons: Luggage, but I also found myself skimming sections. I have another book in the series on my Kindle, so I will be interested to see how a different author explores a different subject.

8 March
**

The first pages of this book are comprised of laudatory blurbs about the Object Lesson series from Bloomsbury Academic, of which this book "Luggage" is number 42. It seems that the previous books were magical.

Well, sorry, but this book isn't magical it is banal.

I love personal essays and I travel extensively and I thought "Luggage" sounded like a good read. All the whys and wherefores of those bags I obsess over trying to find the perfect one, designed by someone who travel packs just as I do. There is a bit about suitcases here, but mostly it is about Susan Harlan and her dog traveling around by car with a backpack. We have descriptions of her car, her motel, her dog, the dog, the fake Bavarian town where they stop for the night. I gagged and quit reading.

I received a review copy of "Luggage" by Susan Harlan (Bloomsbury Academic) through NetGalley.com.

Luggage is the second book in the Object Lessons series that I've read, Souvenirs by Rolf Potts being the first. This incredibly interesting book talks about the stories that the physical manifestation of our travels, the luggage that we carry, tells. Here, luggage represents the human condition, physically and emotionally. The absorbing anecdotes and thought provoking metaphors add a richness to Luggage that I enjoyed. It is quite an enthralling idea, how much such a mundane artefact such as a suitcase that you drag along, says about who you are !

A look at the (physical) luggage we carry and what it represents. I found Harlan to be a good story teller, which is key for this series. I also like how she covered a lot of small details that added up, such as her & her dog's travel costumes for a road trip and how car travel is so different to air travel when it comes to luggage. I also liked how she looked at trends over time, even though some parallels were unsettling such as cruise travelers & Holocaust victims' separation from their luggage.

Although this was an interesting read, I didn't like it as much as I did Rolf Potts' Souvenir in the same series. It didn't seem as tightly focused as his, and despite a relative short length I feel as if it could have been more tightly edited. Reading these two titles back to back, though, allowed me to see some interesting/possibly accidental parallels in pilgrimages' role in the field of tourism and how what they carried/brought home with them differed to "regular" tourists.

I'd still recommend this series as a whole

<blockquote>Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between a traveler and his or her luggage. We become our things.</blockquote>

This is a longish monograph about luggage: some history, but mainly a quite unedited barrage into what luggage has been throughout the ages, what constitutes luggage, some anecdotes about luggage, how people treat it, worship it, forget it, have it plundered, words on the evolution it it, et cetera.

At the best of times it's introspective and funny, like this:

<blockquote>And the boring black suitcases cause confusion. Excuse me, but I think that one is mine. No, I’m pretty sure this one is mine—let me check the tag. Oh, I’m so sorry—it looks just like mine. This is the baggage carousel dance. Trying to reclaim our property. Trying to identify it. Some people monogram their luggage. This is practical—a monogram helps you to pick out you suitcase— but it is also tied to identity in deeper ways. A monogram is the textual distillation of your identity and a declaration of ownership. This is mine. It becomes another brand: your brand alongside the brand of the suitcase; a mark the self, endlessly reproducible and immediately recognizable.</blockquote>

At its worst it's filler and seemingly just advertising, as with the favorable mentions of Louis Vuitton.

There's quite some matter-of-factly stand-ins:

<blockquote>Commercial airlines now estimate 190 pounds per passenger, including his or her carry-ons, and 30 pounds per checked bag. Four hundred passengers and their luggage, or approximately 75,000 pounds, makes up only 10 percent of the total weight of a fully loaded 747. (Fuel often accounts for a third or more of a plane’s total bulk.) But you can still travel on Cunard’s Queen Mary with unlimited luggage.</blockquote>

Still, as a whole, paragraphs can be interesting:

<blockquote>Disasters leave luggage behind. Genocide leaves luggage behind. In David Foster Wallace’s 1995 essay for Harper’s about the absurdities of luxury cruises “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” the invisible handling of baggage brings to mind the Holocaust: “A second Celebrity crowdcontrol lady has a megaphone and repeats over and over not to worry about our luggage, that it will follow us later, which I am apparently alone in finding chilling in its unwitting echo of the Auschwitz-embarkation scene in Schindler’s List.”</blockquote>

All in all, if you are a fan of luggage and factiods, I do recommend this book.

Luggage by Susan Harlan is one of the newest releases from Bloomsbury Press Academic.  The series are object lessons about simple things in life that are often overlooked in our daily lives.  Harlan is Associate Professor of English at Wake Forest University. She is the author of Memories of War in Early Modern England.

Traveling has changed quite a bit even in the last two decades.  Gone are the days of two big bags and a carry on with your flight.  I used to pack up my entire life in two seabags and a carry on and move to a new military base.  It was simple. Now you get one carry on and, of course, you can be randomly selected for extra Secondary Security Screening Selection.  Live simple and you can live out of a carry on for a week.  Need more, AmTrak allows four bags per passenger. 

Luggage was a status symbol and one traveled with as much as they could.  Steamer trunks and bags for things that are today much more portable or disposable.   The more you (had) carried the richer you were perceived.  Ship and train travel made plenty of room for bags and trunks.  Although luggage makes up only 10% of a commercial aircraft weight the price rate is at a premium.  Although traveling has gotten easier and the travel times shorter, taking one's luggage has gotten expensive. 

Harlan gives a history of luggage while she packs and travels to Alabama's Unclaimed Baggage Center.  If the reader ever wondered what happens to unclaimed baggage, Harlan takes the reader into the Unclaimed Baggage Center in Scottsdale.  Luggage is purchased sight unseen,  opened, cleaned, and sold to the public at discounted prices.  Overall, it is an interesting look at what we use to carry our stuff in.  From steamer trunks, to American Tourister's 1971 commercial of their suitcase versus a gorilla, to the invention roller bags luggage, has come a long way.

This series seems to be self-consciously launched out of Barthes' Mythologies, each one offering up a riff on a common, often pedestrian, mundane, and over-looked object - here luggage.

Harlan roams effortlessly from the psychology of the baggage carousel to the liminality of travel, from literary travellers (Odysseus, Don Quixote, Herodotus) to packing. But there’s a seriousness, too: the images of abandoned suitcases in association with genocide and disasters, before thinking about things found in luggage: Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise to a spy’s paraphernalia.

At around 120 pages, this is perfect for a thoughtful and entertaining commute.

Three and a half stars - this is by no means the worst book in this ever-expanding series, but it's not quite the best either. I didn't mind the personal for a change, as it's mostly bracketed away in italics, but in looking at luggage through the eyes of an English professor it did kind of get bogged down in literary examples, and 'unpacking' mumbo-jumbo. But the series is supposed to show how you can cast an erudite, academic glance over things we normally take for granted, and this entrant certainly does that.

Another good entry in the Object Lessons series, in which Harlan examines the many role of luggage--the evolution of roller boards as a mark of seasoned travelers, the manuscript for Suite Francaise found in a suitcase a generation later, foster kids moving their belongings in the indignity of trash bags, Alabama's lost luggage store and the routines of transatlantic liner life requiring 20 pieces of luggage.

Interesting book about the luggage/baggage we carry both physically, emotionally and metaphorically.