She wore them for fun and read them on nights when she wasn't terribly exhausted. He read in his Pacific Crest Trail guidebook that people tore up the book so they only had to carry the parts they needed with them while on the trail. After having this revelation, he began doing this with every book he had with him. He literally burned eleven books during his three months on the trail. Only two of her books survived the journey, The Dream of Common Language by Adrienne Rich and The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor, because she could not bear to part with the former and exchanged the latter for a different novel, coincidentally titled The Novel. These books were her link to her normal life and she burned every page she read as she progressed through the story. This is symbolic of him just moving forward. Once the pages were burned he could no longer go back and read them, just as after completing the journey he could no longer return to his old life. At the novel's conclusion, he doesn't even return to his old apartment, but instead settles in Oregon, the state where he finished the journey.