The Reading List

I've been thinking about what books you read when you are on a trip like this ever since my aunt requested a blog on the subject back in September. I've realized, with 4 months of thought, that there is a reading list common to most English speaking travellers on this side of the globe. It has a little to do with shared interests (i.e. travelling), but more to do with the fact that we all buy and sell our books at the same used book stores. You even see signs on the English used book stores advertising "We have On the Road, Life of Pi, and God of Small Things in stock!"

I've also realized that this common reading list has three genres: the Location-Pertinent Novels, Histories, and Travelogues (LPNHTs); the Finding Yourself, Random Travel, or Social Outcast Protaganist Novels, which I group under the heading Stranger in a Strange Land; and the Best Seller Page-Turners.

LPNHTs. This tends to be the most interesting group. Some of the books are excellent in their own right, others would be mediocre reading at home but in context become worth the time. The books we've read in this genre, followed by author and pertinent location:

• A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry, India) - a good but not great novel about India when Indira Ghandi cracked down on dissent by silencing it in the '70s. I think every traveller we met in India read or was reading this book.
  
• God of Small Things (Arundhati Roy, Kerala) - an excellent novel about children growing up in Kerala. Fantastically descriptive language brings the region to life even if you aren't travelling there! Again, very popular among travellers in Kerela.
  
• Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse, India/Buddhism) - the classic.
  
• Inscrutible Americans (Anurag Mathur, India/America) - novel about a small-town Indian who attends college in the U.S. Not very well written, but funny after having travelled 4 months in India.
  
• The Glass Palace (Amitav Ghosh, Burma) - this one was highly recommended to us. I haven't read it yet so not much to say. Liz is halfway through.
  
• Sri Aurobindo Biography (Pondicherry) - picked this up at the Ashram bookshop in Pondicherry. I can't remember who wrote it, but it was written like propaganda. Claimed that Aurobindo's meditation stopped the Japanese invasion from Burma in WWII and caused the Allies to win the war in Europe. Yikes! Not recommended.
  
• A Hell On Earth (a Tibetan monk, Tibet and Mcleod Ganj) - we bought this from a monk in McLeod Ganj who had been tortured by the Chinese and escaped to India over the Himalayas. Liz read it and distilled it for me -- basically an account of what happened to him. Pretty horrible stuff.
  
• Freedom at Midnight (Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre, India) - a fantastic history of India at the end of the British Raj that Liz read and I decided was too long (probably a mistake)
  
• The Geography of Thought (Richard Nisbett, Asia) - interesting psychology book about how and why Westerners and Asians think differently.
  
• First They Killed My Father (Loung Ung, Cambodia) - a disturbing true story told first person from a 5-year-old girl's view of the Khmer Rouge's takeover of Camodia.
  
• Holy Cow (Sarah MacDonald, Delhi) - Account of an Australian woman who moved to India to be with her husband and how she dealt with it. Occasionally pretty funny, and full of accurate descriptions of how you feel in India as a foriegner, but on the whole not a great book. Very popular among travellers for obvious reasons.
  
• Indian Summer (Will Randall, India) - written by an English man who taught school in an Indian slum about his experience.
  
• Ultimate Journey (Richard Bernstein, India) - a very interesting book by a journalist who, in 1999, retraced the path of a Chinese Monk who followed the Silk Road to India around 600 AD

Stranger in a Strange Land. These are more generic than the LPNHTs. The theme tends to embody some of the feelings of travelling in a foriegn land, so the books are good general travel reading. They also tend to be popular favorites among high schoolers (at least when I went to high school) . . .

• V (Thomas Pynchon) - I was reading this before I left but put it down. I saw it in a bookstore and gave it another shot. Probably better read at home with access to a dictionary and reference material!
  
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (Douglas Adams) - a great travel book -- lightweight, funny, and about a travel guidebook!
  
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig) - very popular among travellers, which says something about who is travelling and what they are thinking about.
  
• About a Boy (Nick Hornby) - a boy and a man who just don't fit in. Very funny book.
  
• Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell) - I loved this one, but Liz wasn't quite as enthusiastic. Not too popular among the travellers -- I read a review when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and sought it out in an Indian bookstore. It is 6 short stories nested together to give each a new context and a bit more meaning.

Best Seller Page Turners. Hey, sometimes you just need a break. These books can make a long train ride seem short or distract you from a shabby guesthouse room.

• The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown) - I think every English speaker in the world has read this book -- it's popularity is unbelievable. I made Liz read it!
  
• Number One Ladies' Detective Agency (Alexander McCall Smith) - it was sitting around for free at a guesthouse and I'd just finished another book. Turned out to be pretty entertaining, and pretty good!
  
• Resurrection Day (Glenn Meade) - Jochen, our fellow traveller, gave this to me when he finished. It's a Ludlum-like book about a terrorist attack on Washington, D.C. In many ways it is absolutely horrendous, but I read its 700+ pages in less than 5 days . . .
  
• Angels and Demons (Dan Brown) - not as good as the DaVinci Code, but a fast and entertaining (though quite groan-worthy) read.
  
• The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold) - Liz read this one (acquired the same way I got Number One Ladies' Detective Agency). She said it was good but sad.

Then there are the reference books we keep in our packs. For the sake of rounding out this list, they are

• Lonely Planet India (very good guidebook)
• Lonely Planet Southeast Asia (silly to lug around for 4 months as it's now out of date and was too vague to begin with)
• Southeast Asia, the Graphic Guide (a pretty cool book of hand-drawn maps that make us feel like treasure hunters)
• Healthy Travel India and Southeast Asia (extremely handy in diagnosing amoebic and bacterial dysentery)
• a Hindi phrasebook (unfortunately only useful for about 1 out 4 months in India!)
• a book of Boston Globe crosswords I picked up at Logan Airport

Liz is also proud of having tackled (and lugged around) the 800 page Tolstoy classic Anna Karenina. I think her purchase was motivated primarily by the 95 rupee (very cheap) price of the Penguin Classic series.

...

We just finished our 2 week Thai Massage course in Chiang Mai (volunteering didn't work out since we had less than a month here). Sure, they told everyone we still need to practice another 500 hours in the next year, but I think we are ready to open up shop now. Who's first? We'll head up into the mountains from here for a few days, then make our way toward Cambodia and Vietnam, where my sister is joining us for a week! If anyone has some good LPNHT recommendations for Vietnam, let me know.