rezendi, posts by tag: book reviews - LiveJournal

In Shanghai, after a somewhat Kafkaesque flight from Lhasa via Xi'an.

Shanghai is busy and bustling and neon and huge. The forest of skyscrapers I saw being sown ten years ago in Pudong has since grown into their towering, glittering adolescence, and the rivers of bicycles have dried into mere streams, replaced by mopeds and cars. The Bund is still cool. Expats are everywhere and practically everyone under thirty seems to speak a little English. Nanjing Road is a pedestrian mall thronging with stores and crowds, and if you're a Westerner, also full of hawkers offering knockoff watches and bags, and "students" eager for you to visit their "art galleries," and if you're a Western man past dusk, pimps and hookers galore.

I haven't seen a single Internet cafe; there's been a government crackdown (can't remember if the pretext is "fire safety" or "they are depraving our young!") but the place I'm staying has a couple free terminals.

Tomorrow I ride the world's fastest, coolest train (magnetic levitation! 430 km/h aka 260 mph!) to Pudong International Airport, from whence I shall fly to L.A. and K., hurrah. I am meant to depart at 12:45PM and arrive at 12:23PM on the same day. Look for me in the noon sky.


Books read:

• Fyodor Dostoevsky Crime and Punishment (re-read; incandescent genius)
• Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (while I accept this is a great novel, I found every character except Anna herself odious and repellent, and by the end she too was starting to grate)
• Ewan MacGregor and Charley Boorman, Long Way Round (quick fun read; our routes hardly intersected; my friend Wendy makes a brief and amusing appearance)
• Qiu Xiaolong Death of a Red Heroine (fascinating murder mystery set in 1990 Shanghai)
• Jack Weatherford Genghis Khan and the Invention of the Modern World (great stuff, especially if read in Mongolia)
• Barry Hughart Bridge of Birds (re-read; if there's a better book to read on a train into China, I can't imagine what)
• Robert Hughes The Fatal Shore (fascinating if often dry)
• Stephen King Wolves of the Calla (like most of the Dark Tower books, hate the main plot, love the substories)
• Heinrich Herrer Seven Years in Tibet (the incredible story shines through the pedestrian writing)
• Richard Stark née Donald Westlake Lemons Never Lie (purchased, believe it or not, from the airside information desk in Lhasa Airport; they also had Pohl's Gateway which I pondered but I've read it and it's great but I decided to leave it for the next English-language reader low on material. Oh, yeah, and the Stark is really short and really cool.)
• Books for tomorrow's flight: JK Rowling Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Rudyard Kipling Captains Courageous, Ian Rankin Fleshmarket Close.

Hours spent on trains:

• 168 (a whole week!)

Runs: 4

• The Summer Gardens, St. Petersburg
• trail along the Irtysh River, Omsk
• beach northwest of Khuzhir, Olkhon Island
• two laps around Tiananmen Square, Beijing
• Wanted to run in Ulaan Baatar but smog and lack of good route defeated me; worked out twice at the local allegedly-five-star hotel instead. Kinda wanted to run in Lhasa but am insufficiently crazy. Would run along the Bund if I was staying here longer.

Cigarettes smoked:

• 5
• but adjusting for air quality in Moscow, UB, Beijing, Lhasa, and Shanghai, probably more like 722

Finally, I want you to know that in pondering the many experiences of and lessons learned from this trip, I have come to a daring and illuminating conclusion:


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Th-th-th-th-that's all folks. See y'all back in civilization. Well, in California, anyways.

Tomorrow, if all goes to plan, I wing my way back to London, which means this will almost certainly be my last post from this Africa trip. (But maybe not my last post about it: I intend a long what's-wrong-with-Africa rant some time after I return to the northern hemisphere.)

Just a couple things before I go. First of all, you should all rush out and read the following two books Right Away: Acid Alex and The Number. Both are addictive, riveting criminal biographies worth reading in their own right. Both are unexpectedly moving. Between them, they'll tell you just about everything you might want to know about recent South African history, culture, society and politics. (Anyone the slightest bit interested in urban tribes must read The Number, in particular.) And, as an added bonus, you'll learn how to swear fluently in Afrikaans!

I leave you with some pictures from South Africa. Yes, full-on multi-megabyte size; sorry, I'm at a cheap Internet cafe, and they don't have much in the way of editing tools. And yes, I do sometimes take smaller-scale pictures too. It's just that they almost never work out. I seem to only really have a photographic eye for fractalesque patterns and landscapes.


The Mother City, as seen from Robben Island.

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Thus endeth this Africa travelblogue. Hope you've enjoyed.

Lusaka, Zambia

Dar es Salaam - Kapiri Mposhi - Lusaka is a 2000-kilometre journey that took 48 hours; 44 by train (which arrived either four hours late or two hours early, depending on who you talked to) 4 by minibus.

The train was quite civilized. Slowly falling apart at the seams, like all African infrastructure, but it didn't actually break down. The first-class compartments ($50) were four-person bunks with comfortable bedding. There was a comfy bar car that served beer, wine, water and soft drinks, and showed movies (mostly Hollywood, a little Bollywood, and one truly bizarre black-and-white African money-porn thing called "Billionaires Club 2"). There was a dining car that served cheap greasy food. There were basic but serviceable toilets. And there were glorious views all through the daylight hours.

Well. Mostly glorious. We departed at 4PM Friday and spent that afternoon chugging through Tanzania's lush green coastal lowlands, all palm trees and forest and thickly green farmland. I was a little feverish and flu-y for the first half of the journey, and between that and finally inhaling Order of the Phoenix, it was midafternoon on the second day before I really looked out the window again, and double-taked. I wasn't quite sure what I was seeing.

At first I thought it was desert highland; the same stark, minimal palette, stretching across rocky hills and ridges. But there were trees, bushes, grasses. It's just that all of them were dead. Occasional patches of burnt black testified to grassfires, but those were only occasional. We roared past geometrically patterned farming plots, all of it empty, covered with a tawny carpet of sun-killed, shredded, windblown grass. This was farmland, obvious - but it looked like nothing would ever grow here again. I saw a few cattle, here and there, but even to me, they looked dangerously skinny.

Then I realized: drought. This was why Malawi, just a couple hundred K south, recently declared a food emergency. The rains did not come this year, and the land is dry and dead. I was looking out at disaster. Tazania is relatively rich and stable, for Africa, and its coastal lands are still fertile; its people, even here, are unlikely to starve; but disaster all the same. The people the train rolled past, looking up at us, dressed in colours that seemed shockingly bright against the parched brown and gold behind them - they had already lost almost everything. It was sobering. As were the rusted, mangled remains of a derailed train we passed later, after the Zambian border.

The border, incidentally, was perfectly straightforward and painless. Instincts 1, Lonely Planet (which claimed I had to get my visa in advance if coming by train) 0.

On the third day, I finished OotP, devoured The Men Who Stare At Goats (which is hilariously terrifying - everyone the slightest bit interested in the US Army, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Heaven's Gate, hippie militaries, and how these things are connected, should read it immediately), arrived at Kapiri Mposhi, and hopped a minibus to Lusaka. The minibus waited until full, departed, failed to get gas at the next station, and disgorged most its passengers into another minibus, which again waited until full before departing, a sequence of events that annoyed me into the following contemplations:


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Meanwhile, the Washington Post's review was very slight. ( Collapse )

And why the heck doesn't nobody tell me when I have a book on TV?

Jinja, Uganda

When Richard Preston, noted bestselling author of The Hot Zone, entered Mt. Elgon's Kitum Cave, on the trail of the world's most deadly disease, he wore a full-body Level IV biohazard containment suit. When I entered Kitum, a couple days ago, I dared to wear nothing more than hiking boots, slacks, and a T-shirt -

- although, in the interests of full disclosure, I should probably admit that the "I" there could be expanded into "I and everyone else who has ever been there." The locals must have thought Preston a total wackjob. But his fear was rational, if excessive; he believed Kitum cave to be the source of the Ebola Marburg virus.

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Disposable People, by Kevin Bales, is a brilliant and horrifying study of modern slavery. I read it as research for Book 3. (One might reasonably ask if it's really research when I'm already two drafts in; the answer is "sorta" - but DP is so good and thought-provoking that the pretext is irrelevant.) Bales travelled around the world investigating slavery, asking hard questions, and thoughtfully analyzes the economics and sociology of exploitation. I recommend the book to everyone: he's a terrific researcher and good writer. (And all proceeds go to free the estimated 27 million slaves in the world today: see www.freetheslaves.net).

So why are some of his conclusions so infuriatingly wrongheaded?

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Disposable People is a brilliant book, and I urge everyone to read it despite my disagreement with its conclusions. But it's sad to see a man so passionately opposed to slavery urging people to fight the very movement most likely to free the world's slaves.

Me at 8AM this morning: I just (puff) got back from a (wheeze) half-hour run on (pant) the beach, and (gasp) boy, do I feel (doubles over, hands on knees, and desperately respires for five minutes) great! (collapses into bed for three hours and feels woozy for entire rest of day.) Lesson: running is a good hangover cure, but don't overdo it, especially when your body is still adjusting to a newish (sub)continent's uh, histamines and whatnot.

I spent the rest of the bipedal portion of today hanging out in cafes snacking and reading. Reviews from, lessee, shortly before leaving Paris:

Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood. A straight-up genre science fiction novel, and a terrific one - how it didn't get nominated for a Nebula Award is beyond me. (Well, it was until just now, when I checked to see if it had been nominated, and found a review by Robert Sawyer in which he completely failed to understand the book. Sigh. Speculative fiction and literary fiction; I love 'em both, and they'll never understand each other.) A mildly interesting kind of paint-by-numbers postapocalyptic story frames an explanation of the harrowing dystopia that leads up to it. Minor Atwood, not quite as good as Alias Grace or The Blind Assassin, but a whole lot more disturbing than either.

Death By Hollywood, Stephen Bochco. Yes, that Stephen Bochco. Fastest read ever, largely because in normal print it would probably clock in at around 150 pages. Entertaining cotton-candy Hollywood-venality story that reads like the novelization of an unproduced screenplay, good pace, lots of good lines, one really amusing twist, one interesting character (the narrator). Zero depth or resonance but a fun way to kill an hour or two.

Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie. Re-read. One of my all-time top-twenty favourite books, and the one that most thoroughly blurs the line between fantasy and magic realism (and yes, says me, there very much is such a line.) Won the Booker Award, and then the Booker of Bookers (ie was voted the best Booker Award winner ever). People who think that literary fiction is the kind of worthy but painful intellectual equivalent of eating brown rice with steamed vegetables ought to drop everything they're doing and rush out to read this (and Marquez's One Hundred Years Of Solitude) right this very minute.

Ecstasy, Irvine Welsh. There's nobody else even remotely like him. And for this we should be grateful, because I don't think the world could take it. This book, a collection of three novellas about Ecstasy, drug culture, and love, includes several of the most demented, grotesque, squicking, Grand Guignol scenes I've ever encountered, which, even in the hands of a good writer, would come across as puerile cheap gross-out crap. ( Collapse )

The thing is, Welsh isn't a good writer. He's a great writer. He's oh-my-God-how-did-he-do-that? jaw-droppingly good. Easy to parody, yes, with his trademark phonetically spelled Scottish slang (though he's capable of way more than that, stylistically, as is shown here), but impossible to duplicate. His characters start off looking like lager-lout caricatures with no possible depth, and some of them stay that way, and then all of a sudden in two short sentences he turns them into real complex human people. The first story is merely good, but the second and third are genius, and all of them are absolutely unforgettable (no matter how hard you may try). But, uh, the first two in particular, you probably want to avoid reading them anywhere near lunchtime.

India: A Million Mutinies Now, V.S. Naipaul. Naipaul, a Nobel laureate, is infamous for being one of the biggest assholes in the literary world - no lesser a light than Paul Theroux wrote a whole book, In Sir Vidia's Shadow, about how big a jerk he is. (Allegedly; I haven't read it.) So why have all three of his books that I've read - A House For Mr Biswas (his masterpiece), A Bend In The River, and this - seem to me like the work of an incredibly wise and compassionate soul?

I don't know. I do know that you'll learn more about India-up-to-1990 from this book than from any ten history textbooks. It's nonfiction, basically Naipaul's contextualized transcription of the life stories of various people he met on a journey in India in 1989, but about, oh, fifty times more lively and entertaining than that sounds (granted, I benefit from reading it in India, but still, unlike some Nobel winners, Naipaul didn't get his for being a worthy but boring writer; his prose is flat and sparse, but it sings.) In fact you'll probably come away feeling like you've learned something about humanity in general. I did.

Starbucken¹ Internationale

	America	Canada	UK	France
Ubiquity	You remember that Simpsons episode where they go into a mall and every store is a Starbucks?	Omnipresent in Toronto (often directly next to or across from a Second Cup), rare elsewhere.	Everywhere in Central London, probably more common than even in Manhattan. Uncommon elsewhere.	One near metro Odéon, another opening up soon in Les Halles
Coffee sizes	Tall, grande, venti. No small.	Small - but you have to ask for it, it's not on the menu board - tall, grande, venti	Tall, grande, venti. No small.	Petit, moyen, grande. Venti exists, but you have to ask for it.
Coffee-of-the-day variations	None.	Dark Roast or Mild?	Normal or Fair Trade?	None. (and it's coffee "de la semaine", ie of the week, not of the day.)
Food	Pastries.	Pastries.	Pastries, sandwiches, salads, paninis they grill for you.	Pastries, sandwiches, salads.
Wi-Fi	Ubiquitous and reasonably priced on a monthly basis.	No.	Sometimes, but outrageously expensive.	No.
Commercial success	Variable, but generally successful.	Doing OK, but Second Cup is putting up a ferocious fight.	Very successful, largely because the previous competition was pretty much uniformly awful.	Too soon to tell, but the one at Odéon is always thronging with people, half tourists, half French.
Approximate average US$ price of a regular filter coffee	1.55	1.10	2.75	2.75

¹"Starbucken" is the plural of "Starbucks". A "Starbuckener" is a person who frequents Starbucks. Where did I get these words? I, er, made them up.

I am a fan of Starbucks. I am proud, yes, proud to say this, I do not think I am committing a moral or cultural sin by frequenting them, and I'll take you on one at a time or all in a group if I hafta!

Seriously, I don't understand the intense vitriol that Starbucks inspires in so many people. They serve somewhat overpriced coffee in pleasant surroundings. This is the work of the devil? Heck, even Oxfam is a fan, as cited here. I suppose it's not Starbucks itself but what it represents - the homogenization of the planet, the Evil Multinational Corporations that are Destroying The Earth, the Yuppie Scum who drink their coffee - which is so hated. And coffee being the second most internationally traded commodity in the world (after oil), coffee shops are a natural target for antiglobalisers. All the same, honestly, I just don't get it. But this leads inevitably into my pro-Third-World-sweatshop rant, and, well, we probably don't have time for that in this episode of The World According To rezendi.

I guess there's also the "destroys local coffee shops" argument. Except, first of all you all saw that South Park episode right?, and second of all, they don't. They just destroy the bad ones that people don't like. That's how competitive trade works. Good coffee shops survive, thrive, and innovate. It's capitalism in action at its finest.


Now reading: Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin, which is a fantasy novella wrapped inside a tale of doomed Depression-era love wrapped inside in a twentieth-century family saga told by a dying old woman. ("Oh," I can hear you all sniffing, "one of those".) Stunningly great, so far. Atwood is almost too good for her own good - her similes are amazing, but there are so many of them that if the rest of her writing was any less taut it would start to feel cluttered. It's interesting to compare and contrast with Richler, whose writing is livelier and more personal but doesn't have the same distant, devastating power. He's red wine; she's single-malt Scotch.


Still not sure if I'm going to go to India, but I think the visa problem is solved; I should be able to get a same-day visa from the consulate in Toronto, when back there early October. And for less than half the price it would cost in Paris. Why are things almost always much cheaper in Canada compared to the other First World places I go? I'm not complaining, I'm just economically bewildered.

20,000 words into my new book, I have decided it has gone horribly wrong almost from the start. At least I now think I know what I want to do with it. But in future I really gotta try to work more efficiently.

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trapped in Auckland airport an unexpected 75 minutes (at least) due to wonky fan belt on one of the 747's engines. I didn't even know jet engines had fan belts.

to kill time, brief reviews of books read so far this trip:

ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, Mark Twain - magical, wonderful, superb, up to the last 50 pages where Tom Sawyer shows up and the whole thing falls apart.

HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE, JK Rowling - mmm. mind candy.

STARDUST, Neil Gaiman - excellent. miles better than NEVERWHERE.

THE BONE PEOPLE, Keri Hulme - was suspicious at first due to wish-fulfillment protagonist (name almost identical to author's; fabulously wealthy, genius painter and musician and seawoman and hunter and cook, expert martial artist who can dispatch six simultaneous attackers without breaking a sweat, whose Tragic Flaw is that she drinks because her family misunderstands her. I mean, really.) but warmed to it eventually, because the story and characters are mostly compelling and it's really beautifully written.

THE MAN WHO MISTOOK HIS WIFE FOR A HAT, Oliver Sacks - absolutely fascinating, as much for where he seems obtuse as where he seems perceptive.

FROM A BUICK 8, Stephen King - starts off great, and ends OK. At his best - for me, IT, SALEM'S LOT, BAG OF BONES, EYE OF THE DRAGON, and a bunch of short stories - King is as good a writer as you can find. At his worst, say DREAMCATCHER or CHRISTINE, he's still readable. This is a mid-tier fast-food book; tastes great going down, but leaves you feeling curiously hollow. Gets bonus points for not being set in Maine.

THE LOSERS, David Edding - mainstream, not fantasy. picked it up for a buck. A weirdly fascinating train-wreck of a book. Shows quite clearly why sixtysomething writers shouldn't have protagonists in their early twenties unless they're better at inhabiting other skins than Eddings. Pissed me off repeatedly - it's basically an anti-welfare state novel, which is fine, but in a vicious, narrow-minded, mean-spirited, bad-pop-psychology way. Intensely anti-sex to the point I got a little weirded out by it. Good enough to infuriate, I suppose, which is something; I read it (just a few hours ago) in one sitting.

up next: THE MERCHANTS' WAR (sequel to THE SPACE MERCHANTS, arguably the most incredibly foresighted science fiction novel of all time; I expect disaster but love TSM so passionately that I couldn't turn it down) and then FALL ON YOUR KNEES, by Anne-Marie McDonald.

update: flight delay is now 3 hours, and counting...