2010 Reading List: Backpacker's Literature

     Travelling through Latin America, I wasn't sure what sort of books I would get my hands on. As it turns out, there is a whole book-swapping culture out there in the world of travellers, from hostels to café book exchanges in tourist hot spots. In general, I was quite pleased with the plethora of great literature I managed to get my hands on. And of course, there were those books that every backpacker reads, like Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. Then there are the regional books. For instance, nearly every traveller in Bolivia reads Marching Powder by Rusty Young & Thomas McFadden. On the other hand, I sometimes found myself reading absolute trash that made me contemplate killing myself, before, of course, I thought that it would be more productive to kill the author, and rid the world of an idiot who shouldn't be published.

     At any rate, here is a list of the books that I have read this year. I had wanted to write a mini review of all of them, but it's just not going to happen. Instead, I will rate them with brief, completely arbitrary and unhelpful comments.

1	Odyssey	Homer	Classic
2	Eat, Pray, Love	Elizabeth Gilbert	Pretentious and annoying
3	Night	Elie Wiesel	Thought Provoking
4	Tuesdays with Morrie	Mitch Albom	Depressing
5	Stardust	Neil Gaiman	Fanciful
6	Skinny Legs and All	Tom Robbins	Helleresque
7	Fifth Business	Robertson Davies	Shit
8	All He Ever Wanted	Anita Shreve	It wasn't as bad as I expected
9	Rage of the Demon King	Raymond Fiest	Thoughtless diversion
10	The Prefect	Alastair Reynolds	It's not Asimov, but it's Sci-Fi
11	Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas	Tom Robbins	Still can't wait to read everything he's ever written
12	The Story of Edgar Sawtelle	David Wroblewski	Moving
13	The Iceman: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer	Philip Carlo	I empathised with a serial killer...
14	The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde	Robert Louis Stevenson	No comment necessary
15	Belonging	Isabel Huggan	Disappointing
16	Holes	Louis Sachar	Quick and easy, yet surprisingly fulfilling
17	The Resurrectionist	James Bradley	Intriguing
18	A Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel Garcia Márquez	INCREDIBLE! Easily the greatest anything I've ever read
19	The Dark Star Safari	Paul Theroux	I want to go to Africa
20	A Clockwork Orange	Anthony Burgess	Infinitely better than the film
21	House of Sand and Fog	Andre Dubus III	Thought provoking and inspired
22	The Grapes of Wrath	John Steinback	Wish I had read it sooner
23	Love in the Time of Cholera	Gabriel Garcia Márquez	Not 100 yrs, but still incredible
24	Purgatorio	Dante	Classic
25	Marching Powder	Rusty Young & Thomas McFadden	Enlightening
26	The Girl Who Played With Fire	Stieg Larsson	As good as they say
27	The Girl With The Dragon Tatoo	Stieg Larsson	Still waiting to read the third book
28	The Namesake	Jhumpa Lahiri	I don't regret reading it
29	When She Was Good	Philip Roth	I still don't remember that much, even after reading reviews
30	Not Really The Prisoner of Zenda	Joel Rosenberg	A decent distraction
31	Casino: Love & Honor in Las Vegas	Nicholas Pileggi	Fun
32	A Day Late and a Dollar Short	Terry McMillan	A must read- especially for anyone who has lived in the US
33	The Tailor of Panama	John Le Carre	Awesome
34	Angels and Demons	Dan Brown	Entertaining
35	Wicked	Gregory Maguire	Fun and thought provoking
36	The Sirens of Titan	Kurt Vonnegut	Vonnegut- enough said
37	Mother Night	Kurt Vonnegut	Vonnegut- enough said
38	The Audacity of Hope	Barack Obama	The whole world ought to read this
39	The Master and Margarita	Mikhail Bulgakov	Devilish, delightful, masterful, inspired
40	The Da Vinci Code	Dan Brown	I still don't get what all the fuss was about- it's a novel, damnit...
41	The Forever War	Joe Haldeman	Like all good sci-fi, it makes you think
42	Rendezvous with Rama	Arthur C. Clarke	More good sci-fi
43	Dark Prince	David Gemmel	Fun fantasy
44	Shot Girl	Karen E. Olson	Could have been worse
45	The Inheritance of Loss	Kiran Desai	Good, if a bit slow at times
46	The Post-American World	Fareed Zakaria	Inspiring and thought provoking look at the challenges facing the USA and it's new role in the new world order
47	Running Alone: Presidential Leadership JFK to Bush II, Why It Has Failed and How We Can Fix It	James MacGregor Burns	All profs who make this assigned reading should have their degrees revoked
48	Fools Die	Mario Puzo	One of his more inspired novels
49	Spellwright	Blake Charlton	Dr. Charlton should stick to medicine...
50	City of Bones	Michael Connelly	Page turner
51	The Second Chair	John Lescroart	Would make a better movie than book
52	Semi-detached	Griff Rhys Jones	Less enjoyable than I presumed

Fire Your Language Tutor: I Found a Better Way...

     I suck at remembering things. I am much more likely to hold something firm in my mind after reading it and copying it down. Over and over. Pure memorisation. And truth be told- that only sticks around for a while. And I'm lazy. Why do I want to put so much effort into memorising something if it's just going to fade away after awhile? I do concepts, ideas, trends- those I understand. Facts, figures, dates, not so important to me. Sorry, was yesterday your birthday? At least I know that you are a thoughtful, passionate person who always remains positive and surprisingly open minded for someone of your religious persuasion. Ah shit- was that too blunt?

     I'm not a good listener either. Now, I am actually a bit hard of hearing, so I have a difficult time differentiating sounds; I don't always hear everything people are saying to me, and well, it's not that I'm narcissistic so much as I usually have a thousand things darting about my mind, and well, I just don't always have room for more. Many of my friends have noticed this- it's funny how they don't seem to realise that maybe they need to speak a bit more clearly to me, but are the first to point out that I haven't been listening to them, so of course I don't remember when they told me that thing the first time- or the second for that matter. Which is my point, I have an especially hard time remembering things when I hear them.

     All of these things make learning a new language a bit more challenging than it might otherwise be. I don't hear clearly exactly what people say. So even if I've learned a word, I may not recognise it spoken. Conversely, if I learn a word through constant spoken repetition, I will have learned it's significance, but when I try to use it, I am likely to mispronounce it. However, through divine intervention I have discovered a much more effective tool for retaining vocabulary in other languages: sex.

     The other evening, while viscerally enjoying the company of a good friend, he asked me a question in Spanish. While I hadn't yet learned the last word of the question, there was no doubt in my mind as to what I was being asked. Later, it occurred to me to look up the word. And while the dictionary definition is quite different from his meaning- it's not that difficult to see how the slang derived from the original meaning of the word. And I guarantee, I will never forget either meaning. Furthermore, I now have a clearer understanding of Spanish's inherent thought process (the etymology of the slang usage from its original meaning), and thus am one step closer to fluency. It's like, killing three birds with one stone.

     So the next time you think about taking classes or travelling to a new country to inundate yourself in a new language, perhaps it would be more fun to first try taking a lover who doesn't speak your native tongue.

Warning: this method has not been tested in other disciplines, and has only been proven effective for the learning of other languages. Use of this method for learning other than what has been suggested is done so at your own risk. Possible side effects of attempting this method of learning in other subjects include, but are not limited to: loss of sex drive when someone calls out, “what is the square root of pi?” and loss of lover when someone asks, “how many of his wives did King Henry VIII murder or have killed?”

Serial Killers, Expats and Hippies: Where Will You Be Safest?

THE DEAL:
So, some of you may know that there are four ways to get to Panama from Colombia. One of them, to go by land, is nearly impossible (no roads, thus no buses) and quite dangerous (through the treacherous Darién Gap, a guerilla controlled territory), and thus stupid.  Another, the cheapest, is relatively safe but involves finding irregular passages on privately run mini-boats, and thus not terribly popular except with a limited class of Colombians and broke hippies.  By far the two most common ways are by air, the most popular, especially with business and tourist travel, and by independently-expat-owned sail boats that ferry backpackers through the San Blas Islands to Panama City. 
This last option is most popular with backpackers, but also by far the most expensive option at around 400-500USD for a 4-5 day trip.  
Now, in Colombia, I hung out in the ports quite a bit. Befriended the sailors.  Made contacts.  I had almost opted to run with a captian carting backpackers to Panama, but as his cook, for free passage.  But a better opportunity came up, which I shall get to in a moment.  I also had, through a series of connections, met a sailor with whom I nearly sailed the Pacific- but when we had lunch in the Bocas del Toro Islands, he had mentioned how not only did he want to see Nancy Pelosi dead- but he wanted to be the one to push her down the stairs.  You can check out his boat, Dances with Dragons so you know against whom to warn your friends should they feel like sailing around the world with a stranger.


MY CHOICE:
All right, so- the better opportunity:  I hitch hiked for two days through Colombia, from Cartagena to Turbo, whence I caught a boat to some little town whose name I forget and which I can't find on Google Maps, to Capurgana to Olbadia to El Porvenir (San Blas) to Playa Something or Other on the main land just north of the Panama Canal.  Although technically I sailed through San Blas, stopped to refuel a few times, and had lunch with some Kunas, I didn't snorkel off deserted islands or anything.  On the other hand, I did swim across the Colombia/Panama border- and had a quite different, more local, less backpacker, experience.


THE POINT:
When people learned what I was doing, they all said- 'how dangerous!'  'You can't possibly be serious.' 'Why?' et cetera, et cetera.  Now I can explain for hours how much cooler my trip was- even if I missed out on a few things, like deserted Caribbean islands.  And how safe I really was- how generous and helpful were the Colombians, and on and on.  But truthfully, there were many- even a few Colombians, who thought that I shouldn't be going to Turbo, and to be careful, bla bla bla.


THE SERIAL KILLER:
Well, I read the strangest link on Face Book.  My Australian friend posted a link with the headline: Serial Killer Javier Martin Captured in Santa Fe, Darien , and her status reading: 'so... they caught the captain we sailed with from Colombia/Panama last year...'  What the ---? And I read on...


TO REITERATE THE POINT:
I hung out in the docks in Cartagena for a month, meeting and befriending expat sailors, exchanging information and creating a network from which I could make contacts to sail the world.  I continued networking in the famed expat favoured islands of Bocas del Toro, especially popular among sailors who wait for clearance to cross the Panama Canal in these ideal islands.  It was here, in these ports, in which I passed nearly two months, that I was living close to two known serial killers.
To reiterate: when I found myself hanging around expatriots in tourist regions, I was in fact, in much more danger than when I hung out with hippies and poverty-stricken locals in the poorer regions of South and Central America.  

The Top 10 Differences Between Working In Mexico and The US

10)     If your neighbours have a WiFi connection that is not password-protected, it is acceptable to hang a sign reading 'WiFi zone'.

 9)     When the electricity goes out, which is often, it does not mean that the restaurant closes, just that you need to buy more ice.

 8)     Neither is lack of plumbing a reason for closing.  Water can easily be obtained next door.

 7)     When something breaks, it can be rigged back together with whatever is handy- how it looks is not a concern.  If said object cannot be fixed by oneself, it will not be repaired/ replaced until the staff threaten to revolt due to frustration of not having a properly functioning said object.

 6)     Change for large bills comes from neighbours, not banks.

 5)     Showing up within a half hour of your scheduled in-time is perfectly acceptable and not considered tardy.

4)     When you ask for your salary four days after you should have been paid, your bosses ask you how many days you worked and how much they're paying you.

3)     If there weren't a shrine to the Virgin Mary, complete with crucifix and candles burning at all times, we would all go to Hell.

2)     It's not sexual harassment when your bosses tell you that you need to dress more sexy at work.

1)     It's rude if you don't kiss your boss (or anyone else for that matter) every time you come and go.

II

I opened my soul
To free my mind
Only to find
That I was more free
With my apathy.