Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Books you read when travelling
While on train , bus or airplane on long journeys...you'll see people reading , yes, even here in Malaysia which is notorious for people not reading anything apart from silly gossipy magazines ..you'll notice a few rapt in their paperbacks....and I'm obsessed by the need to know what these people are reading... it's kind of like trying to peek into people's souls in a way... I have this urge to come up to the reader and flip the cover to know what the title is...
But more often than not I feel dissapointed when I finally get to glimpse the title as in most cases the books are just long version of silly gossipy magazines...most of the books are those formulaic and saccharine romances or thrillers....not that I have anything against these authors... they are some of the most clever people and they know they can make loads and loads of money by giving more of the same to silly uncritical readers...people like John Grisham, Stephen King, Danielle Steel the late Barbara Cartland...these people know what they are doing are not art..but just feeding people macdonalds in words....
Hardly anybody seems to read real books...but sometimes you do meet people reading some unexpected books...I once saw this beautiful lady reading William Boyd's "Stars and Bars"...Boyd isn't exactly Doestoevky of course but he's one of the better popular novelists...Over the years I've read several of his books and I have the following in my collection : Good Man in Africa (1981) An Ice-Cream War (1982) Brazzaville Beach(1990)The Destiny of Natalie 'X' and Other Stories (1995) and Armadillo (1998). The girl I mentioned above was in Dover though, so perhaps not very suprising to find people reading good books here..in England I mean....though judging from the top 20 books in major papers like the Times or The Guardian quickly show that even English people mostly read rubbish...
Back here, quite recently I was with this engineer friend on a flight and I noticed he was reading a thick book with a bown paper cover. Now here's someone reading an interesting book! I thought, porn may be..a brave man to read porn on a plane I thought....he's more interesting than I originally thought...I thought...I asked him what he's reading but he kind of refused to say much...I waited till he nodded off and flipped the inside cover..and lo and behold! he's reading Harry Potter!!!..but sensible enough to cover the cover page with brown paper......
Anyway, for me whenever I'm travelling I usually bring several books...at least one fiction and one non fiction..If I go overseas lonely planet is a must of course...In my most recent Trip to Cambodia in December I brought with me Bill Bryson's Sunburned Country..a quite hilarious travel book on Australia and a Vonnegut paperback.
I'm looking forward to my next travel which is in two weeks' time to London and what I'm really looking forward to is on the way back...I'll fly to Moscow and spend a couple of days there and than take a 6 day trans-siberian train journey to Beijing...I'll have plenty of times to kill and need to start thinking which books to bring...I'm thinking of bringing several volumes of GRANTA, may be Marmaduke Pikthall's translation "The Glorius Quran" and the highly interesting book about Jews and anti-semitism that I'm currently reading ..."CHUTZPAH" by Alan M. Dershowitz.
An interesting comment by one reviewer in Amazon.com has this to say about Jews:The essential question is... Are his people persecuted because they are obnoxious or are they obnoxious because they are persecuted?
But more often than not I feel dissapointed when I finally get to glimpse the title as in most cases the books are just long version of silly gossipy magazines...most of the books are those formulaic and saccharine romances or thrillers....not that I have anything against these authors... they are some of the most clever people and they know they can make loads and loads of money by giving more of the same to silly uncritical readers...people like John Grisham, Stephen King, Danielle Steel the late Barbara Cartland...these people know what they are doing are not art..but just feeding people macdonalds in words....
Hardly anybody seems to read real books...but sometimes you do meet people reading some unexpected books...I once saw this beautiful lady reading William Boyd's "Stars and Bars"...Boyd isn't exactly Doestoevky of course but he's one of the better popular novelists...Over the years I've read several of his books and I have the following in my collection : Good Man in Africa (1981) An Ice-Cream War (1982) Brazzaville Beach(1990)The Destiny of Natalie 'X' and Other Stories (1995) and Armadillo (1998). The girl I mentioned above was in Dover though, so perhaps not very suprising to find people reading good books here..in England I mean....though judging from the top 20 books in major papers like the Times or The Guardian quickly show that even English people mostly read rubbish...
Back here, quite recently I was with this engineer friend on a flight and I noticed he was reading a thick book with a bown paper cover. Now here's someone reading an interesting book! I thought, porn may be..a brave man to read porn on a plane I thought....he's more interesting than I originally thought...I thought...I asked him what he's reading but he kind of refused to say much...I waited till he nodded off and flipped the inside cover..and lo and behold! he's reading Harry Potter!!!..but sensible enough to cover the cover page with brown paper......
Anyway, for me whenever I'm travelling I usually bring several books...at least one fiction and one non fiction..If I go overseas lonely planet is a must of course...In my most recent Trip to Cambodia in December I brought with me Bill Bryson's Sunburned Country..a quite hilarious travel book on Australia and a Vonnegut paperback.
I'm looking forward to my next travel which is in two weeks' time to London and what I'm really looking forward to is on the way back...I'll fly to Moscow and spend a couple of days there and than take a 6 day trans-siberian train journey to Beijing...I'll have plenty of times to kill and need to start thinking which books to bring...I'm thinking of bringing several volumes of GRANTA, may be Marmaduke Pikthall's translation "The Glorius Quran" and the highly interesting book about Jews and anti-semitism that I'm currently reading ..."CHUTZPAH" by Alan M. Dershowitz.
An interesting comment by one reviewer in Amazon.com has this to say about Jews:The essential question is... Are his people persecuted because they are obnoxious or are they obnoxious because they are persecuted?
