reading western books while traveling can be a very dramatic experience. sometimes i really do get lost in them, and when i look up and realize where i am its almost like nausea or vertigo or panic. like waking up from a powerful dream. also, the associations i form between these books and the places where i read them are fantastic. the memories are all intertwined.
here are the books that i read in the last two months:
ward churchill - marxism and native americans
jose saramago - all the names
immanual wallerstein - alternatives: the US confronts the world
edward abbey - hayduke lives!
joseph heller - catch 22
tom wolfe - radical chic & mau mauing the flack catchers
j. m. coetzee - disgrace
kurt vonnegut - galapagos
harry cleaver - autonomous marxism
kurt vonnegut - breakfast of champions
edgar allen poe - the murders in the rue morgue and other short stories
graham greene - the quiet american
maurice brinton - the bolsheviks and workers control
jonathan safron foer - everything is illuminated
most of it is political, even several of the novels. i learned a great deal from these. also, lots of it is dark. that darkness has had quite an effect on my experiences. imagine reading poe (variations on the deaths of women) while fasting in the jungle of southern thailand. or coetzee (did not like- just rape and dog murder) with a fever in patong (hell). or all this critique and rebuilding of marxism while hanging out in nations whose governments have been guided by the very worst, corrupted interpretations of marx and his successors. (4 of 5 countries visited so far have such histories, counting czech republic, where we just arrived).
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