...On Reading

I haven’t written much about my reading list since coming to Warsaw.  I’ve been so preoccupied with life in this foreign city that my project has become rather secondary to the business of life and survival.  But I have been reading—

My first book was Roald Dahl’s Going Solo.  I read Dahl’s first memoir, Boy, when I was nine (also, interestingly, while living abroad) and I was eager to reacquaint myself with Dahl’s adventures.  Going Solo details Dahl’s life after school, his early adventures in Africa, and his experiences flying with the RAF.  It is a wonderful, exciting and surprisingly touching account, full of the English schoolboy spirit that I have heretofore expressed a love for (perhaps I got some of that from Boy?).

I actually read King Solomon's Mines as an ebook off of
my smartphone, which made it both convenient (for bus
travel) and inconvenient (for obvious reasons).

After finishing Going Solo, I turned to King Solomon’s Mines by Henry Rider Haggard.  Like Going Solo, King Solomon’s Mines is an entertaining adventure of British spirit and derring-do.  Having previously encountered Allan Quartermain, the novel’s narrator, I was curious to read his tales of Africa, and few things appeal to me like a hunt for buried treasure (thank you Indiana Jones).  Set in Africa and peppered with all sorts of characters ranging from British aristocracy and military to African tribal nobility, I’m sure that it would make a fascinating study of British colonialist attitude and racism (though, as I write this, it occurs to me that as there are studies abound of gender, race, sociology, etc. on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Star Wars, someone or many someones have made their extensive studies of King Solomon’s Mines, so I’ll move on).

After my flirtation with the British schoolboy mentality, I moved into a haze of novels by Michael Crichton and John Grisham—a two to three month indulgence in paperback fiction that was thrilling and entertaining, but not necessarily enriching of mind or soul. 

• Rising Sun, Michael Crichton: A sort of business corporate thriller involving Japanese businesses in California and a couple of disillusioned detectives.  Brief, but decent.
• Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton.  JP, dude, JP.  ‘Nuff said.
• The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton: Gripping and fascinating.  It’s a short novel that almost made me miss my bus stop more than once.
• The Broker, John Grisham: I’ve actually read this several times, but when I saw it on sale at my favorite bookstore, I had to buy it.  The main character, a former broker in the Washington, D.C. political game, is secretly relocated to Bologna, Italy, where he indulges in amazing Italian food and forces his brain to adopt a new language.  While my own situation is far, far from similar to the Broker’s, it was fun to read about an adventure in a foreign land and someone’s struggles with a foreign tongue.  Although, I must say, I’d take learning Italian over learning Polish any day.  As I’ve said so so so many times before, Polish is effing hard!

In January, motivated primarily by the delightful experience of watching The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, I bought myself a copy of The Hobbit and set about devouring it.  Although I’d listened to it years ago as a book-on-tape, I remembered very little, so it was like experiencing the story for the first time and I loved every minute of it.

My beautiful and much traveled books--The Fellowship was
purchased in England, The Two Towers came with me to
Slovakia and Hungary, while The Return of the King
accompanied me to Spain.  

After finishing The Hobbit I finally made my return to my reading project, turning (appropriately enough) to The Lord of the Rings.  While Warsaw does not have every book I’ve wanted (and my local Empik seems to have more soft-core vampire porn lit than anything else) I was able to find copies of The Two Towers and The Return of the King.  I wasn’t, however, able to locate a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring until I went to Worcestershire for Christmas (Worcestershire, incidentally, was Tolkein's own Shire, and I kept my eyes peeled constantly, hoping for a glimpse of a hobbit!) .  Fortunately for my own pretty-book loving self, all three books are from the same publisher, so their jacket covers are all similar in style and design—elvish runes set upon a stark, black background.  I think Tolkein would approve.  While I do want to write more about LOTR, this is not the post for that, so I will save that for another day.  I do, however, want to finish with this one last note.

I love my copies of The Lord of the Rings and it delights me that I was able to find editions from the same publisher.  They have one small quirk, though.  In keeping with the fact that the Lord of the Rings is not a trilogy, but one continuous story broken into six books and three volumes, The Two Towers and The Return of the King do not start at page 1, but (I think) both pick up where the last book ended.  I have to qualify this statement with “I think” because the page numbers in each of my books do not match up.  My copy of The Fellowship of the Ring ends on page 407 while my copy of The Two Towers starts on page 537 and ends on 971, and my copy of The Return of the King starts on 977.

My copy of The Fellowship of the Ring, published in 2011, is the newest of the trio, and is the biggest in page size, which I think accounts for the discrepancy in page numbers between it and The Two Towers.  Since it has absolutely zero effect on the story, I find this little quirk charming and I like to pretend that these missing pages exist somewhere, containing lost text—some heretofore unknown story in the epic quest of hobbits, elves, and men.  It makes me happy.