travel reading

As I leave in a mere hour for my flight to Beijing, which takes 26 hours in total including the bus down to LAX and a stop in Tokyo, I want to share some of the books that are going to be keeping me company. By the way, while in Guatemala, I got an AMAZING amount of reading done...I can read in cars, boats, "touristic" minibuses, you name it, so there's never a dull moment. While there I read:

1. This Side of Paradise (3 out of 5 - I was a little disappointed because I had heard it was so many people's favorite book. I think I read it a little too late or something; it just didn't seem that amazing to me. I also couldn't figure out how somebody could like it with all of its Princeton references if they didn't go there. However, Nada pointed out that that may have been a distraction for me, and been why I didn't like it as much as most to begin with...)

2. Fahrenheit 451 (4 out of 5 - I somehow escaped reading this one in high school, and found it in a used book shop for $1.875. Pretty good!)

3. River Town (4 out of 5 - This book I found in my amazing hotel in Atitlan. It was absolutely perfect for me now...It's about a person in the Peace Corps that goes to rural China to teach for 2 years. It's a loosely strung together collection of anecdotes, commentary and analysis of China and the Chinese. It got me really excited for my internship and was easy to pick up and put down while travelling on the trip. I even made Nada pick up the Mandarin Lesson CDs I had abandoned at school after the first 2 minutes as it made me want to pick up a little Chinese, but the book inspired me to think I might want to try, at least a little bit. It also made me very, very afraid of pollution there.)

4. The Rule of Four (3 out of 5 - Entertaining, quick read, but the message/theme was a little blatant and unoriginal. Made me miss campus and a lot of you terribly though...)

and I'm taking the following with me to Beijing:

1. Mating (one of Anand's favorites)
2. White Swans (one of Laura's favorites. read this one before and loved it; it's about the Cultural Revolution and I want to remind myself of a lot of that history.)
3. Lord of the Flies (escaped High School without reading this one, too...guess I was too busy SOHCAHTOAing)
4. Crying of Lot 49 (I keep hearing it's good, and it's short....)
5. Chinese Phrases for Dummies. Though I'm already regretting not getting a phrasebook....not that at this point I could read them even if they were in the Romanized pinyin...

Alright, time to go shower and head towards the bus for my flight out of LA.