Doin the Book Thing

My reading list here in Cambodia is pretty much restricted to the books I brought from the States, books I can manage to wrangle briefly from fellow Volunteers, books I can borrow from Peace Corps staff, and books sold by tourists who need cash to bookstores that sell them to desperate PCVs at the approximate price of one book per day's salary. You'd think, based on this availability, that I'd be reading a lot of romance novels (and I could, if I wanted to). But I've found, to my surprise, some real treasures, and I want to share.


A Summer Bird-Cage
Margaret Drabble

How did a women's college grad never read Margaret Drabble? A Summer Bird-Cage feels like The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood, only infinitely more readable. The stark, hollow choices faced by bourgeois female English college graduates in the early 1960s (marriage and therefore virtual retirement to one's own house or a drab tunnel of meaningless employment leading nowhere) are still relevant today in the West and in developing countries like Cambodia (I think of the choices my female students and even other female teachers face). This is the story of two sisters, both Oxford graduates. The older sister marries a strange but wealthy man, while the younger sister works at a tedious job and considers her future while waiting for her boyfriend who goes to live abroad for a year. The question is whether any appealing choices exist. The answer, well, you can guess....

A Thousand Acres
Jane Smiley

Rare is the friend of mine who has not heard me rave about Jane Smiley. A Thousand Acres is one of her best (surpassed only, perhaps, by The Greenlanders). This is the epic of a prosperous Iowa farming family in the 1970s attempting to determine the future of their farm. All of the players, working desperately to realize their vision of the future, are thwarted, intentionally or not, by those closest to them because of secrecy, greed, and betrayal. The characters are convincing because they are flawed, and Smiley is merciless in her treatment of them all. As things begin to go wrong, you hope that something, anything, will eventually go right. And this hope will be disappointed. It turns out, having all your hopes for the characters crushed is almost a relief, but one that leaves you a little stunned.

Homage to Catalonia
George Orwell

This book will change your life. Read it. Read it now. It's Orwell's story of the 1936-1937 Spanish Civil War from his own perspective as a reporter-turned-militiaman who is injured in the fighting. What strikes you is, well, everything. The revolutionary spirit in Barcelona, the labyrinth of Spanish and international politics, the privations at the front, the moral choices faced, sometimes courageously and sometimes cravenly, by people, parties, and countries. I walked around in a daze for an entire day after I finished it.