Women Without Men - Shahrnush Parsipur

Translated from Persian. Protests the traditional role of women in Iranian society. A tiny book which starts off even keel then explodes into inexplicable fantasy as the two main characters are raped and then come to settle at the house of a woman turned singing tree. Given to me by my sister.

The Art of Pilgrimage : The Seeker's Guide to Making Travel Sacred

By Phil Cousineau. Great coffee table, toilet, or quick train ride book. Excellent in five minute installments and no continuity lost between handlings. Imparts wisdom about why we all should "just pick up and go" in bursts. Also filled with excellent quotes that help to orient us away from the petty in travel.

War and Peace

By Leo Tolstoy. Obviously a classic. I picked up an old copy of this in a fishing village on one of Hong Kong's small islands and it carried me through my Christmas home into my first week of Nepal. What didn't it teach me? It covers all the monumental questions that are at the heart of this very journey - what is life's purpose? The balance between city and country, the nature of the higher emotions like love and honor, adn the tradjedy that is war for good or base aims. It also is the best reflection of human nature I have ever come accross. Who would have thought that 19th century Russian aristocracy and Chicago North Shore culture were so similar?

Anna Karenina

By Leo Tolstoy. I was on a Tolstoy kick. His writing is so fine that after him every one else seemed like an amateur. This is his more perfect work and there are many similarities in mechanics with War and Peace and even certain pasages are recognizable as having been repeated outright. There is a certain haughty pleasure to be had in reading first one work then the other. The character of Levin in this book reached the highest flowering possible for a person withing society. The chapter where he describes the birth of Levin's first child is one of the most captivating I have ever read. Until coming accross that chapter I thought "oh yeah, having children would be a great experience" but did not nearly appreciate what the full power of that experience might be.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin

By Louis de Bernieres. I first picked up this book and thumbed through it in the home of the very frustrated Peace Corps volunteer Virginia in the city of Param near Hile on my first trek. I knew that I had never seen a writing style like this one and that this looked like a book with humor. When I mentioned trading that for one of my books everyone else in the house had dibs on it already. Back in Kathmandu I picked up a copy and found it to be the most classically exicuted work of modern fiction I know. Louis de Bernieres has acheived mechanical excellence on par with the greats except now he has modern sensibilities and humor to match. The main character of Captian Corelli is stationed by Mussolini's fascist forces on a small Greek Island where he slowly falls in love with the island's doctor's daughter Pelagia. The passage where he finally crawls accross the floor like a dog to her made me put down the book, look into the night sky and exclaim to myself "now THAT is writing!" Excellent book which made me laugh out loud often - first at the love and then at the savagery of mankind.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

By Robert Persig. All I knew about this book before I picked it up was that it was about defining Quality, had something to do with maintaining things as they break or show signs of wear, and had something to do with Zen. Many people in university read it and stated loudly how much they loved it. I never imagined it would be such a challenging read. Persig thumbs through all of western classic philosopy and ferrets a seemingly obscure parting way back when "sophist" became a dirty word and this is apparantly a schizm in Western thought that seems to be a the root of many of today's conundrums. As a reinforcing subtheme the reader gets to soak up the methodical and beautiful way in which Persig's main character cares for his motorcycle - an ode to the beauty of mechanics that many of us Liberal Arts types may not have realized is there. And last but not least he shakes a finger at mental breakdowns and asks - how are they different from the exterior than the Nirvanic realizations of the sages of old?

Catch 22

By Joseph L. Heller. When I first found a copy of this book a decade ago mouldering in Michael Dugo's trunk I found it to be the funniest stuff ever. The second time I read this was in the monastary in China. During all those candle-only nights I thought I should have some humor to read along with my meaty Persig. Whether it was the wrong place and time I can't say but this time I found Heller's work trite, simplistic, and well - not all that funny.

The Pilgrimage : A Contemporary Quest for Ancient Wisdom

By Paulo Coelho. By the famous writer of the Alchemist this book is a day by day account of Coelho's personal development program as he walks the Santiago de Compostela route accross northern Spain. This was very on point since I want to do the same pilgrimage myself at the end of this journey. The excercises outlined in the book are nice a probably would work well at some sort of new age retreat but as a book I felt it was clumsily woven together and not engaging. I like to digest wisdom from authors but only well-jacketed in sugar. This was nothing like the masterpiece Alchemist where the most precious learnings were brought to the reader in a mind and soul -dazzeling pageturner. What can you do? That is a high bar to hit.

Circling the Sacred Mountain : A Spiritual Adventure Through the Himalayas

By Tad Wise, Robert A. F. Thurman. Thurman (the father of actress Uma) was the first western man to be made a Lama by the Dalai Lama thirty years ago. He is definitely wise and in this work puts forth the powerful self-examining (and basically self-blameing) teaching called "the blade wheel of mind reform." That teaching is nice, could fit in a pamphlet adn the rest of the book is trash as wise shares his uninteresting personal struggles with the reader. This is what you get when someone writes after the fact about an interesting human experience now that their mind is "filled with positive light." I'm sure it is liberating for Wise but it bored me to death. I wrestled with this book on my first Nepal trek. It is all I had with me - I was starved for intellectual stimulation.

Among The Dervishes

By Omar Michael Burke. An Account of Travels in Asia and Africa and Four Years Sudying the Sufis. Great stuff. He really gets in there, is obviously neither a professional writer, journalist, or grad student and brings this whole thing to life. It is clear from the books get go that he has been sucked into personal beleif in Sufiisms but after how he presents it the reader is too. It does not come off as the biased rantings of a convert (although that is what it may be). He actually debunks 99% of the Sufis he runs into without ever expressing one vindictive opinion about what he had hear from them. He just allows the overwhelming rationale of that other 1% of the Sufi teachers to sort things out for the reader. Explores northern Pakistan (seems like Hunza although he does not name it as such). Go my copy secondhand - apparently owned by my sister in the late 70s and has her scribbles on it - read it many times and took it with me to Nepal - just sold it two days ago to a worthy merchant to save weight (or rather redestribute the weight from my back to my pocketbook).

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