I’m a long-time lurker coming out of the shadows to get some recommendations from some very intelligent people. One month from today, I’ll be moving to Ghana, where I’ll be teaching science in a rural school for two years with the Peace Corps. From what I’ve been told, it’s a very good idea to bring or send lots of reading material. So my question: given lots of free time to devote to reading, what books do I bring or arrange to have sent by M-bag?
Here’s what I’m interested in: everything, both fiction and non-fiction. Ok, not so helpful.
Here’s what I’m definitely bringing:
Pride and Prejudice. I was practically raised on Jane Austen, and I have P+P with me wherever I go.
Swallows and Amazons, by Arthur Ransome. It’s an old British children’s book, the first in a series of seven, that my sister and I have loved since we were children.
Swann’s Way, by Marcel Proust. I started it about a year ago and was stunned by the beautiful language, but I somehow put it down before I finished it. Big mistake – it turns out that Proust is not an author that you can just put down and pick up a week later. Now I can actually devote time to it.
Anna Karenina. I have developed a great love for Tolstoy, though I’ve found myself oddly repulsed by the few other great Russian authors that I have tried.
A few Terry Pratchett novels. They never get old for me.
A little Bertie and Jeeves, for when I’m too tired to think straight.
L’Assommoir, by Emile Zola. It’s been on my reading list for awhile, but I haven’t yet gotten around to it.
Here’s what I’m looking for: anything that makes you happy or intrigued. I’m a biochemistry major, so math or science books are always interesting to me. However, I would love to expand beyond that. I have found that I am interested in almost anything that I can learn about. Feminist Marxism, international development, renaissance literature, architecture – anything that’s interesting to you, if you have some really cool books about them, I’d love to hear about them. I also would be interested in fiction – maybe great novels or collections of short stories that you have found to be engaging but that are not books I would normally find.
In short, I have a very big and very blank two years ahead of me. Much of those years will be spent working on projects for the Peace Corps, but I will have many evenings to myself, with no internet to distract me. Help me fill those two years!
I loved, loved, loved The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. It is the story of a young child with epilepsy who is caught between Western medicine and Hmong culture. I think it would be a great book to read in a culture other than your own.
I also loved My Own Country by Abraham Verghese. Verghese is a physician writing about the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in a small, rural VA hospital. He is a lyrical writer.
aaah, so many books, so much time, so little luggage space.
A couple of my favourite science books (stop me if you’ve heard it) Song of The Dodo by David Quammen The Trouble With Testosterone by Robert Sapolsky Memoirs of a Primate also by Bob Sapolsky
and semi-science: PIHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved) by Alexander Shulgin
And into Fiction (In order of must-readliness)… A Prayer For Owen Meany by John Irving As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Letham Gun, With Occasional Music by Jonathan Letham This is The Way The World Ends by James Morrow (depressing, but very good) Only Begotten Daughter by James Morrow (A little bit lighter)
Take more Zola. The Dram Shop is my favorite, but Germinal, The Earth, and Therese Raquin are right up there. Also, take Jean de Florette & Manon of the Springs by Marcel Pagnol.
Take The Last Witchfinder by James Morrow – intriguing story, with science. Recommended by a Doper and my favorite book so far this year.
Unknowns: Ron Hansen is a favorite – the short story collection titled Nebraska, and all of his novels. Take some Shirley Jackson and Flannery O’Connor too. For something lighter, Boris Akunin writes intriguing, witty historical mysteries.
Man, I’d love to be forced into a position where reading was my only outlet. I get so much gratification out of books, but I’m constantly distracted by all the other bullcrap. My current “to read” stack is about two years’ worth.
If I were you, I’d sit down and consider all of those books that you really want to read, but haven’t because they’re so long, or so difficult, or so attention-consuming - the books that you cannot die without reading but cannot make yourself get through because it’s so much easier to drop them in favor of something else. For me, that would be Proust’s behemoth In search of lost time (of which “Swann’s Way” is part one), because I know that you really have to just devote about a year of your life to reading it, and I sadly doubt that I’ll ever be able to do so because of all of the other distractions and diversions and easier reads. I’d also want to just run the Joyce canon, knocking out “Ulysses” and "Finnegan’s Wake’ in a one-two punch, before jumping over and trying to do the same with all Pynchon in chronological order.
I don’t know if you’d be interested but if you are, a great way to kill a lot of time would be with something like an annotated Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene” or annotated Shakespeare, Homer, Chaucer, etc.
My suggestion is to take collected works. If you like Austen, take her collected works in one volume, that way you’re not only have P&P but S&S and E[ and the rest of 'em. Since our tastes appear to be broadly the same (at least so far as Austen, Pratchett, and Wodehouse are concerned), I would also suggest the collected Sherlock Holmes, which comes in a two big fat paperbacks and includes most of the stories and at least The Hound of the Baskervilles, plus maybe one or two other of the novels. I’d take a volume of Steinbeck, a volume of Dickens, a volume of Twain . . . you get the idea. I would also take a few books that I know I will be able to read over and over again, which for me includes A Prayer for Owen Meaney, A Soldier Of The Great War, and some Alison Weir British history. Oh! And e by Matthew Beaumont, which is a brainless bon-bon of a book, but happens to be the funniest book I’ve ever read, and I could read it 100 times.
I have to say, with all due respect to other posters, that I know myself well enough to know that I would be a very unhappy camper if I virtuously took the erudite high road while packing, and then found myself stuck in Ghana with nothing but Tolstoy, Proust, and Joyce. YMMV.
The whole of Remembrance of Things Past by Proust
The whole of A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell
Complete works of Margaret Drabble, Kingsley Amis, and Evelyn Waugh
Okay, I’ll throw my two favorite books into your suitcase.
For some nautical adventure, ingenious plotting, high humor and a captain you won’t forget, try English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. [As first recommended on these boards by twickster. :)]
For a perfectly written, impossible to put down, simply gorgeous book, take along A Soldier of the Great War by Mark Helprin. Besdies being a great book, it’s a long book. It’ll keep you busy for a few weeks at least.
Garth Ennis’ Preacher is the story of Jesse Custer, a tough-as-nails Texas preacher; his best friend, Cassidy, a 100-year-old Irish vampire; and Jesse’s assassin ex-girlfriend Tulip. They’re on a mission to find God. Along the way they run into hedonistic sex cultists, the inbred shit-slinging last descendants of Jesus Christ, the Saint of Killers (God’s hitman), and a rock star with a face like an arse. If you like ultra-violence, tender love stories, greivous head wounds, rampant buggery, heresy, wry disturbing humor, and deeply human characters, this might be a ride you’d like to take.
My nomination, especially based on the appeal of biology, is Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver. You’d probably enjoy Poisonwood Bible as well. While both are fiction, the imagery is breathtaking and the characters are fascinating.
I was in the Peace Corps in Swaziland, teaching in a rural school, although I was able to get books out of the the library in the capital city. I read a lot of Dickens, because at least his books lasted longer than the four hour bus ride home.
I took with me the collected works of Shakespeare, and made it through all of them except the Merry Wives of Windsor–that lisping character did me in every time. However, I was incredibly surprised by how lively the plays were, especially the “minor” ones. I still have a great fondness for Pericles, and for Henry VIII.
My students loved Louis L’Amour, of all things. I think they found them easy to read.
It is a great time to read the classics, like Middlemarch and Bronte, and another personal favorite, Gaskell. You realize how fun they really are. Austen goes without saying. Take some of your guilty pleasures, too, of course.
Good luck. You’ll love the experience, and I hear Ghana, relatively, has its act together. You may well be able to get more reading materials.
By the way, I had a book stamp made that read “Friends are harder to find than books. Don’t make me lose both. Please return this book to Merrily.”
I got back books I didn’t even want back. Not a bad idea for the Peace Corps pass-around policy, if you think you do want your books back.
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For some nautical adventure, ingenious plotting, high humor and a captain you won’t forget, try English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. [As first recommended on these boards by twickster. ]
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I came to nominate this. Really fun and really good, an unusual combination. And big.
One of my favorites lately has been Jane Smiley, especially “Horse Heaven.” This falls along the lines of fluff with really interesting character development. I personally would go crazy if I couldn’t escape my extended third world experience a little bit with some good fluff to go with the classics.
Project Gutenberg has a LOT of public domain ((free)) works. Basically, if its classic and over 100 years old, its gonna be here;
I dont know if Internet is an option for you where you are headed, but they have Text only options, if connection speed is minimial, or you could print out now. might end up cheaper.
Aside from that
Im gonna Throw in
“Ender’s Game”
by Orson Scott Card.
Im sure most will agree it is a good read. I would like to further the list by naming the 8 or so books after it in the series, but, to avoid the issue of mixed reviews, will leave it at Ender’s Game.
I was gonna drop in just to reply “Finnegans Wake,” but A) VC03 beat me to it, and B) the more secondary sources you have access to the more you’ll get out of it, so that’s probably not what you’re looking for. Though, if you have internet access . . .
Also remember that you can download thousands of titles from gutenberg.org. All of Wodehouse, Dickens, Tolstoy, Austen, etc.; anything with an expired copyright.
