cocaine, xenon, and books

[rezendi]

Coca tea is good stuff. It doesn't have a noticeable effect, mind you. You have to chew quite a fair-sized ball of coca leaves before the novocaine-esque effect kicks in. It was heralded around the world for its anaesthetic effect, back in the day, and Sherlock Holmes defended it at length, and 'til 1906 it was an ingredient in Coca-Cola.

Now, though, I suspect that if I were to buy one of the little plastic bags of coca leaves sold in stores around here and return to the US with them, or mail such a bag to an American friend, jail time might result, even though IIRC the coca-leaves-to-cocaine input/output ratio is something like 1kg:1g. I might be wrong. Anyone want to be a guinea pig?



One thing people who don't travel often don't realize is that travelling in the developing world can be cheaper than living in the developed world, even counting the flights. For instance, I'm living very comfortably on about US $30/day in Peru, plus $20/day in amortized air fare, which is comparable to or less than the per-day cost of living in a studio in NYC, SF, or London. And Peru is by no means cheap; there are worthwhile destinations - Nepal and Ghana leap to mind - where living on US$10/day is perfectly plausible.

I mention this because I'm feeling slightly defensive about the joint facts that a) I am in South America and b) I am spending this week doing nothing at all other than read books, watch football, surf the Internet, and occasionally rove around town (Cusco, poster city for industrialized tourism gone horribly wrong) a little. My usual get-out-there-and-do-something! drive has been replaced by pleasant and total inertness. Were I more introspective, I'd wonder why. Fortunately I'm not. Also, my Inca Trail trek starts at 4AM on Friday, so this fallow period will soon be over.

I have been managing to read a book a day, which is a relief. I hadn't read much over the last year or so, and was beginning to worry I had inadvertently kicked my lifelong book habit. It's good to know I can still backslide. Even if I have to fly to another continent to do so.



Minibookreviews:

THE MERCHANTS' WAR, Frederick Pohl - Surprisingly good, though not as good as THE SPACE MERCHANTS, and falls apart at the end.

FALL ON YOUR KNEES, Anne-Marie McDonald - I'd say that this was what Faulkner would have written if he had been born a woman on Cape Breton Island, except I can't stand Faulkner and I adored this book. Lyrical, brutal, unforgettable.

THE FALLING WOMAN, Pat Murphy - eh. There's nothing actually wrong with it, a perfectly okay little book, but how it won the Nebula, or garnered comparisons to Atwood, is beyond me.

THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH, Philip K. Dick - It's very appropriate that this book had been gnawed on by a bookworm. A re-read, even weirder and more compelling the second time around. PKD was a genius (though not a great writer). He was also insane. THREE STIGMATA is a memorable reading experience. Beyond that, words fail.

FEET OF CLAY, Terry Pratchett - It was a full decade ago that I last read a Discworld novel; I stopped after realizing that (for me at least) they were extremely subject to the law of diminishing returns. I liked this one a lot more than I expected to, and chuckled aloud several times, but I still maintain that Pratchett recycles too many of his gags. The setting and characters are tons of fun and he even manages to weave a slightly treacly morality tale into the story without hampering it even a little bit.

PREY, Michael Crichton - See, usually you know what you're getting from Crichton; science that veers from "laughably bad" to "infuriatingly terrible", cardboard characters, pedestrian prose, cliched contrived storylines...oh, and the damn thing will be absolutely riveting, because Crichton does pacing better than anyone else in the business. PREY, unfortunately, boasts all these features save the last. His worst book by some distance (and he's written stinkers before, eg SPHERE).

AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER, Mario Vargas Llosa - An absolutely delightful romp, with enough interesting textual stuff going on to satisfy a horde of English-lit majors, lowbrow and highbrow wonderfully mixed.

SPIES, Michael Frayn - Frayn (a double threat who also wrote the plays NOISES OFF and COPENHAGEN) won the Whitbread Award last year for this slim but compelling WW2-era novel which cast me right back to what it is to be a nine-year-old, a pretty impressive feat. Not as resonant as it could be, maybe, but excellent all the same.

Up next: MOTLEY CRUE, THE DIRT - CONFESSIONS OF THE WORLD'S MOST NOTORIOUS ROCK BAND. Because how could I possibly resist?