On the Trail of Marco Polo: Brady Fotheringham

This was a bad book. No one should read this book, I shouldn't even have bothered finishing it. I did in part because I wanted to bitch about it and in part because it should have been a good story. Journalist travels by mountain bike from Xinjiang, China to India, detouring into Afghanistan on the way. The problem was it was like hearing some boring, arrogant, idiot tell you about a life experience you can't imagine he's cool enough to have experienced. Plus, the book is riddled with factual errors. I noticed them in the area I had some knowledge about, China, but that made me wary of the rest of the text. For example, the author falls into the trap of identifying China as a stagnant country that's history was immobile until the West intervened, at which point it put up defensive barriers. Take this line that I had to read to everyone of my housemates: "The Chinese were convinced they lived in the hippest coolest, most riteous place on dear Mother Earth." Such bad writing. He also misnames the common term for a government job an "iron rice bowl" and calls it instead "iron rice." An iron rice bowl is a bowl you can use your entire life, "iron rice" is just hard to eat. Finally he is irritated when he is kicked out of a Chinese only hotel because he believes there is no such thing and that what he is facing is merely corruption. I don't know how one could visit China and miss the fact that you can only stay in half the hotels. I'd agree the policy is funky, but it is a policy.

He writes China off as a bureaucratic hellhole after only a few weeks there and much prefers Pakistan, in part because it is very cheap. Although he talks about the country's poverty he seems not to connect his financial good fortune of traveling in a cheap country with the country's economic woes.

In the end, even without the above faults, the book was boring in comparison to the trip's promise. He spends little time on any one subject and you really don't get a sense of his travels. He mostly seems to list off events and gloat about stupid deeds he got away with like photographing Afghan women in Taliban controlled Afghanistan, photographing military compounds and riding bikes through "lawless Kohistan," despite warnings from all sides.

Land of the Dead

I don't know why I go and see horror films. Probably because I have friends that enjoy them. The genres are also predictable enough that the variations become the points of interest. I like Zombie films mostly because I like "Shawn of the Dead" which fits into the Zombie genre despite the humor throughout. "Land of the Dead" is no "Shawn of the Dead", but it certainly fills the requirements of the genre. The film is set after the epidemic has passed allowing for a vision of the future with zombies. The scary thing about this film is that the Zombies are learning, becoming more like us, which fits the ultimate moral of any zombie film- who are the real monsters, us or them. There are some great one liners throughout- "we don't negotiate with terrorists," or "zombies, the creep me out man," but we are not waiting for the awards to role in. Oh, and if you like resolutions, too bad. The best you will get here is driving North, where its fucking cold and nobody lives.

Jazz: Toni Morrison

Sometimes you have to read a really good book to realize that everything else you have been reading is crap. Jazz did that for me. Not that the other books I've been reading were not good reads (occasionally), but in my mind they don't hold the place of literature like Toni Morrison's books do. The diction in Jazz, just like the critics say, sounds like music and one can get lost in the music and even forget the tragic lives the words are about. As soon as I put down the book I felt not only that I wanted to, but also that I should pick it up and read it again. The story is twisted about so that information vital to truly understanding earlier episodes is only revealed later. This is true especially in the last few chapters of Jazz when the Idiosyncrasies of the narrator start to come out. Nonetheless the narrator remained for me a mystery, one that I'm not sure can be deciphered. I found the cycle of tragedy in Jazz to be somewhat similar to Beloved, the only other Toni Morrison book I've read, but the last few chapters, I think turn this notion around and taunt expectation.
Really though, Jazz made me want to go back to school and have a classroom to sort out its intricacies. I haven't felt that need in my pleasure reading for a while. Must be a good book.