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Posted to craigslist on November 3, 2009

**Update: I have sold my copies of these books but you
can still find them via amazon.com by following links.**

I just returned from 7 weeks of traveling light and realize I don't need this stack of very nice books anymore. I was going to review them at thriftsellers.blogspot.com but realize now I don't have anything interesting to say about them. A nice variety of general interest reading to get you through some long damp Northwest nights.

Planes and Copters (1977-78 edition)
Pocket size manual of state of the art flying machines.

Ray Bradbury - Zen in the Art of Writing
Some useful truisms delivered in Bradbury's characteristic hyperbolic but endearing style.

Frank Norris - The Octopus
1901 muckraking novel in social realist vein. I didn't get too far into this tale of late 19th century railroad robber barons exploiting wheat growers in California. There was just too much plodding detail in parched narrative style to hold my interest. But you might like it.

Nick Jans - The Grizzly Maze
Timothy Treadwell was the subject of Werner Herzog's film Grizzly Man--an eccentric Californian with a troubled past who found peace cavorting with Grizzly Bears in the Alaskan wilderness until he and his female companion were mauled to death. This is an even-handed attempt to uncover the nature of Treadwell's motives, actions, and impacts by an Alaskan journalist who is not sympathetic to Herzog's documentary.

Evan Morris - The Word Detective
Interesting etymologies explained in an overly earnest and almost twee manner as if the author were trying too hard to fill the shoes of his highly accomplished parents whose syndicated word origins newspaper column he inherited. Still, a pretty good book to sit on the toilet tank for a quick literary fix during a private moment.

Richard Hough - The Potemkin Mutiny
Russian sailors get sick of eating maggoty meat and mutiny on their 1905 battleship. I didn't get very far into this one, either, but it's got a pretty cover.

Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory - My Dinner with Andre
The film version of this seems so extemporaneous but the words were all scripted and they're all here in this slim edition. Some really wild passages which will certainly make northwest lefties with a paranoid streak cheer.

News of the Weird
Hundreds of bizarre coincidences, freak accidents, perversions, anomolies, and incredible incidents each described in a terse paragraph or two. The only thing I didn't like about this was the weighting of the selections towards pain and humiliation.

Paul Theroux - Riding the Iron Rooster
See: http://thriftsellers.blogspot.com/2009/09/riding-iron-rooster-by-paul-theroux.html


The Incredible Incas and Their Timeless Land
Nice hardback small coffeetable book published by National Geographic Society in 1975. Pretty interesting if you're into South American indigenous culture.

The Onion's Finest News Reporting - Volume One
If you loved Mad Magazine as a child, The Onion is perfect for the adult you. This best-of compilation (the first in what is by now an enormous series) published in 2000 recaptures some of the highlights of that wacky decade we call the '90s. Remember when Clinton deployed vowels to Bosnia?

Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux (1988)

It is wrong to see a country in a bad mood: you begin to blame
the country for your mood and to draw the wrong conclusions.

Mood is just what makes reading Paul Theroux so appealing. This is the second of his epic railway travelogues I've read (the other was The Old Patagonian Express) and I'd be ready to ride his train again.

Theroux is an exemplary traveler. He's quiet and attentive. He keeps a low profile. He's respectful and curious enough to learn the history, geography, and language of the places he visits. He gives himself ample time to soak in the ambience and does not put himself on a fixed itinerary, thereby allowing himself the flexibility to move fast when it suits him and stay put when he needs to regenerate and give his mood some time to regain its equilibrium. He does not travel with a camera. Rather, he focuses his keen and poetic observations into his writing, which is vivid, understated, and good-humored without being sugarcoated. One fellow Western traveler suspects he is a spy, a job for which Theroux might indeed be well-suited given his sharp eye and ability to pump locals for information. Bur far from spook-y, he comes across as someone who is fair-minded, empathetic, and sensible with a broad enough perspective on place and people to make his anecdotes, dialogues, and word-images hang together in such a way that a large, enlightening, and understanding portrait of a culture emerges.

In this case the culture is China in 1986/7. Mao's Cultural Revolution is an unpleasant memory, the traces of which have been all but erased from the landscape and consciousness of the people. The Chinese are shifting from the "one for all" edicts of Maoism and rushing to reconcile personal advancement using the tools of capitalism with inhabiting a nominally communist country. Individual ambition has supplanted ultracomformist dogma. Western styles of music and dress are creeping in and "import/export" is the mantra of an army of college business majors. It is also the time of the pro-democracy student protests in Tiananmen Square and elsewhere. It's a marked change from Theroux's previous visit a decade earlier to which he frequently refers for comparison and it is surely a far cry from what China must be like today in 2009 when it is rare to find a consumer good not stamped MADE IN CHINA.

Theroux takes his time wandering the eternally protean China. Riding slow and slower trains of varying quality he encounters a broad spectrum of Chinese, from stoic and disdainful Party apparatchiks in blue Mao suits to ebullient youth who take Anglicized nicknames and speak in streams of American idiom. These encounters are the most revealing aspect of the book. Theroux is knowledgeable enough about China then and now to make the conversations interesting for his interviewees, and while he is above all respectful he is not too shy to press for honest opinions about touchy subjects.

He can also be witheringly funny, as shown in this early scene when still in England embarking on the transcontinental rail journey just to get to China. He is with a large tour group from whom he is trying to withhold his identity as a famous travel writer: "When I looked around this train I realized that I was one of a large group and that I did not know any of these people. All I had to go on were their faces. But faces say a great deal. Theirs certainly did. The sight made me very apprehensive."

As someone who enjoys privacy and writing on trains, I can sympathize with this apprehension of being stuck with a bore. And I would hate to be that bore to Paul Theroux, so it's a great simple pleasure to be able to ride beside him vicariously. Perhaps even more than being someone I'd want to travel with, Theroux is the informed, observant, and laconic traveler I aspire to be.

*

Get it at your local library, bookstore, or, if all else fails, amazon.com