Book Reviews: 2015 - 2016 Travel

After I quit my job in 2015 to travel through Latin America, I intended to spend a lot of my newfound free time reading. I have always enjoyed reading, but I saw my interest wane when the stresses and time commitments of working full time took over. While the amount of reading I did went up and down throughout the trip, I certainly read a lot more than I had previously. In particular, I began to focus a lot more on reading nonfiction books. I once viewed this category as painfully dull; while traveling, my opinion significantly changed and I began to appreciate how enchanting, thought-provoking and informative nonfiction books can truly be. I couldn’t resist the fiction books either, though, and read more books in this category than any other.

Across my year of travel, I wound up reading 30 books in total: 20 fiction and 10 nonfiction. Now that it’s coming time to pack up the bags and head for home, I wanted to reflect on my favorite fiction and nonfiction books of my 2015 - 2016 travels. I’ve chosen and ranked my favorite three books in each category and explained why I loved them so much, below.

Fiction

1. Cat’s Cradle - By Kurt Vonnegut

I was first introduced to Vonnegut by Slaughterhouse-Five, which quickly became one of my favorite books. The next two Vonnegut books I chose to read, though, were underwhelming at best. I’m happy to say my faith in the author has been restored after reading Cat’s Cradle. Not only did I find the plotline original and captivating, but I also thought the writing was amazing. With his famous wit and creative prose, Vonnegut tells an untrue story from which you can draw many parallels to today’s world. Plus, his fantasty world and the things that occur within it prompts you to take a look at our current society with both a critical and humorous lens. That’s something that’s hard to do, and Vonnegut accomplishes it seemingly effortlessly.

2. A Tale of Two Cities - By Charles Dickens

This was the first Dickens book I successfully started and finished, and the payoff from doing so was immense. I liked the story at the start, but then it got a bit dull toward the end of the first half. I kept reading though, my motivation to do so probably heightened by the fact that I was on a 26 hour bus ride towards Santiago, Chile. As I continued reading, I quickly got more and more invested in the story and its characters. Dickens has made you loathe some characters as much as you sympathize with others in this book, and its really their strength and depth that made me appreciate his writing more than ever before. Plus, the subject matter dealt with a time in history I knew little about, and I felt that Dickens’ dramatization of the events that occurred in this period added to, rather than detracted from, my interest in the story.

3. Telegraph Avenue - By Michael Chabon

I’m a big Michael Chabon fan, so it makes sense I would include one of his books on this list. I read three Chabon books while on this trip, and I enjoyed this one the most by far. That being said, it isn’t my all time favorite of his books either (that award goes to The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), and I enjoyed the two books listed above more than this one. Still, though, this book is great. It has Chabon’s iconic genre fiction style, as well as his sardonic and complex language that leaves you feeling like your own vocabulary set is lackluster at best. This book was also close to home - having grown up in Sacramento, lived in San Francisco and spent a good amount of time in Berkeley, CA, the locations described in this book brought back some great memories.

Nonfiction

1. Eating Animals - By Jonathan Safran Foer

I don’t think another book has changed my life as much as this one has. I had seen films and read books about the meat industry and its horrors in the past, but to be honest, all of that stuff seemed to go in one ear and out the other at the time. This book, though, caused me to take a cold, hard look at what it means to eat meat, both on a personal and a global scale. Meticulously researched, Foer expertly weaves both firsthand and third person experiences with the meat industry and the choice of whether or not to eat meat. He doesn’t proselytize either. Sure, you know the whole time that he himself is a vegetarian and that he personally thinks eating meat is wrong. He also does at times show a small amount of disdain for meat eaters, mostly because his beliefs are in such opposition to their actions. But, in general, he seems to sympathize with meat eaters to some extent, or at least understand how they’re able to support such a horrendous industry.

After reading this book, I began to drastically reduce my meat consumption and to think more critically about the systems in place that enable the American meat industry to function the way it does. I also vowed to become a vegetarian when I returned from my travels. On the one hand, I haven’t carried this out yet (although to be fair, my travels haven’t ended yet), and maybe I won’t fully be able to. Still, the fact that I think about this book on an almost daily basis, even after having read it over 10 months ago, shows how much of an impression it has left on me.

2. King Leopold’s Ghost - By Adam Hochschild

This book is a powerfully close examination at a period of history that I only knew vaguely about beforehand (thank you, Anthony Bourdain). Hochschild pieces together countless facts, personality portrayals and eyewitness accounts to tell the story of the horrors of Belgian King Leopold II’s pseudo-colonialism in the Congo. He describes how the King acquired his “free-state” territory by skillfully manipulating his people and the international community, delves into his psyche, details the immense horrors of what occurred in the region, articulates the opposition movement that arose in England and the US and looks at the effects of the latter and whether it was successful. He also provides a brief overview of Congo political and social history since its independence, and the effects Leopold’s rule had on these events.

This book is both moving and well-researched: a must-read for anyone interested in gaining more in-depth knowledge about this largely forgotten event and the climate of the late colonial era in Africa in general.

3. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man - By John Perkins

This book was a fascinating read in my opinion, and offered great insight into a practice I was completely blind to before. Granted, I knew the US played harmful and deceptive roles in several countries around the world, particularly in Latin America. But I had little idea of what exactly had been done, and how specifically it was accomplished. This book explains all this, from the point of view of a man who once partook in the process. The inner workings of an economic hit man, who goes into a lesser developed country and falsifies economic reports to inflate the expected returns a country will get from infrastructure projects was something I knew nothing about prior to reading this. What happens next is even more interesting - once the project and the necessary loan to fund it are accepted by the host country, the US banks transfer US dollars to US engineering companies to complete them. The companies then build things, whether that be electrical grids, sewage plants or other infrastructure projects. These then typically yield between a 5 and 10% return, which is never enough to pay back the loans that had used falsified forecasts of a 15 to 20% return. In this way, these countries are forever indebted to the US and other Western powers, and in turn, the US can call on them for favors and hold them under their thumb. The global empire of the corporatocracy structure is furthered.

I didn’t find the writing in this book to be particularly compelling, but Perkins is clearly a smart and thoughtful guy who knows a lot about how the world works. His book caused me to view current and past events with a more critical and informed eye, and, I must admit, made me resent my American government a little more than I had before.