Jamestown Residents Ate One Another (and other tidbits from The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown, #25)

I read Lorri Glover and Daniel Blake Smith's account of Sea Venture shipwreck at Bermuda in 1609 and its effect on Jamestown at the end of June, and thoroughly enjoyed it. For the most part, The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown is pretty readable - it's stuffed with facts but with the exception of a slightly slow first chapter, it rolls along well.

I read this book as part of a larger research project that I'm still working on, and feel like I could probably recite the details of every page for you - but I'll resist the temptation. The basic story is that in 1609, the Jamestown colony is floundering, and after a massive PR campaign, the Virginia company puts together nine ships filled with new colonists and supplies. During the trip, the ships get caught in a hurricane and the lead ship, the Sea Venture, gets separated and eventually hits upon Bermuda. Although it was known as the Isle of Devils, the passengers and crew soon discover that the uninhabited island can more than meet their needs. In the end, the shipwreck survivors manage to build two new ships and about a year, they reach Jamestown, much to everyone's shock, and find the settlement on the brink of devastation. Things had been so bad that during the previous winter, the colonists had resorting to eating their dead - hence the title of this post. Essentially, through a series of coincidences - or miracles, as the colonists believed - they survive and then manage to save the colony...which of course is very important for those of us later born in America. (OMG, without the shipwreck, I could be Italian! Or Dutch!)

But all kidding aside, The Shipwreck that Saved Jamestown is a pretty good book. It could totally give Cleopatra or Unbroken or The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the other historical non-fiction tomes I was planning to read this year (and haven't yet) a run for their money.

An Aside: All Over the Map cover error and Laura Fraser's book lists

A good chunk of Laura Fraser's All Over the Map takes place in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, which is why I was surprised to see that the art director decided to go with a photograph of a different Mexican city on the cover. The top photo is bizarrely of the neighboring city of Guanajuato and the only reason that I know that is that I took a nearly identical photo when I was there a year and a half ago. Maybe the stock image was mislabeled? That's the only explanation I can come up with.

 

In other news, as I was browsing the web a moment ago, I discovered that Laura Fraser is a dork like me and also keeps lists of the books she's read. And apparently she's grappled with similar questions that I've had about my list and plan to blog about, which essentially distills down to this: Do all books make the list or are some not worthy? However, she says her list has made her pickier - "seeing the titles line-by-line brings home the realization that the number of books one can read in a lifetime — maybe 5000? — is finite" - while I'm still reading utter crap. Alas.

The Lovers and All Over the Map: F*ing depressing if you ask me (#14, 16)

I read Vendela Vida's The Lovers and Laura Fraser's All Over the Map just days apart all the way back at the beginning of June. I picked them up for different reasons - though I'd read several good reviews on The Lovers, it didn't seem like my cup of tea but was convinced to pick it up after I saw Vida was the screenwriter of Away We Go, the wonderful but alas underappreciated John Krasinski-Maya Rudolph film about an expectant couple looking for a new home. (To be honest, I was also inspired by the title of her other novel: Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. How awesome is that?) I went for All Over the Map after realizing there was a sequel to the wonderful An Italian Affair, Fraser's sweet memoir of finding love on an Italian island. I read them practically back-to-back simply because of library schedules and unfortunately, I left the experience fairly disappointed in both books (though highly amused by the All Over the Map cover photo).

Both works follow the trend in women's fiction of depicting the life of a disappointed woman in middle age trying to recover something of a lost self...and it's fucking depressing. I get that in the end, the protagonist will have some sort of epiphany that will free her from the bonds of being a woman in the Western world but I have never particularly enjoyed the journey of these books…it’s like hundreds of pages of melancholy and bad choices and quicksand which five pages of redemption at the end can hardly make up for.

Specifically, The Lovers is the fictional story of the recently widowed Yvonne, who decides to spend a week in a rented house on Turkey's Datca Peninsula, hoping to recapture some part of herself at her honeymoon spot. But then it turns out she wasn’t really happily married and her daughter has problems and she befriends a little kid named Ahmet and then there’s a tragic accident and blah blah blah. But there's an epiphany at the end, all is well! Ugh.

In fact, there was a passage on page 211 that I thought summed up the book nicely: “She had traveled to Turkey to regain something of what she had had with Peter decades earlier – and failing that, she had befriended a boy. A Turkish boy who spoke nothing of her language. And now he was gone, and she was again searching for some remnant of someone she had lost. Had she ever been so lost herself? She must have seemed – to Ozlem, to Ali, to Mustafa – profoundly so. A sad, aging woman with no anchor.” See what I mean? This book was hard to take, reminding me quite a bit of Anita Shreve novels.

I did like All Over the Map quite a bit better but like The Lovers, it seemed to have an excess of angst. The book starts out with an encounter with the Professor, the other half of her glorious Italian affair – she meets him in Oaxaca, Mexico, for her 40th birthday and he effectively dumps her, as he’s met someone else in Paris that he wants to settle down with. And Fraser feels pulled in two directions – she wants to be free and travel but then she also wants the love and stability of a relationship…and now that she’s turning 40, she sort of wonders if she’s missed the boat.

I found that I was continually frustrated with her, the narrator, and my overwhelming thought was how can you bitch about what you have (which seems like a lot, a career most travel writers would give their right arm for – or left, depending on which hand you write with) and keep actively creating what you have if you really want something else? She also really downplayed her career which I found annoying, probably because I am in the same field - magazines are sending her to Samoa, Mexico, Italy, etc., and she's published two books, but her career is not going well? I found that hard to believe and kept wondering why she was presenting herself as a sad sack (though I know self-image and how others see you can wildly differ). I mostly just wanted to reach through the pages and tell her to snap out of it.

On the bright side, you know what we're going to talk about next? Sweet Valley High, that mythical place in California where no one has even heard the word depression, all because I decided to take a trip down memory lane...

#1: Three Cups of Tea, Mortenson and Relin

On the bright side, I'm pleased to announce - after 2009's dismal list - that I've already finished a book this year! (Yes, I realize this is nothing much to brag about, but I'm just coming off the heels of blogging about my failures.) But, on the shadier side of the street, I'm sad to say that I didn't love Three Cups of Tea. I liked the idea of it but I just didn't think the book lived up to its promise or intentions - much like the similarly themed A Mighty Heart.

For those who have escaped its all-encompassing hold on the bestseller list (I had to go to a second bookstore to buy it before Christmas; the first was totally sold out), Three Cups of Tea is the story of mountaineer Greg Mortenson. After a failed effort to climb K2, he stumbles off the mountain, loses his way, and ends up in a random Pakistani village called Korphe. The people there take him in and get him back on his feet and Mortenson decides he wants to do something for them, to repay their kindness. So he builds them a bridge and a school and the effort sets him on a new life path, building schools for other impoverished villages throughout the country.

I think the book could have ended there and it would have been wonderful...it's really interesting how Mortenson navigated his personal demons, virtual bankruptcy, and Pakistan's unique ins-and-outs to successfully build a bunch of schools and make a difference. But Three Cups of Tea just sort of went on and on. After the first couple of schools, it was the same story over and over again, but without the drama, since he'd pretty much already conquered it.

But more than anything, by the end of the book, I felt like I was reading a public-relations manifesto...and I started to distrust it. The format of the book is incredibly strange - is it an autobiography? a biography? a really long magazine profile? On the surface, Three Cups of Tea is presented as an autobiography, written by Mortenson with help from journalist David Oliver Relin. But it's not, not really, because it's not written in the first person, with Mortenson's voice -- rather, it's written like a magazine article, in third person with scene-setting and interviews and quotes. Which is an interesting way to go, and I quite liked the format, until I started to realize that Three Cups of Tea lacks one basic tenet of journalism: objectivity.

Mortenson is presented almost as a god -- and granted, he seems like a genuinely good person -- but in the last 100 pages or so, Relin starts using these ridiculously fawning quotes, which struck me as overkill. Mortenson's actions stand for themselves, and it seemed a little over-the-top to have people like Mary Bono and Parade's editor-in-chief falling all over themselves to call him a "real American hero." Added to that, I think the book glossed over the difficult parts - at one point, some of the board members leave Mortenson's Central Asia Institute because they don't agree with his management style, and the whole thing only gets two paragraphs. I felt like everyone was afraid to let Mortenson be real on the page. Which just seems weird -- can't he still be a good person and still have some flaws?

Anyway...I'm onto book #2 now, The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver. So far, so good...

#22: In a Sunburned Country, Bill Bryson

It took me forever to read this book. I started it in May, read about 70 pages, barely picked it up all summer, and then finished it right before Thanksgiving. So it might surprise you to know that I quite liked In a Sunburned Country. There's no plot to speak of - Bill Bryson comments on his various travels around Australia - but the book was lighthearted and funny.

Which came as a huge relief. I'd tried to read The Lost Continent a couple of years ago, but put it down about 100 pages in - the "humor" came in making fun of small-town America, with mean little observations masquerading as wit. Not cool, Bryson, not cool.

So In a Sunburned Country was a nice surprise. My goal was to read the travelogue before going to Australia, but alas, I read the bulk of it after returning. Which I actually think made the book more enjoyable - I barely went anywhere that Bryson went, but at the same time, I knew what he was talking about. Sadly, at this point, I can barely remember anything I learned from the book (it was chock full of tidbits) but I can say this: Australia rocks! Which has nothing to do with the book, but still...

#14: The Sex Lives of Cannibals, J. Maarten Troost

I read this book about a month ago, mostly while stuck in an airport, and I'm a little fuzzy on the details...but I actually had the same thought the moment I finished the book. What actually happened? There's not a plot to speak of; the author moves to Tarawa, an atoll in the Republic of Kiribati, with his employed girlfriend and he mostly writes about the ridiculous culture shock he experienced. (And it is ridiculous - I was in Kiribati ten years ago, though for a far shorter period of time, and Troost is not exaggerating in the slightest.)

So yeah, I can't really tell you what happened - he swam, he fished, he made a journey by boat - but oddly enough, it's not really a criticism. I quite liked The Sex Lives of Cannibals - it was an easy read (thus, good for traveling) and totally light-hearted and amusing. So, two thumbs up. Heck, he gets a thumb just for the title.

#10: Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert

So upon a second read, I can still say that I love this book. I don't understand why people hate it so vehemently but my theory is that it involves the ugliest of emotions, jealousy. People are jealous that Elizabeth Gilbert got paid to write what seems like an easy book about living in Italy, India, and Indonesia over a period of a year following a nasty divorce.

But yeah...writing a book, even about your own life, isn't easy. More than anything, I really admire Gilbert's willingness to be honest. Over the course of 334 pages, she's happy, depressed, selfish, giving, and self-absorbed, just to name a few characteristics, and she doesn't seem to skimp on any of it. She doesn't hide it and she doesn't sanitize it. And sure, there were some parts I found annoying - reading about anyone's spiritual enlightment always comes across as a little false - but it's all there, no holds barred. I feel like if she had toned down her emotions, then the haters would be griping about dishonesty, or something like that. I guess you can never please some people. :)

Having said that, upon this second read, I have been persuaded to investigate meditation. Spefically, Ketut Liyer's "sit and smile" meditation, which I didn't specifically recall from the go-around. I'm not sure I'm really the Hindu mantra type, but still could use some calm feeling in m life, and I liked the idea of a meditation where you just try to emanate positiveness. I'm not terriby good at it yet, but I guess you've got to start somewhere... Like Bali, perhaps? Yeah, still hoping to go because Eat, Pray, Love makes it just seem strange, convoluted, and fantastic.

#20: Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert

Overall, I liked this book and would recommend it. And I have to say I like it even more now that I've just looked at the writer's website. Eat, Pray, Love just sort of ended, without a real conclusion, but Gilbert is pretty forthcoming on her site, so now I don't have any remaining questions. (Basically, I was wondering what happened with her and Felipe, and wasn't so sure they'd stayed together based on how she wrote it. But it sounds like all is well.)

Despite some annoying parts -- it seriously bugged me when she writes that she won't divulge the name of the ashram, as if it ought to be all hers -- and the obvious neuroses, on the whole I felt like Elizabeth Gilbert is someone I would probably be friends with. I totally empathized with not wanting to follow the traditional path, and get married or have a baby; I understood wanting to be free and keep traveling. It's how I have lived my life. So despite the minor annoyances, I just bypassed those parts of the story as I would the slightly annoying habits of my friends -- and accepted it as just part of the package.

But mostly, it was a sad reminder that I should have gone to Bali last year when I had the chance. (I got freaked out by the State Department warning.) Oh well. Maybe next year, if I make it to Australia? It just sounds AMAZING.

So, in sum, a thumbs up to Eat, Pray, Love.

#22, Almost French, Sarah Turnbull

I rushed through this book, and while I enjoyed it, I also thought it lacked substance. I guess, in effect, it was a good book to read while traveling around -- easy to pick up for even just a five-minute read -- but not a work of great literature.

The story is basically this: the author, Sarah Turbull, decided to take a year off from her TV job to travel the world. During a stint in Bucharest, she meets a dashing Frenchman, and spontaneously decides to take him up on his offer to visit him in France. Romance blooms, and the story is basically about how she learned to adapt in France.

But the weirdest part about it was, there was very little mention of the dashing Frenchman at all, the man who eventually becomes her husband. I think I knew more in the end about crazy Pierre, who obnoxiously rode his bike through the street. But I think the book could have benefitted more from a look at their relationship -- surely it wasn't all sunshine and roses, especially since at the beginning they barely understood each other.

I don't have much more to say about it...easy come, easy go, I guess. I am sure that in two months I will struggle to remember what it was even about.

Next up: The Pilot's Wife, by Anita Shreve. I am not too excited about this book, but I am in Eastern Europe right now and have very few choices!