Bibliophilia

All our reading material over the past year has come to us fortuitously. I hope these suggestions for literary pleasure will come into your life unexpectedly too.

~Hegemony and Survival, by Noam Chomsky; classic reading for those wanting to accrue evidence to use against the "MAN" for their own personal debating arsenal

~Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell; a wonderfully original, intelligent, multi-faceted novel that will have you entertained and in awe of Mitchell's versitility

~Kon-Tiki, by ?; this real-life adventure of several Scandanavian men crossing the Pacific on a balsa-wood raft is so compelling and wild that we literally couldn't put it down... it deserves a cult following (or perhaps it has one and i just don't know of it, I did see an middle-aged white man in Chiang Mai with a Kon-tiki tee-shirt)

~The World According to Garp, by John Irving; the ultimate read-aloud American novel, it gets better and better and you will remember it and the time you spent reading it with true fondness

~The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood; fascinating, eerie, and important story of how the world in the near future, ridiculously easy to imagine ourselves in this anti-utopia

~The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown; yes, this is airport thriller material in some sense but we read the illustrated version and it was beautiful and wholly worthwhile

~The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami; I didn't know Murakami before this trip but he is a writer that is intriguing on many levels and has an army of books under his belt. A mixture of cherished mundanity with awesome violence and surreality.

~Shantaram, by David Gregory Roberts; an real-life story of an Australian jailbird who makes a new life for himself in Bombay, filled with unbelievably amazing experiences and deserves to be made into a movie with Johnny Depp as the lead (coming to theatres sometime in the next few years)