Which continent, exactly?

This blog's title isn't in reference to actual continents (I've now been to four), but is rather drawn from "The Third and Final Continent," a stunning short story by Jhumpa Lahiri, from her collection, The Interpreter of Maladies. In particular, I'm inspired by the following quote that summarizes the attitude I try to carry with me through life and on my travels

I am not the only person to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

I love this. It calls on us to consider the tiny details of our experiences, both one-by-one, and in the aggregate, and to maintain a sense of wonder even about the seemingly mundane things that are the building blocks of our lives, and often, the glue that binds us to our traveling companions.

This blog began as a chronicle of my study abroad experience in Cairo in Spring 2008, and continued last year while volunteering in Geneva, and South Sudan with a wonderful organization, VIDES.

Now in graduate school, I'm returning to the Continent this summer while interning in New Delhi, India.

Please enjoy, inquire, and learn.

Friday, August 22, 2014

Summer Reading

The slowness and erratic nature of my Internet at home, combined with the lack of easy access to entertainment on Netflix and Hulu has helped me to catch up on reading literature. It's been wonderful.

I'm posting this list for accountability on my remaining to-read list, and just to show what I do on my down time when not running around taking pictures of random animals. 

Coming Up

In progress:

  • Ulysses... A good read but kind of an uphill battle. I reward myself with chocolate every time I get through 100 pages of this beast 

Still to read: 

  • The Dark Tower VII
  • Reread Faulkner's Light in August
  • Reread The God of Small Things, (probably my favorite novel) which I'll start when I viisit Kerala, where it's set
  • I would love to discover some more Indian novels. Suggestions welcome. 

My Conquests

New Favorites

  • Slaughterhouse 5
  • Cat's Cradle
  • The Dubliners
  • The Illicit Happiness of Other People:  The second novel of Manu Joseph, an Indian author. One of the best new books I've read in a while. I randomly picked it up at a local bookstore, and when recovering from my cold, I couldn't put it down.  Here's a great quote that highlights his writing style. 
Thoma....stares at the open textbook for hours and is distracted by the pain of the parallelogram, which is slanted forever. his nails scratch the page to straighten its tired limbs.  It affects him, the great arrogance of the Equilateral Triangle, the failed aspiration of the octagon to be a circle, the eternal suffocation of the denominator that has to bear the weight of the unjust numerator, the loneliness of Pluto. And the smallness of Mercury, always a mere dot next to a yellow sun. In this world, there is no respect for Mercury.
 Great, right? 

Disappointments

  • Manuscript Found in Accra...great quotes but found it to be a mediocre version of Gibran's The Prophet

Beloved Rereads

  • The Dark Tower, Books I-VII
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