No, I'm not getting married! I'm planning a reading list that will hopefully carry me through 40+ hours of flying, not including airport transfer times, during a three week trip to Mozambique which starts on Friday. I'm hoping that four books will be enough, but if not, the Johannesburg airport has a terrific library filled with regional fiction and non-fiction that is not easily attainable outside of Africa, so I *should* be okay. So, without further ado ...
The List:
Something Old: I've been reading my Portuguese copy of A Mulher que Escreveu a Biblia, or The Women who Wrote the Bible by Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar for quite some time now. The writing isn't difficult, but somehow the comparative ease of reading something in English keeps getting in the way and attracting me to other books. I'm determined to finish this one on this trip. Scliar is the author whose relatively unknown outside of Brazil book Max and the Cats was the "inspiration" for Yann Martel's Life of Pi which then went on to win the 2002 Man Booker award and much fame....
Something New: I picked up a copy of The Shadow of the Wind by Spanish author Carlos Ruiz Zafón at a book sale at work last week. Being described as “Gabriel Garcia Márquez meets Umberto Eco meets Jorge Luis Borges for a sprawling magic show” by the New York Times Book Review was enough for me to pick this one up.
Something Borrowed: Back in August I borrowed a copy of The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working from friend Ysa. Written by Canadian Robert Calderisi, the book is an undiplomatic and frank look at why he thinks foreign aid in Africa often hasn't ended up making a difference. Fortunately, he labels Mozambique as one of the few countries that is doing the things right and should be on the donors' list for assistance, so I won't need to get myself in too much of a moral quagmire.
Something Blue: The last book on my list is The Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela. It's blue both because of the blue swash on the cover and because I suspect that there will also be some pretty blue moments in the text, like, oh, the twenty-seven years that Mandela spent in prison....
Overall, I think that I have a balanced list. Some fiction, some non-fiction. Some to relax with, and others to reflect upon.
May the reading begin!
Case in point: I'm in the middle of rural Mozambique, visiting a health training centre. It is early evening and I am spending a couple of hours working on my computer in one of the classrooms. At 6:30pm, the students, freshly laundered from their day in training and looking spiffy (one was in a cocktail dress while another was in plaid pyjamas!), traipse in and turn on the television. On tap are two Brazilian telenovelas - or soap operas - back to back, draped in as much Brazilian telenovelaness as possible. Let's just put this out in the open right away: during the three years that I lived in Brazil, I watched maybe five partial telenovela episodes. That's like 1.67 episodes per year. But here I am, in rural Mozambique with a bunch of Mozambican kids (well, young adults, I guess) riveted by the B-level drama playing out in front of me. And there I was, feeling highly nostalgic about something that I basically ignored while I had the chance!
