City of the beasts - Isabel Allende

This is a really engaging mystical story. In broad strokes, young American boy has to go hang out with his grandma on the other side of the country during a family health crisis. Grandma's scheduled to go to the Amazon - she's a writer type for National Geographic or something. So, junior has to go along. The Amazon, in reality as well as in this book, is equal parts unknown mysterious and scary wonderland, and a place for unscrupulous people to try and boost their egos and bank balances at the expense of the indigenous folks.

Junior learns to adapt, to be brave and live up to his totemic animal's reputation (I kinda want a totemic animal. With my luck, it'd be something like a cricket.) Anyway, he learns to see with his heart and accept the rythm of the jungle.

Books translated, as this one is, into English run the risk of losing some of the qualities of the original language (Spanish, in this case). Either the translator was brilliant, or the original book has huge qualities that some could get lost and it is still wondrous to read - or both.

The book isn't supremely spiritual and metaphysical as to be impenetrable - on the contrary, it makes the (perhaps mythologized and romanticised) Amazonian wonder accessible. It makes the point of the plight of indigenous people without being preachy.

A good read, and recommended.

Down under - Bill Bryson

This is my first Bill Bryson book, and I'm still not sure if I like it or not. He's definitely good at writing from the point of view of the tourist. There are parts of the book, such as when he's describing the diversity and vastness of the continent, or the way the blackfellas been treated, when he demonstrates a sensitivity as well as an awareness of his own lack of deep understanding of things, when I really admire his style and observations.

Other times, he just sounds like a dumb American who lived as a whingeing Pom for twenty years, and who's been to Australia, likes it, and wrote a book about it.

Oh, he makes fun of cricket... nothing new there. It's not a terribly interesting story he tells, that's all. He seems to like it, but like so many journals of where people have gone and seen wondrous things, it's hard to really care about it.

Sure read the book, there's some flashes of brilliance, but over all, a pretty light read.

Five past midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre & Javier Moro

Sucks to be poor and unimportant as the waves of the global market splash and ebb capital around, doesn't it? One day you're sitting there wondering if the damn rice is ever going to grow and the little power brokers in your remote province will ever cut you a bit of a break, when lo! some nice guy wanders around and gives you super duper seeds and an amazing cow, and life is going to be fabulous when the super seeds get eaten by little buggies and the cow doesn't have enough to eat so it keels over, so you have a really nice steak with no salad and then bugger all.

Act 2. Things get worse! So, you pack up the wife and kiddies and leave the nice little rural area you've been scratching by in for ever, and go to a city, where, as we all know, the streets are paved with gold. Well, maybe they were, because now there's just mud and more grinding poverty. Oh, but the kiddies can go make matches and cigarettes by hand in dark, close buildings, or scuttle over trains looking for things to salvage or maybe beg a couple of units of currency...

And lo! A wondrous thing happens. Out of nothing but concern for fellow human beings, and the boost in the pocketbook is really just a nice side effect, some big company which makes batteries, has decided to conquer the little buggies mentioned above, so the rice can grow proud and strong, the people can eat, prosper, and buy more bug-icide.

That company looks to your country which has lots of hungry people, and a history of climactic difficulties when it comes to feeding them, and decides that it'd be a heck of an idea to build a big factory right in your new city to manufacture this bug-icide. Right on, dude! Work, money and more food to buy with the money... a dream come true.

The factory gets built, people get good work, and training in handling the dangerous chemicals that go together to make their bug-icide. Your little slum even gets a television! Happy days!

Remember that bit about the pocket book? Turns out it's more important than we thought. So, things go downhill in the shiny new factory, as a couple of currency units here and a couple over there are saved... until... things go really wrong, and lots of people die, and no one really is assigned responsibility; the survivors and the victims' families never get compensated - and the compensation that they were supposed to get was minimal anyway.

Pretty crummy story, huh? It's a true one. A chemical plant blew up because it wasn't maintained, and killed 30 000 people in India.

This is by the same fellow who wrote City of Joy, and it's just as sensitive and disturbing.

Read it.

Drylands - Thea Astley

Cool - a fiction book, the first one in a long time. Shortish story shorter: The lives of a bunch of people in a fading Australian rural town are intertwined.

This is a pretty darn good book - it's readable AND it's technically interesting. There's a bunch of Aussie-centred subtexts I'm sure, but I've not been here long enough to pick up on all of them. I do know that chronology, psychology, economics and ecology are very believably dealt with in this book. The characters are not too complex; just enough so that they're interesting. The plot is the focus of writerly effort, I think, and it was worthwhile.

Good stuff, worth reading.