Stay Alive My Son - Pin Yathay

Now for a Cambodia book that really got me to say not much at all - what the hell can you say about the memoir of a guy who survived Pol Pot's insanity?

The title alone should be enough to provide that funny choking feeling in your throat - those are the words that his father said to him when they were separated during an enforced migration; and they are the words he said to his son as he left the boy with a friend of the family just before his attempt to escape the country on foot.

This book was hard enough to read; thankfully Mr Yathay did not include the gruesomeness that he might have.

Red Lights and Green Lizards: A Cambodia Adventure - Liz Anderson

Hey, a book by someone who went and had an adventure in Cambodia! Of course I'm gonna read that...

Okay, so it's the story of two English doctors in the early '90's; I was there in 2006. They were in Phnom Penh; I was in Siem Reap. So, I don't know how good the story is at actually capturing what was going on while they were there. I do know that I didn't find the book as enthralling as the Duchess of Kent or the British Ambassador to Cambodia did.

It's a fairly straightforward chronology of a couple of doctors in their 60s or so who decide to, before they're too old and creaky, to depart the quiet doctoring life in England to do the good work in Cambodia for a year or so. That is, we get:

a) Their awakening and delight at their decision,
b) The hijinks of the flight over, shared with a bunch of other interesting travellers,
c) The wonder and shock at disembarking in a strange world,
d) The honeymoon period,
e) The reality sinking in period,
f) The adjustment and settling in period, and
g) The "I don't really wanna go home" period.

This is getting just a little harsh - it's wonderful stuff they did, bringing education and health services to a brothel, and helping run a hospital. It's just that these voyages tend to yield the same sort of stories, and without something to set them apart, it gets a little difficult to really get into the story - even when there is a shared locality.

Not a terrible story, there's some insights, but it's a lot of reportage.

The Leopard - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

From the frontispiece: " Giuseppe Tomasi was a Sicilian nobleman, Duke of Palma and Prince of Lampedusa. He was born in Palermo in 1896 an died in Rome in 1957... He published nothing during his lifetime, but bequeathed, in addition to his great novel [that'd be The Leopard - R] a memoir, some short stories, an incomplete novel and some fascinating appraisals of English and French literature."

Must be nice to be a nobleman. Anyway...

This is a historical novel based on the transition in the 1800s in Italy from the end of the Kingdome of the Two Sicilies to the declaration of Rome as capital of Italy 1870. (Credit to the translator's note; I don't know much about 19th century Italy.) So, one political system is transitioning to another, the key characters are princes and their families... what can the book be about but the strangeness of a changing world?

It's really a pretty impressive book - challenging enough to get into through the style, has plenty of interesting little asides and allusions and interesting characters, and in the end feels nicely rounded out.

Thanks to Simone for this one!

The Black Ice - Michael Connelly

Not a badbook, just another detective thriller type, set in LA. Apparently the critics think the book is excellent, so I guess I was lucky not to get a dog of the genre.

October Sky - Homer H. Hickam, Jr

Once in a while you find a memoir by someone who actually had an interesting life, and is able to write about it in an interesting way. Hurray!

Okay, Homer Jr lived in a West Virginia coal town in the 1950s, and instead of high school ball and working in the mines, he got stuck into rocketry. Being an egghead in a coal town wasn't always the best plan, but Homer and his mates made out alright.

I think what keeps this story interesting is that it doesn't rely on the "I did this, then that, then this, then that..." approach. He's managed to tie in the events that happened around his immediate experience, and then with the hindsight of a few decades, relate the whole works as intertwined events - like when his father, the coal company's head guy in the town, couldn't slip him some materials for building rockets after the company was bought out and the unions showed up and so on.

Almost made me want to go out and build a rocket.