Around the World in 80 Books - First Dispatch

Wow! I can't believe it has been so long since I posted. I will try to do better - I promise. In fact, I actually have some serious blogging goals now that I am unhindered by actual work. My first goal is to actually review some geo topics through my various sources and report back here - like I used to do for my kiddos. Once I start working on that more regularly, I'll send out the word to my ninjas to take a look at my page. My second goal, the reason I am posting today, is to write about my new project. So, I have this list I found - of 80 books (83, actually, I added a few). 80 books of literature and stories from around the world, my new project is Around the World in 80 Books. I love to read, I love to travel, and I love to read about places I want to travel to. So, I thought I'd work my way through the list. Maybe I'll learn more about the places I've been, find some new places to go, keep my wanderlust satisfied until my bank account allows me to travel again, and most importantly, find some books to add to my Recommended Reading List for Geography Ninjas. After reviewing the list, I realized that I've already read 6 of them - including the one I added. But it's been a while since I've read them, so I'll probably read them again, anyway. In any event, I have since gone through the list and reorganized it by continent and have noted some severe shortages. So, I've decided to use the original list (which I found online somewhere) as a guideline, but I'll add my own books along the way. I'll start with one of the books I added - Around the World in 80 Days by Michael Palin - it seemed like the best book to start with... "...air travel shrink wraps the world leaving it small, odourless, tidy and usually out of sight." Air travel may shrink wrap the world, but it also makes it accessible. While I laud the ideal that traveling closer to the ground makes you more a part of the scene, I wonder which scene he was actually attempting to see. On land, Palin rushes as quickly as possible through every major city, minor village, and everything in between. He comments on how this is part of the plan - in the original book our valiant explorer skips all the sites, too, and necessary due to the time constraints. But, he spends most of the trip at sea. True, he gets to spend more time with people - gets to know them much better than the average traveler, but he accomplishes little in the way of seeing the world. Unless you are trying to convey the sense that the world is mostly ocean. His travel methods did leave him a lot of time for introspection, but little time to inspect what he could or should be introspective about. In the end, we learn a little about people - mostly people who are away from home themselves, so what we learn - what we see - is an incomplete picture. But, maybe that's the point. The world is mostly ocean. It is a relatively small vessel upon which we are all travelers throughout the solar system. Seen from a global, rather than local scale, the book does tend to tie us all together, and the stories are as interesting and amusing as you'd expect from a former Python. Worth a read, for sure.