Reading Your Way through Winter

I know that it has been a while since I last wrote, but no one reads this thing anyway.  Over the last few months, I did some traveling, moved apartments, and applied for graduate schools.  I also became addicted to reading over the last few months.  Pathetically, I plan my social and lunch schedules around reading, but everybody has got to have a hobby.  I finished the fifth Dune book last night.  It is quite good, especially considering the travesty that was God Emperor of Dune.  Read that one a few years ago.  It was so boring that it took me years to get the resolve to read this one.  Frank Herbert is really philosophical in this one as the Bene Gesserit attempt to continue humanity’s journey down the “Golden Path”.  I am still not entirely certain what this “Golden Path” is, but the jist of it is keeping humanity from destroying itself in a feudalistic future.  In this one, the citizens that scattered throughout the universe during the first four novels’ Imperial Age return to t 
he core systems.  Think of it like post-colonialism in space…with giant sandworms.  I know, I know….heavy stuff right?

 All this reading has resulted in some great literary finds and some disappointments.  After finishing Lonesome Dove, currently my favorite book ever, a few months ago, my grandfather warned me never to read the sequel, Streets of Laredo.  Long story short, I should have listened.  The first two thirds of the book are really amazing.  Who doesn’t want to read about Woodrow Call chasing outlaws across west Texas with an out-of-place railroad accountant from New York?  Sounds like a recipe for success, right?  However, the story shifts its emphasis to the relationship between Joey Garza, the outlaw who the railroad hirers Call to kill, and his mother.  I imagine the author gets a lot of hate mail for the book, but I say cut him some slack.  Yeah, the ending of the book is about as disappointing as your ice cream falling off the cone, but he did write Lonesome Dove.    

Jan Morris’s portrait of Hong Kong made for a great read.  It’s amazing how she/he (that’s right, the author had a sex change) managed to make the history of this former Crown Colony into a narrative driven pseudo-story.  Gotta give her props.  I like it so well that I loaned my copy to someone getting ready to visit the city.  There is a lot of interesting stuff in this one, and Morris does a reasonably good job analyzing China’s relationship with the world outside the Middle Kingdom.  Although this stanch Welsh republican’s presentation of contemporary China is a little too idealized for me.  She overlooks the effects of the Cultural Revolution Other than its effects on mainland immigration to Hong Kong.  Overall, the book proves another amazing work by the woman who gave us the Pax Britannica trilogy.