I like to read travel writing a lot I rarely get to travel and much less write about my travels. The Andaman trip was the only long trip I made anywhere. However, I like to read travel literature to compensate for the lack of adventure in my own life. I've read Bruce Chatwin, Ryscard Kapuscinski, Peter Matthiessen, Pico Iyer- those kind of writers and also travel magazines like Conde Nast Travel. But Paul Theroux continues to be a favorite. Sometime back I had picked up Theroux’s ‘Riding the Iron Rooster’ which is about his journeys in China by train. It is more than a year since I found it and I am sort of treasuring it for a time when I will be free to do some solid reading.
But when I found another book on China I felt glad I had not yet read ‘Riding the Iron Rooster’ since I want to compare it with another book on the same place. The other day I had been to a second hand bookstore and came across Colin Thubron’s ‘Behind the Wall’, an account of his travels in China. It would be interesting to see what one writer noticed and what the other has missed. This book too is a tome with hundreds of pages. I want to read the two books one after the other. But I am wondering which to read first.
The other books I saw but did not buy at the store were Pico Iyer’s ‘Tropical Classical’ which was a better copy than the one I had, Kazuo Ishiguro, a book of poems by Joyce Carol Oates, a book by Sanjay Nigam and several others I would have unhesitatingly bought had my shelves been empty and the wallet full.
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