Jenny's Library Books Mid-January

I had to post this after our podcast episode about reading goals for 2015 went live, otherwise this pile would have not exactly made sense.  But you can see my reading goals in this pile!  Doesn't January always start out that way, with great commitment to our goals?  Reading goals are no different (although I don't get tired of reading the way I get tired of, say, trying to not eat sugar.)

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
One Foot in Eden by Ron Rash
The Absolutist by John Boyne

The top three books are not related to New Guinea! Ferrante is an author I wanted to read so much she's on my goals list for the year. Ron Rash is the January selection for the On the Southern Literary Trail group in Goodreads, and I'm always trying to read more southern literature. The Boyne is for my in-person book club and possibly the first book I've read set in World War I.  I've started it already so I can pass it on to another book clubber before we meet, because our town only has two copies total.

Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art by Carl Hoffman
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond
Michael Rockefeller: New Guinea Photographs, 1961
Gardens of War: Life and Death in the New Guinea Stone Age by Robert Gardner and Karl G. Heider
The Asmat of New Guinea by Michael Clark Rockefeller

The rest of the books are for my month of reading in and about New Guinea, both sides.  Three books have to do with Rockefeller - the newer book, Savage Harvest, is about Michael Rockefeller's death in New Guinea.  He died there but two of the other books in the pile are his photos and his journals, so clearly some items survived! Gardens of War is meant to read alongside another book I need to request from interlibrary loan, and the Jared Diamond will be quite an undertaking. I've always meant to read a book by him, and this one happens to be about the Danu people in New Guinea. Convenient!

The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost

 

The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific by J. Maarten Troost
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Around the World: 17 of 52 (Tarawa, Kiribati, South Pacific)

I think it is important to separate the subject matter of a book from the book itself. Kiribati? Fascinating. The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific? Not good. The research was interesting. The factoids were interesting. But the author comes across as a complete tool. I would have been far more interested in hearing about his girlfriend's experience in the Republic of Kiribati, since she was actually working with people and doing important work, unlike J. Maarten, who did laundry! And canned food hunting!

It isn't a funny book, although I keep seeing reviews that say it is. The situation the author and his girlfriend find themselves in is incredibly uncomfortable and rather unhygienic - they are lucky to have survived it, quite honestly. People shit where they eat, literally, in fact his girlfriend is being sent there in order to do sanitation education. It is a greater sense of isolation than simply being out of their comfort zone. They turn into survivalists just like everyone else living on a tiny island with nothing to make a living off of. Funny? Not really. Definitely not "rip-roaring" as the book jacket claims. The author is a drifter and ultimately doesn't contribute much to the book. (And he wrote it!)

In case you wonder at the title, there really weren't any cannibals here, nor was there any sex.  The closest anecdote I remember is how jealous girlfriends would bite the noses off of their husbands/boyfriends, leading to facial deformation that outsiders originally misinterpreted as being from malnutrition.  

Even though I have it on my to-read shelf, I'm not sure I'll be bothering with Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu. I love good travel writing, and have already experienced some in my Around the World challenge.  What travel writing have you liked best?