100 si 10,000

This post commemorates two personal milestones in my Peace Corps service. It is both my 100th post on this blog and I have just finished reading my 10,000th page of Peace Corps service. I thought I'd share a list of what I've been reading and what my general thoughts were on each book. I hope this assures any bookworm Peace Corps applicants that yes, you will have plenty of time to read in the Peace Corps. Each book is given one, two or three stars. Why no fourth star? Because my notation system just doesn't work like that.

Summer 2005

• Bissinger, Buzz. 3 Nights in August. 272 pg. This book followed Tony LaRussa of the St. Louis Cardinals for three days and explains game situations in the same way that Moneyball explained a general manager's thought processes. 3 stars.
  
• Hornby, Nick. High Fidelity. 245 pg. This was the first Nick Hornby book I had ever read, and I followed it up with two others in the fall. I don't know if it's good or bad that I couldn't get Jack Black out of my head while reading it. 3 stars.
  
• Perkins, John. Confessions of an Economic Hitman. 230 pg. This was about a former Peace Corps volunteer who then used his position as an economic advisor to sabotage governments. His mea culpa was weak not only because his purported activities were borderline evil, but also because he claimed to know of a large conspiracy without ever actually attributing sources of his "knowledge". 2 stars.
  
• Steinbeck, John. Travels with Charley in Search of America. 277 pg. I hadn't read this book since early in high school, and since I have discovered New England and several countries outside of America in the time since I had last read it, the book gave me a new appreciation for America and its people. 3 stars.
  
• Palahniuk, Chuck. Diary. 261 pg. Since Fight Club, Palahniuk's writing has been a downward spiral from novels with social relevance to graphic mystery page-turners for a male audience. This book finished Palahniuk for me. 2 stars.
  
• Thoreau, Henry. Walden. 296 pg. This was the first book I read in Mereseni, the smallest and closest-to-nature place I had ever lived in. It reminded me of New England, but at the same time had me thinking with longing of the Mereseni pond when it would freeze over that winter. 3 stars.
  
• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Two Towers. 398 pg. There's nothing to say that hasn't already been said about the trilogy. I just remember my host sister, 18 at the time, looking at me like I was crazy as I described these books to her at the lunch table one day. 3 stars.
  

September 2005

• Tolkien, J.R.R. The Return of the King. 490 pg. Ditto for what was said above about The Two Towers. 3 stars.
  
• Wodehouse, P.G. How Right You Are, Jeeves. 206 pg. The first Wodehouse I had read since it was required reading in freshman year of college. The adventures of Bertie and Jeeves are hilarious, and this wouldn't be the last I read of them. 3 stars.
  
• Hornby, Nick. Fever Pitch. 239 pg. Nothing like the movie. There's no real narrative structure to this book about soccer, like there was in the Fallon-Berrymore-Red Sox feature film. That wouldn't work in a film, but in a book, it's enjoyable. I liked his admittance that the so-called typical male obsession of sports actually fades in and out depending on the man, the time in his life and the quality of the game. 3 stars.
  
• Steinbeck, John. Cannery Row. 169 pg. I don't know who writes better about America than John Steinbeck. I had to come to Moldova to realize that Steinbeck was my favorite English-language writer. 3 stars.
  
• Hornby, Nick. About a Boy. 307 pg. I know that Kurt Cobain isn't the focus of the book, but I kept focusing on the fact that I was just a few years too young to really grasp the significance of his death when it happened. This book helped give me some perspective. 3 stars.
  

October 2005

• Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 281 pg. Many Moldovans told me that they had already read Huck Finn in Russian or Romanian, but what those translations don't give are the beautifully transcribed accents in the book. Nor is it easy for a non-American to begin to comprehend the black-white relations that this book addresses. 3 stars.
  

November 2005

• Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. 277 pg. If this book had caught me six or seven years ago, it would have been a huge influence. But having attended Boston University and seen some traces of the culture that Holden lives in, I didn't need this book to tell me it was, in the narrator's words, "bullshit". 3 stars.
  

December 2005

• Heller, Joseph. Catch-22. 463 pg. Yet another book that I enjoyed, but would have probably enjoyed more if I had read it in high school, when I was reading Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five. No matter how much Tom Brokaw romances "The Greatest Generation," there will always be Catch-22 to turn the memory of World War II on its ear. 3 stars.
  
• Hawks, Tony. Playing the Moldovans at Tennis. 249 pg. When you live in a country of only 4 million people and you've been trying so hard to understand the culture for the past six months, it's good to read a book about a guy who has never been in a rutiera, speaks awful Romanian and can't get over the fact that people in this country don't smile. It was just what I needed before I left on vacation. 3 stars.
  
• Strauss, Neil. The Game. 437 pg. I asked my parents for this book for Christmas because it included a chapter on Transnistria. Little did I know that this book on pick-up artists would be one of the most enjoyable reads I'll have in my entire two years here. This book has been read by myself and eight other volunteers, and the skills that it teaches may have helped one volunteer snag his current fianc®e. 3 stars.
  

January 2006

• Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. 118 pg. This was the third time I've read this book in my life, and only this time did the idea of wanting to settle down resonate with me. I also thought of the way so many people in this country are trying so hard to get to that next level; they have just one dream, and they may never achieve it. 3 stars.
  
• Seinfeld, Jerry. Sein Language. 180 pg. A quick and mindless comedy read. No harm done. 2 stars.
  
• Petras, Kathryn and Ross Petras. Here Speeching American. 223 pg. A hilarious collection of English errors seen all over the world. I had gotten so used to the common Moldovan errors in English, it was nice to read how other countries mangle the language. 3 stars.
  
• Steinbeck, John. Tortilla Flat. 151 pg. The lives of a bunch of low-down no-goods in a village written out like morality plays and with speech patterns belonging to the Arthurian legends impressed me as stories and as a style. 3 stars.
  
• Wodehouse, P.G. Very Good, Jeeves. 264 pg. January was a big month for reading, and especially a big month for reading comedy. 3 stars.
  
• Buck, Pearl S. The Good Earth. 380 pg. This is my mother's favorite book, and as I read it I thought about my Costesti host father, Tudor. He has so much love and respect for the land, but he is raising his children in a new generation which doesn't see agriculture as a major part of its future. I think of the day when his son will sell their vineyards to a corporation. 3 stars.
  
• Steinbeck, John. The Pearl. 97 pg. Like much of the Steinbeck on this list, I had already read The Pearl once before. Knowing more about Latin America's past and the oppression of native and mestizo populations made this a much more interesting read for me than it had been in high school. 3 stars.
  

February 2006

• Simmons, Bill. Now I Can Die in Peace. 353 pg. This is a collection of online columns that Simmons compiled into a book while the Red Sox were on their way to their 2004 World Series win. As a Sox fon, I really had no choice but to like this book. As a writer, the concept of compiling online writing and making a book out of it struck me as an interesting possibility. 3 stars.
  
• Wodehouse, P.G. Uncle Fred in the Springtime. 250 pg. Without Bertie Wooster and Jeeves, this comedy about the characters at Blandings just wasn't as funny as other Wodehouse material. 2 stars.
  

March-April 2006

• Friedman, Thomas. The World is Flat. 469 pg. I avoided this book like the plague for the first year after it was published, thinking that I knew enough of Friedman's thoughts on globalization just from his New York Times columns. I was wrong. It gave me perspectives on where Moldova can possibly go in the decades to come, with an emphasis on information technology and services. 3 stars.
  

May 2006

• Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. 67 pg. This book will make me think a little when I call something bullshit, but I can't credit it for being a life-changing piece of literature. I guess I just wanted something more humorous. 2 stars.
  
• Wodehouse, P.G. Jeeves and the Tie that Binds. 205 pg. Thank God for Jeeves and Bertie, and thanks to whatever volunteer put so many Wodehouse books in the Peace Corps library. 3 stars.
  
• McCourt, Frank. Teacher Man. 258 pg. This is by no means a perfect book, but it is important for anyone who wants to teach high school, especially in a public school. And since that's exactly what I want to do, it's a good thing I read it. 3 stars.
  

June 2006

• Shakespeare, William. Othello. 128 pg. I was supposed to have already read this play in college, but I was probably busy playing Super Monkey Ball on my roommate's Gamecube. Shakespeare really mastered the art of one character deceiving another in this play, and I can't think of any other work by any other author with so much nervous dramatic irony. 3 stars.
  
• Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. 619 pg. With about 100 pages left in the book, I finally realized that the book had no possibility of ending well. I'm told by one source that Romanian literature doesn't transcribe accents like Twain and Steinbeck do; if that's true, than I consider the language to be a little bit poorer than what it could be. My favorite memory of this book was text-messaging another volunteer and using the initialization "G.O.R." Only a day later did I realize that the final word is Wrath.
  
• Borek, David, Tomas Carba and Alexandr Kocab. Legacy. 107 pg. This book, available at the Museum of Communism in Prague, was a nice piece of supplemental reading to tie in with a visit to the museum. I would have liked a book with more depth, though. 2 stars.
  

July 2006

• Thompson, Hunter S. Better than Sex. 246 pg. This book about the 1992 presidential election doesn't hold a candle to Thompson's work in the '70s, mostly because, as my friend Dennis pointed out, he was no longer really in the game. He was just watching TV and reacting to it. 2 stars.
  
• Keret, Etgar. The Nimrod Flip Out. 167 pg. I just couldn't get into this collection of short stories translated from Hebrew. Maybe I need to be with a character for more than 10 pages before I really know what's going on. So my poor review of this isn't so much about Keret's writing, but rather the form factor that it was published in. 1 star.
  
• Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. Breakfast of Champions. 295 pg. Four words: Wide Open Beavers Inside! I hadn't read any Vonnegut for a long time, and I love his style. His usage of little hook phrases such as "Listen" or "And so on" combined with my recent Thompson reading to influence my writing style for the time being. 3 stars.
  

August 2006

• Sachs, Jeffrey. The End of Poverty. 368 pg. This book is a must-read. Two things stood out to me: First, Moldova is in the lower half of countries in the world, but is at least stable and is on the development ladder. Many countries, especially in Africa, are nowhere near the bottom rung of the development ladder. Second, there needs to be a major policy change among developed countries, especially in the U.S., about poverty reduction in the developing world. U.S. aid is far too little, and for just 0.7 percent of our GDP, we would nearly eliminate extreme poverty in the next 20 years. 3 stars.