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Transit Maps of the World (2007)
by Mark Ovenden
144 pages - Penguin Books
This coffee-table type book contains maps of metro/subway systems from all around the world. The focus is on the changes and evolution of maps, going from fairly geographically-accurate presentations to the more abstract and not-to-scale versions which more closely approximate the 'feel' of travelling underground. Though some of these system maps incorporate streetcar or other light rail routes, the emphasis is on the traditional subway or metro.
This is a really amazing book for the armchair traveller, and you can spend hours and hours pouring over these maps and imagining journeys (even though I have to admit that I haven't ever been on 2 lines that are in my own city). Systems that have the longest history and most varied evolution of maps get the most space (4 pages each for systems like New York, Tokyo, Paris, etc.). Though I have to say there is a little something missing that would make this the ultimate book. Perhaps I'd like a little more of the history of each system. I'm also not sure about the strict emphasis on the traditional subway, as, for example, here in Toronto subway-building has been mostly abandoned as not being cost-effective, replaced with the building of dedicated streetcar routes which can, incidentally, also travel underground.
The author does have a very definite bias towards maps that are more like diagrams, with lines only travelling along vertical, diagonal, and 45-degree lines, as in the trend-setting map of the London Underground. I remember looking at the New York City map and being perplexed at how each line is drawn as if it has its own crossing across the river (which it obviously doesn't), but it does work on a practical level of making it more coherent when you're actually trying to get somewhere. Oh, and also very interesting are the plans of Berlin when it was devided, and some West Berlin routes ran under East Berlin, with the stations simply closed, and x'ed-out on the map!
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The Last Opium Den (2000)
by Nick Tosches
74 pages - Bloomsbury
Ours, increasingly, is the age of pseudo-connoisseurship, the means by which we seek fatuously to distinguish ourselves from the main of mediocrity. To sit around a bottle of rancid grape juice, speaking of delicate hints of black currant, oaken smoke, truffle, or whatever other dainty nonsense which nature is fancied to have enlaced in its taste, is to be a cafone of the first order. For if there is a delicate hint of anything to be sensed in any wine, it is likely that of pesticide and manure. (pg.4) Nick Tosches goes looking for a modern opium den for several reasons - because he's seduced by the romantic reputation, because it's reputed to be a cure for diabetes, a condition which he suffers from, and probably most of all, to write a magazine article in which he can look cool. He seems a bit troubled by the illegality, but he consults a priest, and the priest tells him to go for it. This is a really small, thin book, and it is simply the feature article from Vanity Fair put in a little hardcover. About half the time is devoted to an incomplete outline of the history of opium and opium dens, while the rest of the time Tosches travels around, mostly in Asia, looking for any last traces of people who are 'hip' (a term whose equivalence with 'cool' was likely due to the lying-down-on-one-hip posture of the opium smoker). Unfortunately, the biggest obstacle in Tosches' book is Tosches himself. He tries so very, very hard to seem cool and dangerous and smart and amazing, it is hard to get to the underlying story because of all the attitude. I wanted to tell him, 'Quit posing so hard.' Though, the narrative is entertaining enough that you forget that the author didn't answer many of the questions the article started with: does opium actually do anything for diabetes? And, if opium smoking is a dying art, as he keeps repeating in this book, incompatible with a world of cellphones and worldwide Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises, what about the seemingly healthy network of opium-smokes he uncovers near the end of the book? I am not going to rhapsodize here about opium. But I will say this: it is the perfect drug. There is nothing else like it. In this age of pharmaceutical-pill pushing, it delivers all that drugs such as Prozac promise. Forget about the medieval-like bugaboo of serotonin, the atrocities of Freud, the iatrogenic 'disorders' that compose the Malleus Maleficarum by which today's shrinks and psychopharmacologists con their vulnerable marks. All the pills and all the whoredom of psychotherapy in the world are nothing compared with the ancient Coptic words of the Gospel of Thomas: 'If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is in you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.' (pg.51)
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On the Road (1957)
by Jack Kerouac
307 pages - Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics
A fictionalized memoir of Kerouac's travels with Neal Cassady across the US in the 40s and 50s. Much of it is written in a stream-of-consciousness style as the two main characters and various other hangers-on travel around without much purpose.
What I liked about this book were the occasional strongly written evocative passages. I also think that, to a degree, you can appreciate this book without sympathizing with or liking the people in it. And the people are most certainly unlikable. A lot of it reads like drunken boasting, as the narrator is always on his last dollar, always travelling in a car at 110 miles per hour, always screwing over the other person without bearing any consequences. I suppose it could be read as either a salute to or a condemnation of the beats/hippies; depending on your personal feelings.
'...and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was--I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap motel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.' (pg.15)
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Shenzen: A Travelogue from China (2000)
by Guy Delisle, translated by Helge Dascher
148 pages - Drawn & Quarterly
Though this has been published after Pyongyang in english, it is actually an earlier work by Delisle. He spends several months overseeing the production of television animation in the city of Shenzen, China, which is just north of Hong Kong. Along with the dealing with the difficulties of supervising the work of people with an entirely different language and culture, Delisle spends his time trying to navigate restaurants and shops, and takes side-trips to the cities of Canton and Hong Kong.
The world that is explored here isn't as extreme as North Korea, but I don't think the work suffers much because of that. Delisle has a great ability to take note of the little habits and gestures of people, and you learn to sense how it's very much the small details more than the big obvious points that contribute to a sense of homesickness and dislocation. The black-and-white art is also very good. Excellent.
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Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863)
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, translated by Kyril FitzLyon
93 pages - Quartet Books
These are some thoughts and reflections on Dostoevsky's trip to Western Europe in the summer of 1862 that were originally published in a periodical he edited. This book is mostly focused on his time in France and England, though to be honest there is minimal space given to actual impressions and experiences, and they mostly serve as a springboard for FD to talk about whatever he feels like talking about. It's also written in a sort of jokey, repetitive, often ironical style, and there's not a lot of development of thought; though on several pages he does articulate thoughts that he would develop in later, more weighty works. This was kind of a disappointing read, as it's just not very much of anything at all.
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Ice: Stories of Survival from Polar Exploration (1999)
edited by Clint Willis
372 pages - Adrenaline
This anthology collects pieces of writing which range from diaries to books written after the fact to pieces by third parties uninvolved with events. The idea sounds interesting, but I found most of the entries deadly dull, except for the excerpt from Alone, by Richard E. Byrd, which is about the months he spent alone at a weather station during an Antarctic winter. There was also a bizarre story about some California professor who's turned Jungian psychology into some kind of uber-religion, who thought he'd 'raise awareness' about how successful the international co-operation in Antarctica is by breaking all the laws they have in place and secretly sailing down there by himself and wintering there, possibly using a historic hut as his own living space. He didn't even manage sailing from mainland Australia to Tasmania without needing rescue. But most of the stories in this book are not as interesting, and there's way too much about the failed Scott expedition, and I ended up just giving up on this book at about page 200.
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