Susan and her traveling partner “Claire” decide to spend a year traveling the world after they graduate from Brown University.  Neither have done any exotic travel.  Susan comes from a middle class family and Claire comes from a wealthy one.  They are what sounds like casual friends prior to the trip but they decide to go and decide to start their travel in China.  It is 1986 and China has just opened it’s borders to tourists, although it is heavily monitored.

Susan and Claire travel to China.  They immediately are disoriented by the language, the temperature, the food, the smells and just about everything.  They take turns having moments of weakness and homesickness while the other pushes to carry on with the trip.  During this time Claire writes diligently in her journal and talks of people watching her and spying on her.  After a dramatic incident Susan realizes that she is having a psychiatric breakdown and works to get her out of the country as fast as she can.

The story wasn’t really what I expected.  There were parts of it that I liked, such as the author talking about the Americans and expatriates traveling in Asia trying to prove how authentic they were by how little they paid for things and how much they roughed it.  She points out that you have to be a wealthy person to have the privilege to travel internationally and “rough it.”  It was also interesting to hear about China during this time and it definitely took some bravery as well as naivety in order to travel there without any preparation.  It is hard for me to identify what I didn’t like about this book but there was just something missing that kept it from meeting my expectations.

The Summer of My Greek Taverna is about an American who went to Greece as a break from real life in order to try to write a book.  He fell in love, both with the country and with a girl who became his wife, and made a life for himself in Greece.  Patmos is the small island where they met and that is where most of the story took place.  I did not visit it during my few months there, but the descriptions in the book brought to mind some of the beautiful places that I did see.

Tom and his wife are both struggling in work that they are not passionate about in order to support their two children.  She had been an artist and he was a writer but these careers were difficult for them to maintain after having children.  When a Greek friend offers Tom to rent his Taverna for the summer on a 50/50 split, Tom looks at this as a chance to make a large sum of money that will help them to be secure for the rest of the year.

This story is about that partnership, the hard work that is put into managing a restaurant, and the many relationships that formed and grew during this period.  There are insights into Greek culture (the love of negotiating), Greek food (including recipes at the end), and the life of expatriates living in a home away from home.  I thought it was a quick enjoyable read.

Rhoda Janzen has a car accident the same week that her husband has left her and these coinciding events lead her to go home to live with her parents while she is recovering.  Much of her story is different anecdotes from her marriage and from her childhood growing up.  She is a good story teller and there were several moments that she described that made me laugh out loud.  Most of these had to do with her mother who is out spoken and has an interesting logic.  The author does describe parts of her Mennonite background such as a built in nature to cook (from scratch) and she details some traditional Mennonite meals that she always had to eat.  She talks about a Mennonite’s lack of style, and how it is looked at as sinful to dance, drink or play cards.  However she did not go into several of the things that I always felt differentiated Mennonite’s from other protestant religions such as their pacifist beliefs.

Overall this was a quick read and it was a book that I enjoyed.  It started a little rough for me because she put these little box quizes into the beginning of her story that I was not a fan of.  This was a story about going home and how that made her examine her background and culture after being away from it for some time.  I think we would all find surprises in doing that at the things that bring back fond memories and the ones that horrify us.

Jo Tatchell first went to Abu Dhabi in 1974 when she was a small child.  Her father was working there and it was a city that was just starting to realize and develop the wealth that it had based on oil reserves.  Before the oil wealth that flooded the area people had lived a simple, almost nomadic lifestyle going where they needed to in order to survive.  The desert climate is harsh and the main ways to make a living were pearl diving and farming.  With the money that started to come into the city within the last forty years there has been a great deal of development and urbanization.  The style of life has changed dramatically within people’s lifetimes.  However it has also lead to Emirates needing to redefine who they are and how they want to present themselves to the world.

The development of Abu Dhabi has been planned and there has been a recently more of a push to become a center for art and culture.  This was what brought the author back to the region because she had a hard time understanding how the society she had known could be open in the way it would need to in order to embrace art.  She describes a society that brushes the bad things that happen under the rug in order to present a good face in public.  She also describes a society in which there are strict rules to live by and how a lot of business is taken care of through connections, backwards deals, and with a lot going on under the surface.

I found this book very interesting and was happy to be both entertained by the personal accounts of the author’s time there as well as being able to learn about a different place and culture.  I was struck that some would put the number of Emirates living in Abu Dhabi at about fifteen percent, making the majority of the people there having come from around the world.  The author seemed to describe her time there as in some ways being part of things but in others being separate as she would always be an expatriate and an outsider.  I also found it fascinating to think how quickly a place has changed and gone from one simple lifestyle to a more complex modern one.

Lily Casey was born in 1901 on a ranch in Texas and grew up there and in Arizona striking up a life as it came and making the best out of what there was.  In the beginning of the book Lily survives a flash flood and protects her younger siblings from it by climbing up a cottonwood tree and hanging on throughout the day and night until the waters subsisted enough to escape.  She has a quick mind and a quick wit and while she seems to try anything new that comes her way, she also has enough confrontation in her that she rubs some people the wrong way.

Lily is not able to finish school as she is a girl and her parents plan for her to get married.  She is able to become a teacher anyhow, at age 15, because of the teacher shortage in the southwest with the war going on.  She has numerous teaching jobs and is known at one as the horse back riding, poker playing teacher.  Lily is very independent and does what she can to stay that way.  After some family tragedy she decides to have children of her own and Rosemary, Jeannette’s mother, is born.

Some of the highlights of this book were the sassy character of Lily and the setting and time frame when it took place.  I also enjoyed getting to know Rosemary as a child since I had previously read The Glass Castle and had read about Rosemary as an adult.  I did find it a little bit odd to be reading in the first person a story that was like a memoir, knowing that Lily Casey was no longer living.  Jeannette Walls interviewed a lot of people to have a pretty complete picture of her grandmother, yet no one can tell accurately tell someone else’s story without a small piece missing.  This was a quick read (in fact I read it in the car on a four hour trip) and I was entertained throughout.  I will definitely read more of what Jeannette Walls writes.

He talks about growing up in a time when people were innocent and didn’t see danger in every little thing.  He describes different places in Des Moines where the kids would hang out and how they spent most of the time running around outside… sometimes behind trucks spraying DDT, playing happily in the mists.  I did not live during these happy times and, to me, some of it was a little hard to imagine.  However, told by Bill Bryson, it was very enjoyable.  He is one of the few authors that I find myself laughing out loud.

While this was not quite as entertaining to me as In a Sunburned Country or A Walk in the Woods, if you like Bill Bryson, you will like this book.

Julie Powell started a blog about cooking her way through Julia Child’s Mastering The Art of French Cooking Volume I in a year.  She did this in her small New York apartment while working full time.  Which is pretty impressive.  I can hardly imagine working a full day and then grocery shopping for that night to get home and prepare meals that can take several hours of prep time. 

Julie cooked her way through the cookbook making many things from scratch (such as making her won mayonnaise) and trying all sorts of adventurous foods.  She had to boil live lobsters, use bone marrow and debone a duck.  All of which she accomplished to varying degrees of success.  What I really like about her story is how her goal to cook her way through this cookbook gave her something to work towards and something to look forward to.  She was working in a job where she didn’t feel that she was going anywhere and having a goal on her own that she could work towards and accomplish added a lot to her life. 

The story is at times funny and entertaining, and at times (if you aren’t super interested in the food preparation) a little slow, but overall very enjoyable… in both book and movie form.

After living in such close proximity to death for a year Ishmael was recruited to be a soldier by the government army.  He found that he had such anger and desperation in him that he was able to do the killing and other atrocities that he would have never believed.  He was part of a “family” of sorts again who looked after him and he fought and killed to stay part of it.

He was eventually selected by his commander to go to a UNICEF rehabilitation center where at first he was very upset and angry at being released from the army.  He was also going through withdrawal from the drugs that he had been using while in the army.  At first he described his time at the rehabilitation center making it clear that he would have rather been fighting then be there.  Eventually he formed a relationship with a nurse there and began making progress.  He was placed with an uncle and began living a life outside of the center.  He eventually is able to make his way to the United States.

This is a hard story to read as it is about war and child soldiers.  The way children, many who have been orphaned and have no other choices, are used is horrible to read about.  However the resilience that is shown by Ishmael Beah is admirable.  As I’m sure that it’s found in many who manage to continue through circumstances that I can not even imagine.  Throughout it all he has hope and is able to use that to make a better life.

Paula’s class consisted of mainly Kosovo Albanians and throughout her course, as she taught the English language, they taught her about their experiences during the war and the resilience that they showed.  Her job teaching serves as an anchor for her days in Kosovo and gives her a purpose and a sense of belonging.  It is quickly apparent how it grows to be much more than that as she gets close to the students in her class.

She develops an extracurricular reading club to read Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea. She had decided that Hemingway’s short, concise writing style would make it a good choice for her book club.  Through this book she also was able to see how closely the struggle, hope and perseverance of the old man mirrored many of her students experiences.

I enjoyed this book and how she included so many personal touches and stories of her student’s lives.  The journal style that it was written in was perfect to help the reader go through the journey with the author and bring the emotions of the students closer to the reader.  It was clear that Paula Huntley and her students made lasting impressions on one another.

The author speaks about how one of her dreams has always been to learn Italian, as frivolous as that is.  She went to Italy, went to language school, ate and enjoyed good company.  My favorite point that she makes in this section is about how Americans are so driven that we feel guilty when we do relax and just hang out.  She said in Italy that wasn’t looked at as strange at all.

In India the author went to an Ashram in India planning to spend part of her time studying devotion at her guru’s for several months before traveling the rest of her time.  Instead, she spends all of her time at the Ashram and quickly slips into a very different routine of meditation, prayer and strict devotion from what she had lived in Italy.  Again, she meets fascinating people from all over the world and learns even more about herself and her strengths.

After India she travels to Indonesia because when she had been there years before for a yoga retreat, a Balinese medicine man had prophesied that she would be back to study with him.  She returns to Indonesia with no real travel plan except to find this man…and is disappointed when he at first does not recognize her.  She ends up studying with him, making close friends, and finding love in unexpected places.  This is the chapter about balance, about pulling together the different things that she had learned into one package.

I really enjoyed this book.  It sounds like a dream to me, to be able to do this sort of traveling and build relationships with people all over the world.