50 Book Challenge-2012

[tenshikurai9]

So I take the time and effort to craft a post and when I tried to post it, LJ goes through emergency maintenance and I lose the post. Let's try this again.

34. Post-Car Adventuring: The San Francisco Bay Area, 2nd Edition, by Justin Eichenlaub and Kelly Gregory

They list destinations, have a map, and directions of how to get to said destination, especially if they think it would surprise the reader that you can get to it carless--like Yosemite. A little general advice on finding obscure transit buses if you're visiting other areas too.

35. Zinester's Guide to Portland: A Low/No Budget Guide to Living In and Visting Portland, OR, 5th Edition, Edited by Shawn Granton

Some things don't change, like organizing the book by sector and the city's history. It's nice to know that Vodoo Donuts is still waiting for me to become yet another tourist to have a penis-shaped donut. But it's also nice to know that a new metal pizzeria has opened since whatever edition I read previously.

36. Cafe Life New York: An Insider's Guide to the City's Neighborhood Cafes, by Sandy Miller and Photography by Juliana Spear

When my college's women's center went on a trip to Northampton, I got this at Booklinks. The different books in the series take a city and its neighborhoods, showcase a few cafes with pretty pictures and backstories, then ends the neighborhood sections with a "short cup" list--a listing of other cafes of note, but no pretty pictures and backstories. The West Village's Joe, the Art of Coffee uses Barrington Coffee Roasting Company of Great Barrington, MA's beans and the author notes that those roasters started with a hot air popper in their college dorm. Anyone want to give me a hot air popper to experiment in my room? Park Slope's Tea Lounge uses their back up espresso machine's steamer to make an "eggspresso" or scrambled eggs. I want to order one.

37. Travel as a Politcal Act by Rick Steve

He divides the book according to countries he's been to and talks about the lessons we can learn from their different cultures. There's also general advocacy to travel and learn from one another.

38. The Watchmen by Alan Moore

Originally I started this on the train ride home for Thanksgiving, but I had to hand my school mate's copy back to her when we parted ways in Springfield. So when I was done with exams and had time to waste before bikergeek could extract me from VT, I spent a few days reading the library's copy that had been put on reserve for some humanities class. I'm doubtful that humanity would actually bond together for long if a squid-like "alien" dropped onto New York and killed a chunk of the population. When reading a Dr. Manhattan chapter and seeing him watching his entire timeline made me think, I can claim to have been in the same room as my grandfather yet not have been in the same room as my grandfather. He died 2 years before I was born, but I've visited his house since his 2nd wife owns it. So if the past is happenning at the same time as the present and future, I was in the same room as him yet not in the same room as him.

39. Nothing Mattress by Brian Connolly

A punk from South Boston who writes an often autobiographical and episodic comic from Boston's alternative weekly, The Dig. Now he's made a little booklet with his work. Quick and humourous read.

Comments

[pseydtonne.livejournal.com]

I will admit that I'm confused:

1. Reading a travel guide does not count as reading a book. They don't have plot lines, they don't build, they have no characters expect in the first few pages about the bare history of the place.
   
2. You read an awful lot about places to go. Then once you get to these places, you don't do much. Are you more interested in the fantasy or potential of a place than the reality of it?

[tenshikurai9.livejournal.com]

1. I'm attracted to nonfiction on my own so lack of plot lines and characters aren't necessarily a drawback. (Statement does not apply to graphic novels.) Anything I view as a quirky travel book is more likely to get read, so you're never going to see me list Lonely Planet, but eventually you'll see a booklet on the anarchist history of Boston. (Besides, you're talking to someone who's taken mental note that the school has exactly one bicycle repair book and wants to finish reading it.)

2. I have more time to read about farther-away places while taking the T or Amtrak than go to farther-away places. (Fun fact: I barely book read at home and do most of it out of the house.) So there's going to be more places read about than visited. Then there's two things that actually drive my travel, gay pride and visiting people. Which means joining the Dyke March was more important than stopping in Barney's Beanery, even though I read about in A People's Guide to Los Angeles on the plane ride over (in a previous day and age, it had a "No Faggots Allowed" sign.) Or meeting-up with the household of 3 from my Westover days takes weight (but getting lunch with them at Oki-Dogs helped me check-off another LA to-do item.)

And I do visit some of the stuff I've read about. On one of my New York visits, I walked around and found almost everything except one statue listed in the Tompkins Square Park section of the Blue Guide and visited a chunk of the Harlem locations. During earlier visits, I was visiting the "radical spaces" listed in the back of the Slingshot organizer and got to e-mail them that one of the spaces didn't exist anymore.

Then my idea of tourism would involve generating the list of goth shops and adult stores where you can buy your BDSM equipment. Which resulted in a conversation with an employee at DV8 in New York and learning about TES from the flyers. Or me finding/going to Ipso Facto with my uncle (place where I got the leather coat) and adding more time in the store because we got into conversation with the guy behind the counter about the God module and Convergence and such. So some of what I put on my to-do list isn't always going to be in my travel guides.