Books on travel writing

This weekend a big parcel of books arrived for me from the UK, so I got the chance to get some more reading in. They were surprises to me - it being a good three weeks since I ordered them, so I couldn't recall what I was thinking. Clearly, I wanted to read about travel. Or read about people writing about travel.
First, Do Travel Writers Go To Hell?

A little disappointing - possibly it couldn't live up to the magnificent title. When this book was released, there was something of a brouhaha about how awful it was that a writer for Lonely Planet could possibly be anything less than perfectly honest - but at least Kohnstamm was being honest about not being honest.
It's perfectly readable, and not particularly offensive (what was everyone getting angry about?) but I never felt there was either a very strong narrative hook, or "High Adventures, Questionable Ethics and Professional Hedonism"; but then I'm English; to us, living with a prostitute, trying to sell drugs and getting lost in a desert are all pretty quotidien activities.
Then

The blurb suggests that Thompson is the new Chuck Klostermann. Well, I love Sex Drugs And Cocoa Puffs, so I had high hopes for this, and it does have some good parts. At the same time, it's lacking some bite - I was gladdened that Thompson really does set out his stall about what's wrong with travel journalism, and how it should be fixed, but it all felt a little episodic and lacking in depth. Perhaps it's good that I came away wanting more, but at the same time some of the chapters (especially his time in Japan) went on a bit too long without having anything strong to say. So a curate's egg, perhaps - maybe it should have been twice the length, maybe it should have been a 6 page article in Travelocity magazine, maybe I should read books slower.

Everything You Know - Zoe Heller

Everything You Know: Well, that was slightly unpleasant. I got half way through and realised that I had no sympathy for any of the characters, and I wasn't quite sure why I was reading the book. It was well-constructed - well, perhaps I should say well-executed, but it seemed devoid of feeling and at the same time belaboured with a slightly sappy ending - not sure if that was a twist or a lack of faith at the end in the nastiness of the rest of the book. I can't say much more for it really - it was short, it kept me up until 1 in the morning to finish it, so successful on its own terms.
Afterwards, to clean my palate I read a second-hand copy of Snow Crash in two days flat. I enjoyed that a lot (I'd forgotten a lot of the plot so it was great to rediscover that, and find that lines I'd remembered in one part of the book were actually in quite another) but there were a few flaws. Most jarring to me was that Stephenson defines loglo twice in the space of twenty pages - now, it's a good neologism, and one to be proud of coining, but you only need to define it once, don't you? Or was he already aiming for an ADHD'd market? If that were the case, why would he go on to build books of such biblical proportion later on?
As for the heavy-duty exposition - well, I haven't made my mind up on that. Is that a satire of blockbuster exposition, a necessary evil for the plot, or just somebody showing off?
Reading The Great Gatsby again now - is this some sort of literary time-travel I'm engaging in?

Light: Science and Magic

So now I'm trying to figure out how to use my flashgun properly, I settled on Light: Science and Magic as the book to read. And it's proving really interesting so far. I sat down exhausted last night at 10pm and read the first 85 pages just like that - a very readable text, with lots and lots of diagrams to keep you flipping backwards and forwards to see how you can do things, and how you can change certain effects.
To me, it feels a lot more helpful than Strobist's 101 - that glosses over the fundamentals of lighting technique and assumes rather more proficiency than its introduction first implies - but then one is for free and possibly aimed at a different audience than one which is made for you to sit down, read and deal with something much more comprehensively. And I wouldn't have discovered the book without Strobist, so there's some debt to acknowledge there.
This is far off the subject of Diet Croydon, but trust me, all things are connected eventually. When there's a better picture on the cover of the second edition of the novel, you'll understand how it came to be. Plus, this is some sort of document of the books that I've been reading lately.

The Wisdom of Whores

Pisani begins her book by decrying epidemiology as a pursuit of 'a card-carrying nerd' but so far it's nothing but - an enjoyable romp through UN bureaucracy, exotic sexual conceptions, and changes in abbreviations.
Why, until this morning on the tram I didn't realise that IDU now refers to an injecting drug user, not an intravenous drug user.
Of course, up to this morning I'd given that little thought, as the only interaction I've had with an IDU was on the train from Victoria to Brixton, travelling back after a hard day typing things into a computer. There was just one empty seat on the carriage, next to a skaghead, and I was too tired to stand up. To the horror of the other commuters, he struck up a conversation with me, and we seemed to get along just fine (which in turn meant the carriage figured the two of us must be equally evil - he had a big black coat, I had hair to my waist) until he got up to go, and proffered his hand for me to shake - a hand that had a hypodermic needle stuck in it. Debrett's Etiquette says nothing on this matter.*
Have found out what a waria is. Half wondering if I should put it into my forthcoming Nazis-and-Himalayas-and-clockwork-Turks extravaganza, or if that would be overegging the pudding.

* Possibly I was the more evil of the two, as I was working for a famous internet start-up at the time, aiding their nefarious scheme to Destroy the World Economy by having an IPO, and then watching their shares shrink to 5% of their opening price...

Diet Croydon - pricing on a diet

Had a look at Lulu today and it would appear the price of physical delivery is creeping up (or maybe it's always been a lot). But that, combined with the fall in sterling over the last 6 months, means that anyone wanting a copy in the UK is going to be paying quite a bit more than I intended. So the price is down (Lulu's production costs mean this is harder to lower than I'd like) to only a tenner - and the download is now only 5 US$, which should be more than affordable for those of you who hate dead trees.

Storefront is here

Free stickers to every customer. Sooner or later...