Rare non-fiction

When I have time for leisure reading, it’s usually a good novel…either one by my new favorite author, Jody Piccoult, or another whose cover caught my eye on my last trip to Borders.  I’m guilty – guilty of buying new books when I’ve got piles of unread old new books lying in piles on my bookshelves.

Today, however, I am writing my first “reader’s advisory training” post, and it’s actually about a non-fiction travel memior…the latest by J. Maarten Troost.  It’s called Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu, but before you get any ideas about me, I should tell you that it’s not really about drugs.  It’s about travel.  The author has traveled to a group of islands in the South Pacific, where his wife has been sent for work.  They sold pretty much everything they owned in D.C., got on the plane, and started the adventure.  With his wife safely at work, Mr. Troost attempts to satisfy his most enticing curiousities about kava, the island inhabitants’ drug of choice, and cannibalism, while still trying to write his daily quota of pages.  My favorite quote so far, his description of Vanuatu:  The geography itself accounts for no small measure of the country’s srangeness.  This is because Vanuatu’s eighy-some islands lie directly on the Pacific Ring of Fire, which, as the name implies, is a rather fearsome place to find oneself.  There is quite likely no greater force that that created when one tectonic plate with, let’s say, Australia and the Indian subcontinent on its back, decides to get personal with another tectonic plate carrying, oh, how ’bout the mass of the Pacific Ocean, the west coasts of North and South America, and for good measure, Japan, on its shoulders. So maybe you can see why I like this guy’s writing.  He’s pretty witty.