I haven’t been writing much about my reading because I’ve been focused on getting my Pecha Kucha presentation ready.  My session is Thursday, but I leave for Vegas on Tuesday morning – can’t wait!!  Click here to see  draft of my PK.

In providing a little history, as he does throughout Getting Stoned with Savages, Troost reminded me of a book I either read in college, but don’t remember…or perhaps it was yet another that I intended to read but never got around to reading, Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific.   The title comes up as Troost is explaining the origins of one of the three main population groups in Vanuatu:  followers of John Frum.  The island of Santo, among others, was used as a staging area by the United States Navy during WWII, and all the cargo brought in essentially proved to those who believed in the Frum Movement that John Frum was right when he encouraged them to ignore the white missionaries and return to the “old” ways – celebrating ceremonies, dancing and drinking kava.  He claimed they would be rewarded with precious cargo if they did so.  Of course, all the cargo brought to the island by the U.S. soldiers confirmed Frum’s words in the minds of the native peoples.

In any case, being a sucker for “island” stories, almost as much as being a sucker for “end of the world” stories (stay tuned for tomorrow’s post), I’ve decided that before summer is over, I’m going to get my hands on a copy of Tales of the South Pacific for my personal book shelf.  Now, whether I actually get to reading it is another story entirely.

So, in addition to adventures in exploring volcanoes, experiencing kava, and learning all he can about the up-til-very-recent-times practice of cannibalism on Vanuatu, Troost also writes about the fact that he and his wife discover that they are pregnant while on the island nation.  Here are a few quotes about that:

“So tell me what you see,” Sylvia asked as I awaited the red light of the nakamal.“One line or two?”
She thrust a thermometer-like contraption in my hands. “Well,” I said, “I see two lines, very clearly.”
“Do you know what that means?”
“No idea.”
“You’re going to be a daddy.”

And other:

What really got us marveling about Mother Nature, however, was the imminent prospect of parenthood.  Technically I knew where babies come from…The was life, a life that we had created.  And what a miraculous thing that is.  Every day our little embryo was sprouting a limb and growing a brain.  “According to the book,” I said to Sylvia, “our child presently has a tail.  Do you think that comes from my side or yours?”

I have contributed to the current trend in blogging by posting a photo that illustrates my passion for education.  You can see my photo and contribution on my other blog of the same name, ATypicalLibrarian?.

I’m a little more than halfway through Troost’s book, Getting Stoned with Savages, and I’ve got to say I would recommend it.  It’s not really heavy on deep travel information, and it certainly isn’t about getting high with the natives of Vanuatu, although he does write a chapter on drinking kava with the locals.  What it is, is a lighthearted account of a man and his wife doing what many of us wish we could do every now & then:  quit our current jobs, sell or give away everything and head off to some faraway exotic land and see what happens.  Now to be truthful, his wife didn’t actually quit her job…but she did take an assignment in a not-so-savory place that no one else in her company wanted.  So, basically the same thing. 

I know only one person who’s actually done this in real life, and MW has definitely not written a book about it.  I see random pictures and hear random stories about his travels in South America and overseas on occasion, but for me, this book is my only real taste of that kind of lifestyle.

A few more of my favorite quotes:

In describing his first experience with kava, in Tonga:  I attended a kava ceremony for a visiting Fijian princess…After a few bowls of kava, I turned to the princess, meaning to ask her how much kava, did she think, was too much kava.  Instead, not yet realizing that kava’s effect upon the mouth is similar to that of a shot of Novocain, I said:  “Wincess, how wuch wava is woo wuch wava?”  My Nepalese friend thought that was hilarious:  “You walk wunny,” he said.  “You walk wunny woo,” I pointed out, as we tumbled over in sidesplitting laughter.  We cracked each other up.

In describing his second experience with Vanuatu centipedes, which occured while preparing for his first experience with a typhoon:  I entered the shed and reached for the nearest shutter.  It was heavy and ungainly, and as I pulled it free, a centipede ran toward my feet.  I shrieked, managing to hit an octave I’d thought I had lost with the onset of puberty.

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.

So I’ve been thinking lately…one of the reasons, no probably the #1 reason I decided to go to library school is that I love books.  I love to read them, of course, but I really, really, really love how books feel in my hands.  I love how they look on the display tables at Borders.  I am 100% hooked on books.  And having a job that allowed me to look at them, select them, organize them and read them was really appealing to me.

Now that I am a librarian, have been for over three years, I’m beginning to think that librarianship should not have been the career I picked after teaching made me too tired to read ANYTHING after grading the essays of 7th graders.  Why not? you ask.

Because I don’t have time to read.  There are too many other tasks, projects, duties that need my attention.  My list of books I want to read and the pile of books I own and haven’t yet read both keep growing.

So I was thinking maybe a public library would be a better place for me…I love teaching, absolutely love it, and it would be hard to give up this job because I do love the teaching so much.  But, in a public library, could part of my job be reader advisory?  I’ve seen that in a lot of the job descriptions on the TCCL web site.  I’ve decided to try it.  My Blogger blog of the same name has been home only to images…photos I’ve taken and want to share.  I decided that this one would be more like a blog you’d see a librarian write.

I don’t get to read much, but when I do, I will share a little bit each day about what I’m reading – usually that’s a few pages here and there from the two or three books I’ve got going at one time.  Let’s see how it goes!