Globe Corner Blogs

Chuck Thompson’s books are not for the faint of heart…or stomach. But anyone who has traveled past their city lines will appreciate his commentary on the highs and lows of travel. His first book,  Smile When You’re Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer, is a favorite of the GCB staff. His upcoming book due in December, To Hellholes and Back, promises to be equally popular. Chuck was kind enough to answer a few questions for us about his travel, his books, and his taste in beer.

1. Do you prefer aisle or window? (Please explain.)

Aisle always, avoiding at all costs the trays-down imprisonment of slow post-meal and beverage-service pickup.

2. The subtitle of To Hellholes and Back is “bribes, lies, and the art of extreme tourism.” Could you give us your definition of “extreme tourism“?

“Extreme tourism” is often associated with space tourism or living in a grass hut in Papua New Guinea for a month. But if your idea of a good time is hanging out in grass huts, what’s so extreme about that? Extreme travel, to me, is anything that takes you out of your comfort zone — physically, intellectually, emotionally. That’s why both the Congo and Disney presented me with “extreme” opportunities. I didn’t want anything to do with either one.

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The Sex Lives of Cannibals - by J. Maarten Proost

J. Maarten Troost  has been Lost on Planet China, caught Getting Stoned with Savages and adrift in sea of The Sex Lives of Cannibals. Although he isn’t presently floating on a raft off a remote island in the South Pacific, it took some sleuthing to find him. When we did track him down, he was nice enough to respond to some of our questions.

1) Do you prefer aisle or window? (Please explain.)

Window, which is kind of odd because flying is essentially one long cardiac event for me. I do not like to fly. It is what it is and I try to live with it. But whenever I find myself looking down upon Afghanistan or Iran or the Kamchatka Peninsula I find that I feel all warm and fuzzy inside, unless there’s turbulence, in which case I whimper and sway as I try to find my special place.

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An Irreverent Curiosity - by David Farley

First and foremost, David Farley is a (self-proclaimed) awesome dancer. Secondly, Farley is the author of An Irreverent Curiosity and has travel essays in Travelers’ Tales Best Travel Writing 2009, Travelers’ Tales Prague, and 30 Days in Italy–as well as in numerous magazines and newspapers. And wait, there’s more: he also writes for WorldHum.com. We had so much fun asking Rolf Potts some questions we decided to see if one of our other favorite travel writers would answer and even be up for our version of The Hemingway Challenge.  He was kind enough to respond.

1) Do you prefer aisle or window? (Please explain.)

Always the aisle. I like to move about the cabin whenever the spirit strikes me and if I’m sitting at the window, I’m stuck there, lest I want to pester the person sitting at the aisle (which I don’t). Extra special bonus lovely seat: the aisle seat in an exit row.

2) Have you ever pretended that you were Canadian while overseas?

Never. And I never will.

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Marco Polo Didn't Go There - by Rolf Potts

Marco Polo Didn’t Go There is a collection of travel stories by Rolf Potts from a decade of writing for publications like National Geographic Traveler, Salon.com, and WorldHum.com. He’s also been selected for The Best American Travel Writing anthologies several times and is best known for his book, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. Each essay in Marco Polo is accompanied by  a “special commentary track” that gives the reader clarifications and anecdotes about each story. After Sarah and I read the book, we still had a few questions that we were dying to ask. Since his travel advice column for WorldHum.com is called Ask Rolf…we did.

1. Do you prefer aisle or window? (Please explain why.)

Aisle.  I have long legs, and it’s nice to stretch them out every so often.

I’d say the bag of peanuts I bought in the Siphandon region of Laos in 1999. There were rumors of a cholera epidemic in the area at the time, so I was avoiding restaurant meals.  I figured a bag of peanuts would be fine.

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Real World - by Natsuo Kirino

Many readers who express an interest in Japanese literature are already familiar with Natsuo Kirino’s fascinating work. Her recent novel, Real World, reads like a social study carefully disguised as crime fiction. The crime itself, a murder, slowly makes its way out of the picture, revealing other dangers, and rushing the story forward like a Tokyo bullet train.

The main characters are high school students with few bonds to each other and whose aspirations are as mundane as to simply live a peaceful life. Unfortunately, that is not meant to happen, and their worlds are doomed to be invaded by all the threats of the real world imaginable: school girl-obsessed creeps, fortune tellers, marketers, shallow pop-culture, alienated parents, personal disasters they have no idea how to cope with, smothering relatives and peers forcing them to study, study, study until you “spit up blood”, study “like you are going to die.” Continue Reading »

The Lazarus Project - by Aleksandar Hemon

Love and Obstacles, the new book of short interlinked stories by Aleksander Hemon, arrived just in time for me to browse it before I went to hear him speak at the Harvard Bookstore. These stories are linked by a common character: a young Bosnian from Sarajevo who leaves for the United States right before the war in Bosnia erupted in 1992 and ends up sort of stranded abroad. The narrator is a familiar voice, and it is very similar to characters’ in Hemon’s previous books, The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, and current Globe Corner Bookstore Staff Favorite and highly acclaimed The Lazarus Project. The books are not autobiographical, but Hemon’s biography and the character’s share many common traits so I kind of felt like I knew him–I was very curious to see what he was like.

I was a little shocked when he first came to the podium, as he looked a bit different from the author photo on the back page. But, soon I was laughing along with the crowd as he read the witty dialog from the final story, The Noble Truths of Suffering. I became completely charmed if not completely smitten with him. As he was reading a passage describing “his” Sarajevo (one of my favorite places in the world) I was lulled into a dreamlike state and started to think of one of my most favorite places in Sarajevo…the cevabdzinica. The sausage shop.

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The Burma Chronicles--by Guy Delisle

Having recently traded in the lush madness of Southeast Asia for the prim, snow-covered streets of Cambridge, I’ve been spending a lot of time in our Asia section–perusing the shelves for books and pictures chronicling others’ adventures through the region, gazing fondly at the photos of Wats and markets I’ve been to, and just generally daydreaming about lychee-flavored ice cream on hot green afternoons.

Recently, while lost in one of my Asian fantasies, I came across The Burma Chronicles, a bamboo-green covered book with a cartoon of the author pushing a stroller past two glaring soldiers with machine guns.  Naturally, I was intrigued. Continue Reading »

Cartagena--photo by Harriet

We arrived in Cartageña to welcome sun and humidity. The 5-10 minute stroll along the harbor, from our hotel in the Getsemaní district to the entrance to the walled city, was glorious even during the mid-day heat. The walled city’s many plazas, varied retail districts, cobblestone streets, and beautifully maintained or restored buildings were breathtaking. It was reassuring to be in a historic port–a cultural travel destination that still somehow retains a sense of everyday life. We wandered down narrow streets, gazing at colorful buildings, pausing in plazas (many with fountains) to take in cafes, check our map, and plan our next route to a museum or church. Continue Reading »

The Lazarus Project -by Aleksandar Hemon

After enduring an extremely brutal reading list for a class on genocide, I declared January to be a “happy book only” month for me.  But now it is February, and I can start reading about pogroms, political oppression, and mass graves again. The first book I read after my self-imposed “depressing book ban” was The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon, and it became one of my favorites overnight.

Hemon intertwines two intriguing stories about Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe who was shot by a Chicago Chief of Police in 1908, and a fictional, present-day Bosnian immigrant named Brik. Officially, Lazarus was declared an anarchist assassin, but Brik wants to discover what really happened. Continue Reading »

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao --by Junot Diaz

I have ticked off another box on my Writering Life List (…like birding, but with authors).

Junot Diaz was sitting across from me on the subway the other morning. I was on my way to work, so it was early; I feared my senses were still blurry from having just woken. But there was really no mistaking it. Having seen his picture everywhere when our friends at Harvard Book Store hosted a reading with him, I was familiar with that stubble, that hairline (or lack thereof), those glasses, and that peculiarly frowning mouth. It was him.

Did I go up him and tell him how much I loved Oscar Wao? Of course not! Would you casually saunter up to a pileated woodpecker if you spotted one and tell him how brilliantly red his crest was? Of course not! Most writers are known to be solitary creatures, skittish at the sight of fans clutching books to their chests, grinning shyly, practicing softly under their breath how to say, “I’ve been the biggest fan for…” without sounding like that guy.

So no, I did not bother him. Besides, he was reading.

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