serpentine smiles

First book: Adventure in Zanskar by Amy Edelstein, a travel memoir with a heavy Buddhist spirituality slant, about a 20-something hiking a mountain range in far-north India in the 1980s.

I actually really enjoyed reading this; I generally enjoy travel memoirs of women doing adventurous things PLUS I love travel memoirs that take place before cell phones. That, plus the author really had a great time on her trip and loved meeting local people, and the introspection stuff that's typical of a 20-something trying to figure out what to do with her life wasn't as annoying as it might've been because it was tempered with Buddhist philosophies.

Downside is she falls heavily into the "things are so much better for this primitive uneducated society because they don't have technology or money" mindset which is very surface-level, tbh. Maybe they're truly happy, maybe they're just showing you, an outsider, a positive face.

Second book: Peregrinations of a Pariah by Flora Tristan, translated by Jean Hawkes, another travel memoir but this time from the 1800s. It's basically about a French woman traveling to Peru to try and get some family inheritance, and then getting caught in a civil war.

She's an excellent writer (and the translator did a great job) but she definitely has the old-school traveler mindset of "everything but my home country is horrible"-- she hates the food, the people, the location, etc. Her personality is quite funny, though; she kept saying she could run the country if only she could find the right man to partner with, but she couldn't even convince her miserly uncle to part with any money for the 9+ months she lived with him. Ha!

Civil war coverage was a slog and took up a good 1/3 of the book-- which was edited down even more from the original, actually-- and while it was interesting to read about 1800s Peru the fact that the author hated nearly everything about it made for rough reading. I WOULD read her other books, though, one of which is about traveling to England (The London Journal of Flora Tristan, 1842) and another about labor reform in France (not sure if this was translated into English).