"Riding the Iron Rooster" (read in 1993) and "The Mosquito Coast" (read in 2006) by Paul Theroux

I have kept a book journal most of my adult life.  It started as a stack of index cards. I kept them in one of those small metal index card boxes that were staples of college students back in the '70s.  I listed the book, author, Dewey or other card catalog number system depending on which library I got the book from.  A brief synopsis, review or connection to my life was included as well as other books by the same author.  I also had cards for books I wanted to read.

In the days before electronics, I would peruse the references of nonfiction books I enjoyed looking for other books to read.  I jotted down recommendations by friends in a little address book that I carried around.  I scoured the just-arrived shelf at the public library for new books and wrote down the names of the ones I didn't check out for future reference.  Then, the lists started to be electronic in the '90s.

When One Note was released by Microsoft I began a journal on there.  Mostly just a list, but with a few comments thrown in.  Then came LibraryThing and I was able to categorize books into ones I owned and hadn't read yet, ones I had read and didn't own, etc. Six years ago or so I started taking literature courses that required me to write papers and journal articles about books.  This led to becoming a blogger.  And here we are.

I have a rare day off from work and told myself I had to do things that usually were at the bottom of the priority list.  So, I'm going through One Note and moving information from there to LibraryThing and the blog.  So what follows in the blog, interspersed through new reading, will be some entries telling of books I have read.  They'll be arranged by the person or place I associate them with or by author or subject.  Who knows.

In this first blog about my past reading I'll talk about "Riding the Iron Rooster" (read in 1993) and "The Mosquito Coast" (read in 2006)  by Paul Theroux  

I watched the movie "The Mosquito Coast" many times both because I love Harrison Ford (he took the place of John Wayne in my heart as a favorite actor) and because I found the story so frightening.  I hadn't realized that the movie was from a book or I would have snatched it up.

He-who-caters-to-my-every-whim gave me a paperback copy of "Riding the Iron Rooster" for Christmas of 1992 because I was traveling to China (and going to be on several trains) the following May.  Knowing nothing, really, about China before my three-week stay in Beijing and the Hebei province, I was eager to hear about it, and mostly enjoyed the book and felt more secure in traveling there.  More than 20 years later, the book should be read as a historical snapshot because so much has changed in China.  I would love to travel there again to see the places I had gone before and talk to some of the people I had met to see and hear about the changes first hand.  Later reading "Blue Highways" by William Least Heat Moon, I was reminded of this book as both authors made their way across a country talking to people along the way.  Reading "Rooster" gave me the courage to talk to people in China, at least those that were kind enough to speak my language.  I actually confuse my memory of the trip to China with bits of Theroux's book.

Of course, I looked through the list of other books by Theroux in the front of "Rooster" and discovered that he had written "The Mosquito Coast."  And so, a seed was planted in my mind to buy a copy of "Mosquito" the next time I saw it.

On some later trip to Fairbanks, Alaska, I found a copy at Gulliver's Books, packed it and brought it home.  After sitting on the shelf for a while, I packed it back up and took it to Alaska with me for a several months stay in 2008.  I read it while living in my sister's sauna, a 7' x 14' building between her cabin and the outhouse.  It had electric lights and a space heater, and I slept on a foam pad on the sauna bench because she hadn't yet installed the stove to make the sauna a sauna yet.  It felt right to read this book in a handmade cabin that I had a (very small) hand in building.  The impromptu nature of my living quarters, as well as the abundance of mosquitoes in Alaska in the summer, set the right tone for the book.

The book was just as frightening as the movie.  It was different, not so much because they had played a little with the timeline of the story for the screenplay, but because in the book we got to hear more of what the oldest son was thinking of his father.  In retrospect, Harrison Ford played the father well and fleshed out the power that one person's megalomania can have over other people's lives - the combination of excitement and danger is intoxicating.  This is definitely on my to-read-again shelf.