Reading Lists

We expected to devour books here in Africa with the rural pace of life and general absence of leisure activities, but as it turns out we’re averaging just under one book per month. Some of our Peace Corps buddies put us to shame in the literary department having read over a hundred titles during their stay. Volunteers have pooled all of their pirated e-books, making a nifty file with thousands of volumes, all accessible on Janet’s reader, so lack of material is not our excuse. We’re just too busy to pound the pages during the daytime, and after dinnertime we just want to sleep. Overland travel still provides some quality book time, although not without competition from the African landscapes passing in the windows. The opportunity cost of reading is substantially lower when our vehicle is not moving, which is not an inconsequential portion of time when you consider break downs, flat tires, passengers boarding and disembarking, rearranging the mountains of baggage, and just waiting for vehicles to fill before they depart. Even with full time jobs, we still find some time for reading at home. Even our anemic literary habits here impress the locals. Reading for pleasure is completely foreign. Passers by assume we’re reading religious material or studying. Romão still attempts to read a few words whenever he sees Luc with an open book, but can never put together an entire sentence (especially since Luc is usually reading in English). Everyone marvels at how our collection of printed materials fills an entire bookcase, more titles than the rest of the town combined. Only the schools have more books since they receive free government textbooks, especially at the primary level. We have access to the Peace Corps libraries where books have accumulated from previous generations of volunteers, although it’s unclear who would ever allot precious international baggage space to such trashy romance novels which always seem to abound. Maybe they’re just more visible because no one takes them to site. Janet reads widely: novels, historical fiction, biographies, while Luc has given up on made-up stories. He reads almost exclusively histories, travel guides, Peace Corps memoirs, and inspirational biographies about people who have given their lives to making the world a better place. After two years of enduring such a scarcity of printed material, it will be amazing to see a bookstore or an actual library when we get back to the United States.