Reading Material at the WWOOF farm

I like to read. While at the WWOOF farm I read Errant in Iberia, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Ethical Slut, plus The Count of Monte Cristo as an audiobook. I was also intrigued by some of the reading material that was available there. Half of the living room seemed to be stacks of old magazines, with a cupboard full of atlases in the corner.

The bathroom had magazines of two distinct types. One was a magazine with political comics called El Jueves, and the others were adult comics. I was amazed! Although I think that I was vaguely familiar with the idea of dirty magazines in a bathroom, I had never actually seen them in anybody's bathroom before.

The living room and the kitchen provided some more mature reading options, ranging from political books, cooking books, multiple dictionaries, and one book that I recall as being "A Complete History of Drugs."

My best experience of finding reading material on the farm was definitely a comic book that I took a liking to. It featured some teachers and some students at a secondary school in Spain. The comic book, called Acné y 4º de ESO, served fairly well to introduce me to some new vocaulbary, as well as to show me some fairly humorous situations of the teachers and students. Some of them I could even relate to. I really enjoyed reading it, and I felt it was sort of a culturally educating experience for me, especially useful since I will likely be working with kids of that age.

Books, Couchsurfing dinners, and hotsprings

I am officially off of work for Spring Festival. Also called 春节 (chūn ​jié​), or Chinese new year, it involves lots of people traveling. I want to save money for debt payment and for future travels (especially Spain this summer!), and it is still a bit chilly outside for my preferences, so I am gonna be staying at home for most of this vacation. Fortunately, I have some things I want to take care of at home. Primarily, I am zooming through China Shakes the World as fast as I can because I am very eager to start Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism. I also have a book on Latin America that I am very excited to read. Unless something unexpected comes up, China Shakes the World should be the last China book I read for a while. I am still interested in plenty of China-issues, and there are still loads of books in the China section of my "books to read" list, but I am trying to focus on Latin America. I have ordered Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America's Soul and Open Veins of Latin America off of Taobao, so those are my planned readings after Spring Festival.


Reading isn't the only thing that I will be doing though! In addition to the 40 Gigs of movies that I have gathered over the past year that could use watching, I plan on practicing some juggling everyday, and hopefully some P90-X driven exercise. I also am going to make regular use of some instructional breakdancing videos I got from a Russian guy at the juggling club. Hopefully I can get some basic toprock down by the time my vacation is over.


Much like many Americans spend Christmas at home with extended family, most Chinese people go back to their hometowns for Spring Festival. This means that the majority of my Chinese friends are out of town for the week (some for the month!), and Beijing suddenly becomes a much quieter and calmer city (except for the fireworks). Most of us foreigners don't have an ancestral hometown in China, though, and some Chinese people don't go home, so I will be going to a big couchsurfer gathering on Wednesday night to celebrate the new year with our international community here in Beijing. Comprising, dinner, watching the fireworks, and dancing, I think an event like this will be good for me. Regardless as to how much I normally yearn for more downtime to read and watch movies, I know that having nothing at all on my schedule is the opposite end of the spectrum, and is no better for my mental health than being overly busy is. Having some social things like this planned will keep me from going crazy and getting bored with my schedule of reading and other self-focused activities.

I am also going to to and check out some nearby hot springs with a Chinese friend whose hometown actually around Beijing, in a nearby area called Yanjiao (燕郊), so that will be another fun time out being social. Not to mention the idea of relaxing at a hot springs for a whole day is very appealing in itself.

How I "read" Classic Literature

I read with my ears. That is: I listen to audio books.

I have loved librivox ever since I first discovered it in my freshman year of college. With a spring break to be spent on campus I needed something to keep me entertained. Fortunately I got a hold of Librivox's The Picture of Dorian Gray. I remember listening to it while jogging and exercising, as I didn't know many other ways to pass unscheduled time. That is my first memory of Librivox.

Since my freshman year I have used Librivox to listen to a lot of stories, and my having "read" War and Peace during the summer of 2008 and my time as a student in China is certainly because of Librivox. I have great doubts that I would have gotten through that behemoth if I had been in possession of a paper copy. Don Quixote was listened to while I did boring manual labor at Kalamazoo college in the summer of 2008, and I "read" some of Leo Tolstoy's and Oscar Wilde's short stories the same way, to keep from insanity while painting walls and moving furniture in exchange for the privilege to live on campus during the summer. During my senior year of college I "read" Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Mysterious Island. After seeing how thick a paper copy of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was sitting (unfinished, I might add!) on the shelf of another K student, I was very pleased that I had used such an easy way to read it.

A few months ago, however, I discovered that Librivox audio books could be downloaded as podcasts directly in iTunes. I was immensely pleased, as the ease and convenience of listening to audio books suddenly skyrocketed. As a result my rate of "reading" has gone up significantly, and in the past six months of being in China I feel that I have "read" many books: Uncle Tom's Cabin, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and a collection of H. P. Lovecraft stories. I am currently finished up my Mark Twain kick, and after polishing off The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I am part way though A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. I am definitely enjoying Twain's sense of humor and satire so far


I normally don't listen to audio books in the daytime though. While I am on a bus, bike, or subway I tend to listen to educational or news podcasts, or sometimes lectures from iTunes U. In fact, the only time that I consistently listen to audio books in when I lay in bed before sleeping. A pillow mp3 player that a received as a gift years ago serves this purpose, and is exceedingly more comfortable than trying to drift into sleep with ear buds in my ears of headphones around my head.

I problem does arise though: when I lay down in a vaguely comfortable position in a dark room at the end of a day, egads! I tend to fall asleep! This is a problem when I am listening to especially long chapters, as if I fall asleep before the end of a chapter my iPod will keep playing until the end of that chapter, meaning that I miss out on a part of the story. I can, of course, go back and listen again, or look up what I missed on Sparknotes. It is a little hassle though.

Another downside is that I can only read old (classic, usually) books this way. For all of the more modern books I want to read about China, Brazil, Latin America, lying, zombies or anything by my new favorite philosopher, I still have to actually read the book, rather than drifting into dreams while listening to someone else's voice.

I feel really geeky about enjoying audio books so much, but in kind of a warm and fuzzy way. In the same way that reading a good story often makes me not want to put the book down or makes me excited to pick up the book again, I sometimes enjoy the stories so much that I am excited to go to bed, and I end up turning off my lights and hopping into the covers far earlier than I otherwise would so that I can listen to more of the story. More rest certainly won't hurt my health, but I find it amusing that I hop into bed full of energy and excitement.

My computer is working... again

I am, for the first time in too long, typing on a computer which is (as far as I am aware) not stricken with any fatal problems, can access a wireless network, and is owned by me. I had a few brief days of use about a week ago before a hard drive problem necessitated the purchase of new hardware and the subsequent installation of a new operating system: Windows Vista.

The whole process took much longer than I had hoped it would, as I bought the new hard drive Thursday January 13^th, and today (the 19^th) is the first day I have been able to use my computer since. First Mike, a co-worker who knows computers, told me that he would install the hard drive and Windows XP over the weekend. Come Monday mike informed  me that the version of XP he had was apparently the Chinese version, so he would try and get the English version ASAP. On Tuesday I accompanied Mike to ZhongGuanCun (中关村) to find a pirated (daoban/盗版, for you Chinese language learners out there) English-language version of Windows XP, and Wednesday I get my computer back with Windows Vista on it (he said he couldn’t find the right drivers to install XP on my computer).

Although it took several days, this method was undoubtedly cheaper, as my co-worker, Mike, did all the work free of charge. This means that rather than paying several hundred yuan to some guy in ZhongGuanCun to fix it, I instead bought a pizza for Mike.

Not that I have been completely cut off from the outside world since the new year. Anyone who has kept an eye on my online action will have noticed that I stayed active (increased my activity actually) on Twitter, and I did a few things via email and Facebook as well. Using my iPod touch to type is not as convenient or comfortable as using my computer though, and reading is also easier when the text is not so small.

On the upside, I have upped my rate of reading over the past few weeks which I been semi or completely lacking my computer. I finished the book China Candid, started and finished The Geography of Thought, Three Cups of Tea, The Zen of Juggling, and today I finished Foreign Babes in Beijing. With my computer back in action, half a dozen blog posts I want to write, a few update emails, and the continual roll of new blog posts to read, I have great doubts that I will finish four books in the next month. I will aim for one book before the end of February: Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell.