Every few months I receive in my mailbox something called the Peace Corps Times. In the last issue they printed results of an informal poll of Peace Corps volunteers’ favorite books. The popular image of Peace Corps life may be full of adventure, but in reality you spend most of your time losing the struggle against boredom. Reading is thus a major part of your life, unless you have electricity and a computer, in which case watching pirated seasons of The West Wing eight hours a day is a major part of your life.
Here are the results of the poll:
1. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
2. Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible
3. Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains
4. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
5. Joseph Heller, Catch-22
6. Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
7. Greg Mortenson, Three Cups of Tea
8. Larry McMurtry, Lonely Dove
9. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
10. Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, The Ugly American
What strikes me as strange is the presence of Atlas Shrugged on this list. Our volunteer libraries always have several Ayn Rand books hanging around, and presumably someone is reading them. Ayn Rand’s philosophy is basically this: the world is divided between the masses, who are morally and intellectually incapable of improving their situation, and a minority of über-humans who have the brainpower and willpower to raise themselves up. If only this upper crust of humanity were free to fully exploit their superiority, unburdened by any obligation to others, they would eventually improve the whole world and make life better for everybody.
This is, of course, fascism. Ayn Rand considers altruism to be immoral: by helping others, you are helping the weak survive and thus disrupting the natural order of things. How can someone subscribe to this view, and also serve in the Peace Corps? I’d like some volunteer who likes these books to explain this to me.
Anyway, here my favorite books that I’ve read here, in no particular order:
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
John Steinbeck, East of Eden
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses
e. e. cummings, The Enormous Room
V. S. Naipul, A Bend in the River
John Gardner, Grendel
Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Catching up on your posts. I found the list of books odd, since two of them (the Kidder and the Mortenson) were SDSU “common experience” books, and were complete garbage. Also, kudos on the Kundera – good, but not his best.
S.