Inherent to travel is reading. In a foreign country, whose language differs from yours, books in your domestic tongue are worth their weight in gold.

Reviews of books I´ve read while traveling are included below:

-The Picture of Dorian Gray
-Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
-Imagining Argentina
-The River Why
-Doctor Zhivago

The Picture of Dorian Gray:
By Oscar Wilde

Hedonism, ahh Hedonism. The never forgotten art of enjoying passions and pleasures. Wilde takes you through the life of Dorian Gray, a man who falls madly in love with a picture of him painted by an artist friend. Upon seeing his pianted face on canvas he utters a wish that he himself would never age, but instead his picture would wear the marks of old age and the ravages of sin.

For years Dorian Gray´s wish is etched true on the ever increasing ugliness of the painting. Dorian sins upon sins while indulging in his Hedonistic life work of pleasure, slowly building a bad name for himself, but keeping his boyish good looks. He frequents brothels, opium houses, and commits murders.

The painintg is a mirror more real than one that only showed us what we can actually see. Finally, his passions become too much for him and his Hedonism gives way to self-loathing.

The ending is predictable, but necessary. It couldn´t have ended any other way...

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
By Robert M. Pirsig

One motorcycle, one man, one boy, and a whole lot of self discovery. A "modern" philosophy book whose main character was a committed crazy man who thought too hard and was thus committed.

He battles between who he is now, on his motorcycle trip with his son, and who he was, a college professor with a deviant philosophy about where the meaning of life stems from. His conclusion on this issue, which he rediscovers through introspection, is centered around his definition of "Quality." Teach Quality, live Quality, and think Quality, all in the quest for QUALITY. The sum of life and living.

It's a good book for those who enjoy thinking, but don´t enjoy names like Plato, Aristotle, or Socrates.

Imagining Argentina:
By Lawrence Thornton

Remembering the Disappeared in Argentina during the military junta that only international pressure was able to dispel. While the book glazes over the reason why the government lost its stranglehold on the country, it does bring to light typically horrible stories of the tortured and murdered people of Argentina.

It follows an average man who is the director of a children's theatre in Buenos Aires. After his journalist wife is taken by the government, over an anti-governmental article, he learns he has a strange power. He is either clairvoyant or has the power to make things happen. By telling the stories of those that have disappeared, he accurately describes what has happened to them. Ultimately he uses this power to place his wife. Dead, alive? Read it.

The River Why:
By James Duncan

Another modern day philosophy book that takes place in a fictional river in a non-fictional state, Oregon. The main character is obsessed with fishing and comes from a fishing obsessed family, save for his younger brother, who abhors it.

He comes to realize that there is more to life than fishing and embarks on a journey of self discovery and laments the thousands of fish he has maimed or killed.

By the time he discovers who he really is, he finds love, family, friends, and still has time for fishing.

Without beer, fishing can prove boring. Without beer, this book is still worth the read.

Doctor Zhivago:
By Boris Leonidovich Pasternak

With character names like Nikolai Nikolaievich Vendeniapin and
Ivan Ivanovich Voskoboinikov it is at first hard to follow the characters as your eyes glaze over the gutteral bible length names.

If you stick with it for about a hundred pages the characters begin to come clear, especially since the author uses nicknames for them, as if he himself were tired of typing them all out.

In the beginning of the novel young Zhivago's father commits suicide by jumping off a moving train due to money matters. Later young Zhivago becomes Doctor Zhivago. The book chronicles his time during the end of Russias involvement in the First World War and its subsequent "Red Revolution," to Communist USSR.

Zhivago is often caught on both sides of the war, Communist and Tzarist. Throughout the novel he marries three women, divorcing none, and sires a litter. It is a book of self-determination. It also brings to light the happenings in Revolutionary Russia that the USSR was rightfully ashamed of.

Origionally written in Russian it was not printed in Russia due to government censors, and the first publication was seen in Italian.

It´s a heavy book that takes a time investment, but the reader inevitably becomes deeply involved with the characters, as long as they can keep them straight.