All posts by djarmul

I am a Peace Corps volunteer in Moldova, in Eastern Europe, serving in the small city of Ialoveni with my wife, Champa. We are from Durham, N.C., where I was the head of news and communications for Duke University. You can follow our adventures on my blog, notexactlyretired.com.

Visiting Gagauzia

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If foreign tourists only visited New York City, they wouldn’t understand upstate New York, much less the rest of the country. Likewise if they visited my home town of Durham but skipped the rest of North Carolina.

Screen Shot 2018-01-16 at 2.49.50 PMThe same is true here in Moldova, even though the whole country is only slightly larger than Maryland. This past weekend, Champa and I were reminded of this when we visited Comrat, a small city that is the capital of Moldova’s autonomous region of Gagauzia.IMG_0640

Comrat has notable red wines and a lovely church, but it’s best known in Moldova as the home of the Gagauz people, an Orthodox Christian ethnic minority that left Bulgaria years ago to escape persecution from the Ottoman Empire. Almost all Gagauz people speak Russian instead of Romanian and they have no interest in Moldova reuniting with Romania, which is a popular idea in our part of the country. IMG_0653To the contrary, many have unhappy memories of Romanian rule.

When I served previously as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nepal, it took me nearly a year until my American eyes adjusted enough to notice the different facial features of people in various ethnic groups. Here in Moldova, where we are well into our second year, I was struck by how Gagauz faces showed similarities with the Balkans, in ways I don’t usually see in Ialoveni.

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We traveled to Comrat by bus so I could help teach a journalism class led by Haley, a member of my Peace Corps group who is working with Miras Moldova, an NGO that advances Gagauz culture. At her request, I discussed my career as a journalist and communicator, and we then worked together with the students to review projects they have been developing on topics such as Gagauz cuisine and traditional medical practices.

 

Haley and her partner Anna Celac also organized fun activities such as the one you see above, which challenged one student to draw a copy of a picture, guided only by verbal cues from her partner instead of seeing the original. The students also asked Champa to teach them some Nepali, as you can see in the video clip below (also on YouTube.)

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Two other Peace Corps Volunteers in Comrat joined us, Haley and Anna for dinner at Haley’s house, where we spent the night. Haley cooked a fabulous meal and we loved meeting her host mother, a Gagauz journalist herself who remains active well into her 70s.

All in all, it was a short but fascinating reminder that even a small country can have big internal differences, in this case not “red states” vs. “blue states” but “bună ziua” vs. “Здравствуйте.”

Martin and Mihai

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While Americans were commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr. on Monday, many Moldovans were celebrating the birthday of Mihai Eminescu.

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If you don’t know recognize his name, well, at least one of my work partners didn’t know who Dr. King is. She and others at the library, some of whom had heard of him, were more interested in the birthday of our colleague Raisa, who you see receiving flowers.

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We celebrated Raisa with a big lunch and the singing of both “Happy Birthday to You” and La mulți ani trăiască.

IMG_0658It was my latest reminder that even though Dr. King is a hero of mine and many other Americans, our country is not the center of the universe, as much as we might like to think otherwise. To be sure, Dr. King is known and honored in many parts of the world, which is richly deserved, but people everywhere generally care most about their own lives and communities.

IMG_0536A few days ago, a friend back home wrote to ask whether Moldovan newspapers were coming up with their own phrases for “shithole.” I was sorry to disappoint him: Not a single Moldovan friend has mentioned the recent controversy to me. Keep in mind that I work with librarians and other friends who are well-educated. Undoubtedly some Moldovans have been following the controversy, but the ones I know don’t care about American politics unless it affects them personally, which it rarely does. At least they know where America is, which is more than most Americans know about Moldova.

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As you’ve probably guessed from the photos by now, Mihai Eminescu was a famous poet, perhaps the greatest ever to write in the Romanian language. He is beloved by many Moldovans not only for his beautiful work but also as a symbol of the cultural ties between Romania and Moldova, which was part of Romania until it was taken over by the Soviet Union. Ialoveni organized a big show in his honor on Monday evening, featured in the poster you see above.

So that’s the story of Martin and Mihai … unless, of course, you live elsewhere in the world. In that case, feel free to replace Mihai with someone from your country.

 

Beyond the Comfort Zone

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One of the things for which I’m most grateful about serving in the Peace Corps is how it’s made me less fearful about traveling to places that seem exotic or dangerous to some Americans even though they’re actually safe, beautiful, fascinating and cheap.

I’ve been reminded of this during our recent trips to countries near Moldova, where Champa and I are serving as volunteers.

This past week we visited Sofia and Bucharest. If we’d traveled instead to London, Rome or Barcelona, we probably would have seen Americans on every corner. But in these two cities we saw very few.

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The photo above shows what I mean. The tourists are listening to the guide in the purple coat, who led us on a free walking tour through Bucharest’s old town, which is filled with lovely churches and Parisian-style architecture. They came from Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, Russia and Serbia. The only Americans were Champa and me.

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Here’s a photo of another walking tour we took, this one through the heart of Sofia, where we received a fascinating history lesson from the woman with the blue bag. We viewed beautiful churches, a mosque, a synagogue, the presidential residence, the former Communist Party headquarters and more. Joining Champa and me were 23 other tourists, who came from the Basque region, Bulgaria, Canada, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Netherlands and Spain, plus one other American.

The same was true on our tours of Bulgaria’s Boylan Church and Rila Monastery,  and of the ancient city of Plovdiv, the country’s second largest. You can see these above. The only American in the photos is Champa.

Likewise when we visited Armenia and Georgia a few months ago, shown below, touring monasteries and ancient sites in Armenia and Georgia’s capital city, Tbilisi. The only other American in our groups was a software engineer from Boston who came to learn about his Armenian roots. The others hailed from China, Dubai, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Philippines, Russia and other countries. All of our tours were in English, with the Armenian and Georgian guides also speaking in Russian.

It’s possible we just happened to be in groups without Americans. Certainly I didn’t expect to see swarms of American tourists in these Eastern European countries, as I might have in Cancun, San Juan or Toronto. Americans who search for flights to Europe look first to London, Paris and Rome, and to familiar places such as Dublin, Madrid and Frankfurt. Destinations in Central Europe such as Prague and Budapest have become popular, too.

Moreover, people travel abroad for many reasons. The two of us enjoy exploring new cultures but others prefer shopping, fine dining or resorts, or hiking, or visiting friends, pursuing a special interest or something else. A 2015 New York Times article said “nearly half of overseas travelers are from the East Coast, and they make trips within the Western Hemisphere or to Western Europe, to places that are more affordable and easier to reach (with shorter and direct flights) than those farther afield.” Tourists from other countries have their favored destinations, too.

IMG_8532Fair enough, and I certainly understand why so many Americans love visiting London or Paris, since I enjoyed these cities, too. Even these tourists are more adventurous than Americans who won’t venture further than a summer beach house. Moreover, millions of Americans lack the resources to do even that and can only dream of foreign adventures. I know how lucky Champa and I have been to pursue our lifelong passion for travel.

I also know serving as an older Peace Corps Volunteer in Moldova now affects my perception of what’s interesting and reasonable. But for goodness sake, I’m not suggesting Americans forego the Eiffel Tower to visit North Korea. I just wish more of them were joining all of the other foreign tourists we saw in experiencing these amazing countries instead of defaulting to the same predictable list, like ordering only vanilla or chocolate ice cream cones in a shop offering many flavors.

Serving as Peace Corps Volunteers, living and working in an unfamiliar culture, has made us even more comfortable with travel alternatives. But you hardly need to have served abroad to expand your horizons a bit, especially with so many companies now offering trips to “exotic” destinations and the internet making it easy to find reputable local travel companies and guides for almost any budget.

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Champa and I hope to keep exploring both familiar and less-familiar destinations in the years ahead, assuming our health and circumstances make this possible. Our current wish list includes Sri Lanka, the Baltics and other places we can visit easily with a limited budget, just as we have recently.

I hope we’ll see some of you out there or perhaps somewhere else off the beaten track. There’s a big world waiting beyond the American comfort zone.

Chicken Soup for Christmas

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There’s no better way to celebrate Christmas than with a big, steaming bowl of chicken noodle soup.

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Our host mother, Nina, prepared the soup on Sunday as a traditional dish for Orthodox Christmas, which comes two weeks after December 25. That’s Nina below behind the tureen filled with the delicious soup, which tasted like what my grandmother used to make for us when I was a kid.

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My Grandma Sarah was born near Odessa, Ukraine, not far from Moldova, as I described in a previous post. Many of the foods I’ve seen in Moldova resemble what she used to serve at our family gatherings in New York. Her stuffed cabbage, for instance, was similar to Moldovan sarmale, although with beef instead of pork. Champa helped make the sarmale you see in the photo above.

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Sunday’s baked chicken, pickled vegetables and salad all looked familiar, too. I made an apricot bundt cake with jam I bought in Sofia last week. IMG_0494We also had a plate of Romanian cookies and American Oreos, which we found in a store in Bucharest.

Many Moldovans also celebrate Christmas on December 25, as well as New Year’s, so the past two weeks have been filled with celebrations. (While I’m writing this on Sunday night, a neighbor’s fireworks are exploding outside my window.) IMG_0478Our host family generously invited us to join two Christmas feasts this weekend, together with their niece and the couple you see here. That’s Liviu in the green jacket showing us a pickled tomato and watermelon with our host dad, Mihai. Viorica sang several songs after dinner, with the voice of an angel, as you can hear in the brief video below, with Nina continuing to bring out more food for us.

So to summarize: chicken soup for the Christmas soul, an angel and childhood memories brought to life. There was no better way to celebrate.

 

Homes on the Road

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We stayed at an Airbnb apartment instead of a hotel when we visited Sofia, Bulgaria last week. We also stayed at Airbnbs when we visited Tbilisi, Georgia and Sibiu, Romania in 2017.

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The living room of our Airbnb in Sofia, Bulgaria. (Sorry for the mess.)

All three apartments were central located, with kitchens, living rooms, washing machines and comfortable beds. All cost much less than hotels, although more than local hostels. IMG_0302All three hosts were helpful and responsive. The woman who welcomed us to our apartment in Sofia told us about a wonderful local Nepalese restaurant, Gurkha, where we ended up having a delicious meal and conversation with the owner, as you can see in the photo.

Champa and I still use hotels, such as when we stayed in Bucharest for a couple of nights last week and weren’t sure when we would arrive. But we now prefer staying in Airbnbs because they provide us with extra room and a local contact to help us learn about a city.

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Our Airbnb in Tbilisi, Georgia

Many of our fellow Peace Corps Volunteers in Moldova use Airbnbs, too, when traveling or coming to stay in the capital, Chișinău.

I describe all of this because some Americans are still uneasy about staying in a private home instead of a hotel, whether through Airbnb or another service. Others include HomeAway, Couchsurfing, FlipKey, VRBO and Roomorama.

The concept may seem especially novel to some older travelers. As one wrote on the Senior Planet website, “At first glance, Airbnb looked to me like a site for freewheeling hipsters.” That writer tried Airbnb and became a fan, saying, “I’ve learned something new about myself: I really enjoy staying in a ‘real’ neighborhood and being a traveler, not a tourist.”

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Champa and our guide, Florin, at the Airbnb we used in Sibiu, Romania, also shown in the photo at the bottom of this post.

We feel the same way and are not unique. Airbnb says more than one million of its users are now over 60, as are 10 percent of its hosts. Its 2016 report said some older Airbnb hosts now depend on this extra income to remain in their homes.

This past year, the Freebird Club launched an Airbnb-like service especially for older travelers and hosts. More broadly, older Americans have begun turning to a variety of flexible gigs and part-time jobs. In her latest list of 100 Great Second-Act Career Resources, career expert Nancy Collamer (my sister) identifies many of these.

One of my favorite blogs, The Senior Nomads, describes how a retired Seattle couple, Michael and Debbie Campbell, has spent several years staying at Airbnbs while traveling around the world. They explain: “As we were closing in on retirement, we felt we had ‘one more adventure in us’ so in July of 2013 we rented our house, sold our sailboat and one of our cars, and reduced our stuff until it fit in a small storage unit. We waved goodbye to our family and friends and set off to explore the world!”

 

This past summer, when we visited home, Champa and I experimented with the “sharing economy” in another way, by using a car-sharing service. We rented a blue Toyota Camry on Turo from a guy in Virginia for about half of what we would have spent with a car rental company. We had a great experience and would use the service again.

Serving as older Peace Corps Volunteers has opened our eyes in so many ways, and not only about Moldova. We’ve also become more comfortable with new online travel resources favored by people our children’s age. It turns out they work nicely for us, too. If you’ve had an interesting experience of your own with these resources, good or bad, I invite you to share them with a comment.

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Sofia and Bucharest

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If you can’t find two European capital cities, Sofia and Bucharest, on a map, much less say why they’re great places to visit, don’t feel bad. Before I began serving nearby as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Moldova, I didn’t know much about them either.Screen Shot 2018-01-04 at 1.43.58 PM

Sofia is the capital of Bulgaria. Bucharest is Romania’s capital. Champa and I visited both this past week during a holiday break, using Sofia as a base to explore western Bulgaria and then making a quick stop in Bucharest.

Neither city is as beautiful as Paris or Venice. They still have plentiful Soviet-style apartments and government buildings. But they also have magnificent churches, lovely parks, modern hotels, excellent restaurants and interesting places to visit, all with prices much lower than elsewhere. Together with Krakow, Poland, they were the cheapest tourist cities on the latest European Backpacker Index.

We were very glad to visit both.

We toured Sofia and the surrounding area for four days, beginning with a free walking tour of the city. It’s a laid-back capital that Lonely Planet described as “a largely modern, youthful city, with a scattering of onion-domed churches, Ottoman mosques and stubborn Red Army monuments that lend an eclectic, exotic feel.” You can see some of its sights in the photos above, including the stunning Alexander Nevski Cathedral,

On our second day, we joined a group that visited the Boyana Church, a medieval Bulgarian Orthodox structure with striking frescoes on the city’s outskirts. We continued on to Rila Monastery, the largest and most famous Eastern Orthodox monastery in Bulgaria.

Snow began falling during our visit, making the setting even more beautiful, as you can see in the video clip.

Next we visited Plovdiv, an ancient city straddling seven hills, with an amphitheater, stadium and other ruins dating back to Roman times. Today it’s Bulgaria’s second-largest city, blending museums and tourist attractions with shopping and nightlife.

We shifted gears with our final visit in Bulgaria, this time to Koprivshtitsa, a historic mountain town known for its traditional architecture. We visited several of the town’s colorful houses and churches before taking a break in a charming local restaurant to sample some of Bulgaria’s famous soups, salads and breads. We arranged this and the other tours with Traventuria, a local company that provided great service. We stayed in a nice Airbnb apartment two blocks from the cathedral.

On Monday, we took a bus from Sofia to Bucharest, arriving in the evening at an out-of-the-way bus station where it took us several minutes to flag down a taxi. Eventually we arrived at our hotel in Old Town, where we strolled for a late snack and view of the many clubs, which were pulsating with music and, in a couple of cases, scantily clad dancers in the windows.

The next morning we walked across the boulevard to Unirii Square for a two-hour walking tour that provided a great overview of the city’s complicated history, which ranges from the Roman and Ottoman Empires to Vlad the Impaler (also known as Dracula), as well as the more recent Communist reign of Nicolae Ceaușescu, who was executed with his wife in 1989. Nearby was his People’s Palace, the world’s second-largest building after the Pentagon.

On Wednesday, we flew back to Moldova, where our host family welcomed us with a great dinner and lots of questions about our travels.

All in all, it was a fascinating week, and fun, too. I know now why Sofia and Bucharest are great places to visit. Maybe you should find out, too.

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Less News is Good News

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If you spent too much time obsessing about all of the big news stories in 2017 — the tax bill, the hurricanes, Charlottesville, #MeToo, North Korea and everything about President Trump, as well as about sports, entertainment and other fields — perhaps you’ve resolved to turn down the volume in  2018.

I am happy to tell you that change is possible! However, you may need to join the Peace Corps to break your habit.

As a volunteer serving in Eastern Europe, I have been living for more than a year and a half now without the nonstop chatter of American cable news stations. These channels aren’t widely available here in Moldova; much of the content comes from Russia or Romania, as well as locally. Champa and I don’t even have a television, much less English-language newspapers or magazines.

This has been a huge change for me. I used to run a university news office, paying close attention to what was happening not only on our campus but around the world. My office’s “rapid response” team tracked events and jumped quickly to highlight faculty experts who could discuss the latest political drama, natural diaster or social trend. I monitored the news throughout the day. It was both my job and a passion.

If I’d been home this past year, I probably would have been following every twist and turn in the Russia investigation, along with other stories. Instead, I’ve been focused more on what we’re doing at our post, such as with my robotics and entrepreneurship teams for local students, and with Champa’s costume project for her school’s drama program.

I still get my daily fix of American news, mainly via the online New York Times and Washington Post, both of which offered great overseas rates. Champa and I also watch monologues from the previous night’s comedy shows, such as Stephen Colbert. We often view these while eating dinner. I can’t believe I’ve become one of those people who gets news from late-night comedians, but I have, albeit with a seven-hour time difference.

This may still sound like plenty of news but it’s nothing compared to what I used to ingest. And guess what? Just like an obese person who went on a diet, I now feel lighter and healthier.

I’ll never quit the news altogether. I’m still a curious person who wants to know what’s going on. I still get outraged by some of what I see. But I’m thankful my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer has led me to step back a bit. I’m a lot happier never seeing people argue on a cable news program or CNN flog a story hour after hour.

When we return home next summer, I’m going to resist reverting to my old habits. I’ll try to stick with my new diet. If you come to visit us in North Carolina and see me staring at the news again for more than a few minutes, please snatch the remote control out of my hand.

 

Ready, Set, Flow

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Raise your hand if you’ve done any of these things at your local library:

    • Guided a fire truck to a burning fire
    • Used munipial sludge to fertilize a garden
    • Replaced a broken pipe in a water system

Oh, and you needed to do all this with a robot you programmed. (You can raise your hand on your own.)IMG_9958

On Wednesday, students in our robotics program at the Ialoveni library began their newest challenge: a “Hydro Dynamics” competition in which their robots will carry out as many of these and other tasks as possible within two and a half minutes.

They are joining students aged 9 to 16 from 80 countries in this event organized by First Lego League, an international organization that challenges kids to think like scientists and engineers. This year’s competition focuses on water; previous themes have included animals, food, trash and climate.

IMG_9928Our team will be programming robots to operate precisely on a colorful mat filled with Lego models of pipes, wells, fountains, gardens, a filtration system and other structures involving water. In one of the 18 possible missions, their robot will need to turn the handle of a faucet, releasing plastic models of water. In another, it must pull a lever that releases rain from a cloud. In others, it must place a water well near a garden, open a valve or drop water into a pot to make a flower rise.

This video shows what they’ll be doing:

Our students will also need to give a presentation in which they share an original idea for solving a problem involving water. Their overall score will assess their research, presentation and teamwork skills as well as their programming prowess.

Ialoveni’s library, Biblioteca Publică Orășenească “Petre Ștefănucă,” is among several public libraries participating in the competition with support from Novateca, the NGO that’s been a driving force in modernizing public libraries across Moldova. (See my recent post describing Novateca’s remarkable impact in our area.)

On Monday and Tuesday, my colleague Lidia Rusu (shown above) and I participated in a training session for the new competition. Novateca organized the program, where we were reunited with many of the libraries we met at November’s SumoBot Challenge at Tekwill, which I showed in this video. The librarians have formed a Facebook group to stay in touch, share ideas and encourage each other as they compete against teams from schools and other groups.

Our students are now building the Lego structures for the competition and starting to think about their research project. After Christmas, they’ll need to decide which of the 18 missions to undertake, and then start modifying, programming and testing their robots.

Raise your hand and wish us luck.

 

 

‘Wealthy’ Neighbors

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When your neighbor appears wealthier than you, it affects how you view your own life. I’ve seen this in both of the countries where I’ve served as a Peace Corps Volunteer, in how Nepalis view India and how Moldovans view Romania.

Most Americans probably view India and Romania as developing economies, which they are relative to ours. But in Nepal, India is the wealthier neighbor next door, as is China to the north. In Moldova, which was once part of Romania, many people look admiringly at their western neighbor’s economy, which has prospered since joining the European Union in 2007. This is especially true in our home city of Ialoveni, which has strong cultural ties with Romania. In some other parts of Moldova, the outward focus is more on Russia, whose economy is also much wealthier.

Many Moldovans are eligible for dual citizenship with Romania. If they can obtain a Romanian passport, they can work in EU countries. Every day, they line up outside the Romanian Embassy, which is located down the block from the Peace Corps office. In between are passport photo shops, travel companies and employment agencies.

The three high school students who were on my Diamond Challenge entrepreneurship team last year are all studying now at universities in Romania. Several of the girls on my current team may study in Romania, too. A young man from Ialoveni who I tutored in English is now there as well, as are people from across Moldova. Many others are in Italy, Germany, France and other Western countries, as well as in Russia and other countries to the East.

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Before we came to Moldova, we visited our nephew Shankar and other members of our family in Nepal who live near its eastern border. India is on the left side of the river behind us in this photo.

It all reminds me of what I’ve seen in Nepal, where India is a larger, wealthier and more powerful neighbor — and one much more accessible than China for most Nepalis. A large percentage of Nepal’s adult population has left to work across the border or elsewhere, especially in the Gulf, although there are also Indians who come to work in Nepal.

When Champa and I visited Nepal before we came to Moldova, we spent several days at her sister’s home in a small village near the Indian border. In the evening, we could look across the river into India and see homes whose brighter lights contrasted with those on our side, where electricity was weak and  irregular. We often had to use candles and flashlights. So did the family next door, which had a television and other nice things purchased by their son who worked abroad.

Here in Moldova, many of my colleagues at the library earn a bit more than $100 per month. Monthly pensions for retirees are far lower. Highly-educated employees at the local county government earn only a few hundred dollars per month. No wonder some Moldovans look lookingly at their counterparts in Romania, whose GDP per capita in 2016 was $9,474 compared to $1,900 for Moldova, according to the World Bank. (For the United States, it was $57,467.)

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We saw Romania’s economic growth for ourselves when we visited Transylvania last spring.

All I can say is that what I’ve seen here in Moldova feels familiar to me, as does the irony that the same Romanians whose economic situation seems better may aspire themselves to get a green card to live and work in the United States. Likewise for people from India and other countries whose economies look impressive to their poorer neighbors but remain behind our own and, of course, include wide disparities in income and opportunity.

It’s all relative, and we’re not immune from these comparisons ourselves. When Champa and I flew home from Nepal last time, we stopped for several hours in the oil-rich Gulf state of Qatar, whose Doha airport felt like a palace compared to many of ours in the United States. I was impressed, if not a little jealous, even though I was glad to leave and continue home.

Our sense of other people and places begins with our own lives. Wealth, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

 

My Favorite Books

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‘Tis the season for year-end lists of favorite books. Here’s mine from Moldova. I downloaded almost all of these books onto my Kindle for free through the online OverDrive system which, as I’ve written previously, is the best thing that ever happened to a Peace Corps Volunteer who likes to read.

 

I could fill my Top Ten list just with recent novels I read this year. My three favorites were Exit West, Mohsin Hamid’s brilliant depiction of two refugees from a war-torn Arab country; The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, which captures the brutal insanity of North Korea; and The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead’s chilling exploration of slavery in antebellum America. All three novels haunted me for weeks.

I also loved Manhattan Beach, which Jennifer Egan sets on the waterfront of New York, showing us a different side of the city while telling a harrowing yet moving family saga. Richard Ford’s Let Me Be Frank With You and Richard Russo’s Everybody’s Fool are gentler but wonderfully written, with compelling protagonists struggling to make sense of their aging years. Viet Thanh Nguyen in The Sympathizer and Karan Mahajan in Association of Small Bombs both took me to communities I barely knew before. Tom Perrotta’s Mrs. Fletcher was funny and wise. Carl Hiaasen’s Razor Girl was even funnier. All ten of these novels were a pleasure.

 

I also loved three older novels: Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, whose depiction of a man’s life upturned by accusations of sexual misconduct seemed especially timely now; Redeployment by Phil Klay, rightly hailed as one of the best novels about the Iraq war; and Smiley’s People by the great John LeCarre, who published an acclaimed autobiography this year.

I’ll give a partial thumbs-up to three other novels: Moonglow by Michael Chabon; The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian; and Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng. Bohjalian’s book is about the Armenian genocide, and I read it shortly before we visited Armenia. Like the others, I thought it was good, not great. I was even less enthusiastic about Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, which was snarkily funny in places but somehow didn’t click for me.

 

I also read some great nonfiction this year. My favorite book was Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. I know it’s come in for criticism for its depiction of dysfunctional white families in Appalachia, but I found it insightful following our election last year. Arlie Russell Hochschild covered some of the same issues in Louisiana in Strangers in Their Own Land, which I enjoyed but found less compelling. Bruce Springsteen’s autobiography, Born to Run, was a treat from cover to cover. So was reporter Katy Tur’s recent Unbelievable, about covering the Trump campaign, although its uneven text reflected the haste with which it presumably was written. (Sorry, always an editor.)

I’m in a science book club back home, so I’ll give a shout-out to my favorite science book of the year: Steve Olson’s Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens. It wove geology, politics, history and personal stories into a narrative I would have found engaging even if Steve weren’t a good friend.

I’m also a history fan. In Revolutionary Summer, Joseph Ellis offered a fresh look at how early military defeats under George Washington nearly ended the American Revolution in its early days. In The Wright Brothers, David McCullough showed how the two aviation pioneers were nothing less than admirable, illustrating what’s best in the American character at a time when I needed to be reminded.

 

I’ll also give a hat tip to two novels I read just for fun. In Crazy Rich Asians, Kevin Kwan poked fun at the super-rich families of Singapore and Hong Kong. I’m looking forward to seeing the movie version when it comes out next year. Another comedy of manners featuring people with too much money was Eligible, Curtis Sittenfield’s modern adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Once again: well-done fluff that kept me turning the pages.

Detective and mystery novels are great page-turners, too, and I read several good ones this year, including books by John Grisham (The Litigators), David Baldacci (The Guilty), Paula Hawkins (Girl on a Train) and Jonathan Kellerman (The Murderer’s Daughter). My favorite was Jo Nesbo’s The Redbreast, which dealt with neo-Nazis emerging from the shadows, in this case in Norway, yet another case of novels unexpectedly touching on today’s news.

Then there were travel and adventure books. I’d missed The Old Patagonian Express by one of my favorite travel writers (and former Peace Corps Volunteer), Paul Theroux. It described his trip across Latin America. Eric Weiner’s entertaining The Geography of Bliss explored why some countries are happier than others, with Moldova featured at the opposite end of the happiness scale. In The Taliban Shuffle, Kim Barker described her adventures as a foreign war correspondent, a tale recently adapted by Tina Fey in the film Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. David and Veronica James in Going Gypsy and Kristin Newman in What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding described extended trips they made after leaving the workplace. All gave me new perspective on my own recent adventures.

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Among the books I expected to like better but never finished were The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova; The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood; Still Here by Laura Vapnyar; Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan and Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. The biggest clunker for me was Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which extolled the virtues of simplicity and decluttering while bloating a 10-page idea into an entire book.

Finally, and I’m embarrassed to admit this, 2017 was the year when I finally got around to reading some of the Harry Potter books. I blasted through both Sorcerer’s Stone and Chamber of Secrets and am looking forward to reading the others in the year ahead. That is, if I can find time after we get home and start binge-watching all of the movies we’ve missed.

Thanks to the Durham County Library and the Duke University Libraries, together with the OverDrive system, for providing these great books for free. Which others did I miss? I welcome your suggestions and will look forward to reading some of them in the year ahead. If you’re a reader, too, I hope you’ll try some of the books I’ve recommended here. Happy reading in 2018!