Reading List

Due to completely unforeseen and unwanted circumstances involving a trip to the emergency room, I was not able to leave for Nepal when I had planned to. However, in spite of the advice of several illustrious doctors, I will be leaving tomorrow, two and a half weeks later. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, right?

This delay has allowed me to finish some of the books I've wanted to read about Nepal and the Himalayas generally, though the list is still much longer than I can tackle in a short amount of time. If I DO decide to write my anthropology thesis on Nepal, you can be sure I'll very quickly become intimate with quite a long list of books. This is what I have read (or watched) so far:

The Himalayan Letters of Gypsy Davy and Lady Ba - Robert and Katharine Barrett
Servant of Sahibs - Rassul Galwan
Three Cups of Tea - Greg Mortenson
10 Questions for the Dalai Lama - film by Rick Ray
Baraka - film by Mark Magidson
Lonely Planet Nepal
Culture Shock! Nepal
Himalaya - edited by Richard Blum, Erica Stone, and Broughton Coburn

and selections from:
A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms - Faxian
Tibetan Book of the Dead
In the Circle of the Dance: notes of an outsider in Nepal - Katharine Guneratne
From the Mango Tree, and other folktales from Nepal - Kavita Ram Shrestha and Sarah Lamstein

My other preparations have included getting immunizations, sewing up a skirt, making gorp, finding a watch with a working alarm (harder than it sounds), reading Nepali news, and trying to learn the Nepali script.