What better reading material for a trip to Asia than a collection of short stories about the craziness of life in Asia (and particularly in China)? Peter Hessler's Strange Stones is just that. Although many of the stories are a decade old, they still resonate today, particularly those that have anything to do with driving and traffic.
I mean, of course a large tourist park is bisected by a single-late road and of course a van parks on the road - at the curve, no less - and then the tourist trolley barrels through and hits the van, blocking the road and subsequently sending the legions of scooters on the grass (there is no sidewalk in this tourist park) and the pedestrians can but pray they don't end up in the (highly polluted) drink as they are wedged into a narrower and narrower strip between the scooters and the reservoir. I'm sorry, I digress; that's my life in Indonesia this week, not Hessler's in China. As another aside, perhaps it was because I was reading Strange Stones that I had to keep reminding myself many times that I was not in China.
The long and the short is that this is fine travel writing. I was slightly partial to the one story set in Japan, a follow-up with Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice, and also anything involving traffic, if only because it makes me feel better about my own experiences like the one above. A couple of the stories explore life in Colorado, Hessler's home after a decade-plus in China, and are well written but seem just a teensy bit out of place.
Hessler's writing style reminds me a bit of Paul Theroux, but funnier. Many of the stories were laugh out loud funny and all of them were a pleasure to read. Travelers, in particular, will enjoy Hessler's work, but I have no qualms at all recommending Strange Stones to any and everyone.
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