What I Read on My Trip to Uganda

There are so many posts swirling in my head. I thought I’d get the easy ones out of the way first. Here are brief reviews of everything I read. by the way, I loved my Nook for the trip to Uganda! Battery life was awesome (good thing) and it kept me entertained for hours and hours and hours. Here’s what I read:

Left to Tell: Discovering God in the Midst of the Rwandan Holocaust by Immaculée Ilibagiza

I’m sure the guy sitting next to me on the plane thought I was crazy, because I was crying by the time I finished this. I vaguely remember the Rwandan holocaust of 1994. This book was great preparation for visiting some of the genocide memorials in Rwanda, but was also a great inspiration to me. If you struggle with forgiveness, this is a book that will really make you think about your faith and what it means to truly forgive. I’m not sure I’ll be able to convey how powerful the memorials were. The photo, right, was taken as one of them. There were thousands of Rwandans killed in this church. We weren’t allowed to take photos inside, but you can make out the rack of skulls and femurs just inside the door. Also in the church were machetes from the perpetrators and clothes of the victims. It was truly horrifying.

Abyssinian Chronicles: A Novel by Moses Isegawa

This was a story that spanned a couple of generations of people living in Uganda. I read it in order to understand a bit of the history of the country which I’d be visiting. I hadn’t realized how much I’d absorbed until I was listening to our hosts talk about events that had happened, and I remembered reading about them in the book. One of our hosts said she thought the book was obscene; to some degree it’s true. There is sex and violence and it takes a dim view of the church. However, I thought it was helpful to understand how some people experienced life in Uganda.

The Hunt by Jan Neuharth

After all that heavy reading I decided to read something to take me away, and this was a freebie that I got with my Nook from Barnes & Noble. I wasn’t expecting much but it was quite entertaining. A rich single lawyer who is involved in the fox hunting scene becomes entangled in a murder mystery and is falsely accused. Who did it? The ending was only a slight surprise, but it was fun reading about horses, lifestyles of the rich tweedy set, and the woman who almost got away. Great beach read.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

This was another freebie and I discovered a cool feature of the Nook–it had lots of footnotes to explain some of the idioms of 1897 and you can just click on the symbol and are magically taken to the footnote reference, then can click “back” to return to the reading. Nice! The story was riveting, and much better than any of the movies about Dracula that I’ve seen. It’s written as a collection of diary entries and telegrams. You can find it free online since its copyright has expired.

One of the best deals for my Nook was 50 Classic Books: Volume 2. For only $2.99, it includes 50 full length classic books. All of these have expired copyrights so you should be able to find them for free online. As one of my traveling companions was a retired English teacher, it was fun to talk about them with him and some of the other readers in the group. Here are the ones I was able to read so far:

• The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells. I know, hard to believe I haven’t read this before. A fascinating study of what does it mean to be human vs. animal. Sort of reminiscent of Lord of the Flies. A man finds himself stranded on an island with animals that seem to be part human. What’s going on here?
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. One of the ladies mentioned that she thought this book was incredibly boring when she read it. The soon to be senior in high school had just read this for her English lit class. The movie version was available on demand on the airplane. I didn’t watch the movie, but I did make it through reading the book. There is a lot more description than we’re used to in today’s books, but I didn’t find it boring. I did think my goodness, Jane can’t get a break! I also thought it could have ended sooner than it did. I once heard a saying, “Inside every fat book there’s a skinny book dying to get out.” Definitely true here! Think Annie meets Anne of Green Gables meets Beauty and the Beast.
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. If you’ve watched Food, Inc. you’ll be amazed that things have not changed all that much since 1906. Read about the horrifying things that were in food back then and how the meat packing industry impacted Chicago. On top of the disgusting description of what was in canned meat, you are treated to a heart-wrenching story about an immigrant and his family and the hard times they experience. As in Jane Eyre, I thought this could have ended much sooner. It would have been more impactful had it ended at one of the two major deaths in the story, instead of dragging on into other industries and ending with a call to socialism.

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