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3.86 AVERAGE
3.86 AVERAGE
adventurous
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
adventurous
reflective
medium-paced
stunning book with beautiful writing. i enjoyed it WAY more than i expected to. but she did sometimes come off as condescending/privileged/pretentious which i was not a fan of
This book was recommended to me by a friend, so I hate that I don't like it at all. I stopped reading halfway through. Sections of the book felt over-written, the writing too self-absorbed, not even in a contemplative way but a self-obsessed way. Everything the character knows, instead of what they see, feel, hear around them, where they're 'boldly' trespassing into other places unscathed because of privilege. This book oozes with privilege. Privilege doesn't mean that a person doesn't or didn't work hard, but a lot of what they're able to think, do, and say comes from having advantages others may never even be able to attain through the hardest work. The pairing of this unaware privilege and self-obsessive knowledge of the world along with over-written passages was too much for me.
This is the female travelogue I have spent my adult life looking for. The prose is awesome (sometimes it is a bit too much so the book is best digested in small chunks-which is not a complaint. It means I am buying my own copy so I can mark up all the phrases that sung to me with highlighter).
All I want when I pick up travel memoirs by women are folks who get a wild hair to do something that calls to them. They aren't trying to heal, they are just trying to live their life to the fullest and it happens to be a crazy adventure worth writing about. This book wholly met my expectations. It also has a partner in crime, and a little bit of rule breaking, which make for the best kinds of adventures.
All I want when I pick up travel memoirs by women are folks who get a wild hair to do something that calls to them. They aren't trying to heal, they are just trying to live their life to the fullest and it happens to be a crazy adventure worth writing about. This book wholly met my expectations. It also has a partner in crime, and a little bit of rule breaking, which make for the best kinds of adventures.
This was a really excellent book! It wasn't really at all what I was expecting, but Kate Harris is a wonderful writer and I ended up really liking it.
Lands of Lost Borders primarily tells the story of Kate's almost year long bike ride across Central Asia on the "Silk Road" an ancient trade route used by Marco Polo. But Kate also shares a little of her childhood and formative university years with us as well, which surprisingly ended up being some of my favourite chapters of the whole book.
I'm not sure what I was expecting Kate's character to be like, but so many of these travel-type memoirs are from hippie types, teens on a gap year, or people wealthy enough to be able to go on extended vacations. I don't want to say Kate's not a hippie, but I didn't really think she fell into any of those categories.
Kate is a Rhodes scholar and MIT graduate whose livelong obsession with Mars drove her to become a modern day explorer. She's incredibly smart and accomplished, but she isn't driven by fame, money, or accolades. She's driven by a desire to get out into the unknown and explore. She's a wonderful writer and she had a good blend of interesting facts, philosophical thoughts, and funny anecdotes. Although I did think the story started out stronger and declined a little bit when she starts writing about the silk road. She does get a bit bogged down sometimes in the historical and scientific facts, when I would have loved a few more stories and anecdotes from her time on the silk road and what it was like day-to-day.
After finishing the book I went to Kate's website to learn a bit more about her and discovered that she has a ton of albums from the trip on the website. I would say that photos are the one thing missing from this memoir and I wish I'd discovered them earlier because it would have been lovely to look at each country album as I progressed through the book. So if you decide to read this one, I'd recommend following along with the photos on her website.
Overall though, this was a really strong debut novel and I would definitely be interested in reading more about Kate's adventures. This was definitely a part of the world I haven't read very much about and I think most travellers tend to pass over the "stans" in favour of other countries like India, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Lands of Lost Borders primarily tells the story of Kate's almost year long bike ride across Central Asia on the "Silk Road" an ancient trade route used by Marco Polo. But Kate also shares a little of her childhood and formative university years with us as well, which surprisingly ended up being some of my favourite chapters of the whole book.
I'm not sure what I was expecting Kate's character to be like, but so many of these travel-type memoirs are from hippie types, teens on a gap year, or people wealthy enough to be able to go on extended vacations. I don't want to say Kate's not a hippie, but I didn't really think she fell into any of those categories.
Kate is a Rhodes scholar and MIT graduate whose livelong obsession with Mars drove her to become a modern day explorer. She's incredibly smart and accomplished, but she isn't driven by fame, money, or accolades. She's driven by a desire to get out into the unknown and explore. She's a wonderful writer and she had a good blend of interesting facts, philosophical thoughts, and funny anecdotes. Although I did think the story started out stronger and declined a little bit when she starts writing about the silk road. She does get a bit bogged down sometimes in the historical and scientific facts, when I would have loved a few more stories and anecdotes from her time on the silk road and what it was like day-to-day.
After finishing the book I went to Kate's website to learn a bit more about her and discovered that she has a ton of albums from the trip on the website. I would say that photos are the one thing missing from this memoir and I wish I'd discovered them earlier because it would have been lovely to look at each country album as I progressed through the book. So if you decide to read this one, I'd recommend following along with the photos on her website.
Overall though, this was a really strong debut novel and I would definitely be interested in reading more about Kate's adventures. This was definitely a part of the world I haven't read very much about and I think most travellers tend to pass over the "stans" in favour of other countries like India, Thailand, and Vietnam.
adventurous
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
slow-paced
adventurous
informative
medium-paced
adventurous
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
Kate Harris writes about her experiences biking the Silk Road over nine months. She shares stories that go beyond exploration and adventure, and writes about the histories and politics of place— as well how unnatural (and often destructive) the creation of borders has been.
I loved this book, and found it inspiring (and kind of grounding... especially as someone who is restless and finds it hard to keep a routine/ be in one place for a long time).
Not to mention Kate is queer, her wife’s name is also Kate AND they live in an off grid cabin in northern BC (Basically life goals).
Kate Harris’s Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road is a book about self-reflection and personal growth. In my recent reviews of UnSheltered (Barbara Kingsolver) and Gun Island (Amitav Ghosh), on Goodreads, I have reflected on how fiction writers are responding to the massive changes that are happening on planet earth. Climate change, these writers point out, is irrevocably linked to the ethics and values of many human beings today. The ability of humans to change, especially those humans who are contributing most to climate change, is a matter of survival for all species.
In exploring the Silk Road by bicycle, Harris compares Marco Polo’s desire to monetize and quantify with her own desires to “highlight the immeasurable worth of the place in between” (p. 133) Harris wants to talk reverences, sufficiency, and the economics of enough. Seven hundred years later, many humans still desire to monetize and quantify, but a few, including many indigenous peoples still practice the economics of enough. On the desperate direction monetization and quantification may be taking us Harris says of Tibet, “I saw a chilling, sterilized land in which no horizon is unmarred by authority, no movement goes unmonitored, and every hint of peaceful protest is crushed beneath the heel of the state” (p. 243). These observations, sobering and terrifying at once, point again to the ethics and values of humans, especially those in authority.
Lands of Lost Borders would have disappointed if it had only pointed to the need for human values and ethics to change. Instead it provided some avenues for personal growth and deep reflection. Although Harris humbly admits that she does not fully understand the teachings of Buddhism, she celebrates that “After five years [Buddha] found enlightenment some where between severe asceticism and sensual indulgence, by recognizing desire as the source of all suffering and devising a systematic way to appease it” (p. 263). Although she does not dictate the system or even the way for recognizing and critically examining our desires, for her the system was exploration. Kingsolver certainly critically examined how human desires have resulted in climate change. In Unsheltered her characters critically examine the desires of many of us for endless progress and for always having more than the last generation.
Harris also links national borders to desires, saying “We subconsciously accept them as part of the landscape—at least those of us privileged by them, granted meaningful passports—because they articulate our deepest, least exalted desires, for prestige and permanence, order and security, always at the cost of someone or something else”. She explains further how the physical representations of privilege originate inside of us, saying “the barbed wire begins here, inside us, cutting through our very core” (p. 245).
One of my favourite parts of this book is how her relationship to places (e.g. Siachen Glacier), characters (e.g. like Darwin and Wallace), and things (e.g. the Golden Record) evolve throughout the book. For example, in the beginning of the book she explains how science, often aligned with monetizing and quantifying, did not result in happiness and fulfilment for Darwin “Science became the elder Darwin’s exclusive passion, but that term usually connotes some measure of enjoyment, and what he seemed gripped with instead was a cold mania for sorting facts into theoretical frameworks. Meanwhile he lamented the withering of his more whimsical, imaginative sensibilities as a “loss of happiness” (p. 50). Near the end of the book she compares Darwin’s life with that of Wallace, who also discovered the law of natural selection but is largely unrecognized. Relatively poor and with fewer resources, Wallace’s love of the world remained until the end of his long life. ““If the highest goal humans can achieve is amazement, as Goethe attested, then Wallace led the more enlightened life” (p. 192). Again she returns that the ethics and values which result in a good life not a life that harms others.
Finally I loved Lost Borders because of its crossing between prose, narrative, and poetry. This beautiful resistance to one form of writing can be found throughout and even within a sentence. For example, “You have finally arrived when your realize that persistent creak you’ve been hearing all this time is not your wheels, not your mind, but the sound of the planet turning” (p. 285) or in the dedication “For Kate Neville, my love is as deep as Sloke Inlet on a slate summer day the wind quiet and the lake calm, paddling home on meltwater, mountain light” ( p. 293).
I may be through with books that are responding to climate change for now, but not to finding the magic, wonder, and wildness that thread through books like Unsheltered, Gun Island, and Lost Borders. Harris was enamoured with Alexandra David-Neel’s descriptions of magical living in her book on travels in Tibet in 1924. I think I might just find myself a copy!
In exploring the Silk Road by bicycle, Harris compares Marco Polo’s desire to monetize and quantify with her own desires to “highlight the immeasurable worth of the place in between” (p. 133) Harris wants to talk reverences, sufficiency, and the economics of enough. Seven hundred years later, many humans still desire to monetize and quantify, but a few, including many indigenous peoples still practice the economics of enough. On the desperate direction monetization and quantification may be taking us Harris says of Tibet, “I saw a chilling, sterilized land in which no horizon is unmarred by authority, no movement goes unmonitored, and every hint of peaceful protest is crushed beneath the heel of the state” (p. 243). These observations, sobering and terrifying at once, point again to the ethics and values of humans, especially those in authority.
Lands of Lost Borders would have disappointed if it had only pointed to the need for human values and ethics to change. Instead it provided some avenues for personal growth and deep reflection. Although Harris humbly admits that she does not fully understand the teachings of Buddhism, she celebrates that “After five years [Buddha] found enlightenment some where between severe asceticism and sensual indulgence, by recognizing desire as the source of all suffering and devising a systematic way to appease it” (p. 263). Although she does not dictate the system or even the way for recognizing and critically examining our desires, for her the system was exploration. Kingsolver certainly critically examined how human desires have resulted in climate change. In Unsheltered her characters critically examine the desires of many of us for endless progress and for always having more than the last generation.
Harris also links national borders to desires, saying “We subconsciously accept them as part of the landscape—at least those of us privileged by them, granted meaningful passports—because they articulate our deepest, least exalted desires, for prestige and permanence, order and security, always at the cost of someone or something else”. She explains further how the physical representations of privilege originate inside of us, saying “the barbed wire begins here, inside us, cutting through our very core” (p. 245).
One of my favourite parts of this book is how her relationship to places (e.g. Siachen Glacier), characters (e.g. like Darwin and Wallace), and things (e.g. the Golden Record) evolve throughout the book. For example, in the beginning of the book she explains how science, often aligned with monetizing and quantifying, did not result in happiness and fulfilment for Darwin “Science became the elder Darwin’s exclusive passion, but that term usually connotes some measure of enjoyment, and what he seemed gripped with instead was a cold mania for sorting facts into theoretical frameworks. Meanwhile he lamented the withering of his more whimsical, imaginative sensibilities as a “loss of happiness” (p. 50). Near the end of the book she compares Darwin’s life with that of Wallace, who also discovered the law of natural selection but is largely unrecognized. Relatively poor and with fewer resources, Wallace’s love of the world remained until the end of his long life. ““If the highest goal humans can achieve is amazement, as Goethe attested, then Wallace led the more enlightened life” (p. 192). Again she returns that the ethics and values which result in a good life not a life that harms others.
Finally I loved Lost Borders because of its crossing between prose, narrative, and poetry. This beautiful resistance to one form of writing can be found throughout and even within a sentence. For example, “You have finally arrived when your realize that persistent creak you’ve been hearing all this time is not your wheels, not your mind, but the sound of the planet turning” (p. 285) or in the dedication “For Kate Neville, my love is as deep as Sloke Inlet on a slate summer day the wind quiet and the lake calm, paddling home on meltwater, mountain light” ( p. 293).
I may be through with books that are responding to climate change for now, but not to finding the magic, wonder, and wildness that thread through books like Unsheltered, Gun Island, and Lost Borders. Harris was enamoured with Alexandra David-Neel’s descriptions of magical living in her book on travels in Tibet in 1924. I think I might just find myself a copy!