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when i travel, i like to read novels set in that country or region, preferably ones written by locals. it’s my way of learning local history, customs, nuances as told by those who live it. i looked all over for thailand reading recommendations, but surprisingly, i found very few. maybe i just don’t know how to use amazon’s readers listmania function? in the end i found four books, reviewed here in the order that i read them…

a fortune-teller told me by tiziano terzani: journalists really like to write memoirs. this one is about terzani’s travels in southeast asia as a foreign correspondent during one year in which he swore off air travel by advice from a fortune-teller. i liked it just about as much as xx’s memoir “where we have hope,” which was not at all. i wasn’t able to finish either book. memoirs are just not my thing. i guess i don’t need to read about someone rambling on and on about their dinner parties and their friends and how important they are as a journalist in this or that developing country. memoirs sound strikingly like blogs, but i absolve myself of guilt by saying that i’m not paying someone to publish my musings. anyway, a fortune-teller told me could be good for its flitting insights into southeast asia idiosyncracies, but you have to slog thru all the mundane egomaniacal details to get at it. it’s not at all worth the effort.

sightseeing by rattawut lapcharoensap: this was my coup for thailand reading – a modern collection of short stories written by a thai about thailand. several of the stories’ themes – growing up, duty to country, family obligations, cultural clashes – could be transplanted to any country in the world, but i think that thailand and thai culture are irreplaceable elements of the stories. remove the thai-ness and you lose a lot of the nuance of history and culture that makes the stories so intriguing. for me, it was my only chance to read about life in thailand from a thai perspective while in thailand, and for that it was fantastic. plus, the stories are really good.

the bridge on the river kwai by pierre boulle: years ago, julia told me this was her favorite book of all time. i knew it was a world war II novel, it was set in siam (now known as thailand), and that i trust julia’s opinion so i tracked a copy down in the bangkok airport (amazon had no available printings). sure enough it is a war novel but incidentally not at all about thailand, except that the river kwai is in thailand. regardless, i really liked it. i’m always impressed by writers that can fully develop a storyline and complex characters with minimal language and an economy of pages (186 in my version). it was written in the early 1950s so smacks of eurocentrism and superiority, but the war concepts of honor, duty, and mission couldn’t be more poignantly told in such a concise novel.

anna and the king of siam by margaret landon: this is the book that inspired the musical and subsequent hollywood movie “the king and i,” but unlike the theatrical version the book doesn’t have a plot. no love story between anna and the king, either. in fact, it’s just a collection of events pieced together by landon but not logically connected. landon admits that the novel is loosely based on fact and what’s not is conjectured from various diaries, conversations, and unverified documents. the result is just a mish-mash retelling of anna’s life as an english governess for the king’s royal children during the 1860s. as landon would have you believe because anna was an enlightened englishwoman with unprecedented ability to shape the ideas of future kings and queens, she was directly responsible for the banishment of prostration before the king and for the abolition of slavery in thailand. one white woman changing the course of a country’s history – wow! sarcasm aside, the book does give some interesting insight into palace life and the life of the harem, and provides some commentary on western-eastern relations during the 1930s when landon wrote it. besides, i enjoyed reading about places we’d been, especially the royal palace and phra wat kaew.