Reading, ummm. Have been meaning to tell you about some absolutely brilliant books, and some less brilliant books, I've come across lately.

"Guns, Germs and Steel" (and a subtitle - but I hate subtitles) by a bloke called Jared Diamond. Came across it in Bolsa del Deporte (my home in Bariloche, Argentina) while I was waiting for Arnon to emerge re-born in spirit from his meeting with the birds and nature in nearby Lanin National Park. This Diamond guy is a biologist of sorts and has, while studying birds in Papua New Guinea and other places, been wondering why on Earth white people came to dominate. The name of the book tells it all. But, why did the white man and not the Incas, or the Aboriginals, get the guns and the germs and the steel?!?! Gee, I was far into chapter 4 and just beginning to see the light, and then some idiot fellow traveller stole the book...

Sorry, but there are few places that I've been that are more morose than an ultra-modern Scandinavian capital in heavy late-winter wind and drizzling rain. No wonder Carsten was depressed when he left Denmark on some January day to see the world. "I Have Seen The World Begin" by Carsten Jensen is just as depressing as these winter days in our seriously affluent, ultra-modern Scandinavian bubble, but I can't really tell if it is because this divorced, in-a-mid-life-crisis guy has such a hard time telling himself apart from the surroundings or if the surroundings really were so bleak and terrible. This depression annoys me, and the terribly pretentious style he uses from time to time, but nevertheless I get just glued to the book everytime I pick it up. Annoyance de-glues me. Give it a try, a lot of people seem to have liked it a lot.

My Spanish needed a brushing-up when I came to Chile and I got the terrific idea of buying Mario Vargas Llosa's "Pantaleon y las visitadoras" (it was cheap and had a wonderfully ridiculous b/w photo of girls in swimsuits smoking cigarettes on the cover). Someone with a Ph.D. in Spanish would have problems reading that book!!!! Lucky me, to have a mini-mini-dictionary with me, found there maybe 1 in every 20 words I looked up. Well, I guess I was the German nerd at school but now I know how you other guys felt with a German short story in front of you... Guessing could be good fun, though, and often I was quite surprised to find out that everything I had been THINKING I was reading the last 2 hours was just crap, the guy was in a jail and not in a whorehouse etc. Anyway, the book is hilarious, it has been translated into Icelandic and you really really really should read it.

"The Jungle Book" by Rudyard Kipling. You all know this one. Mowgli and Rikka-Tikki-Tavi and the elephant dance. Fallegt. Undurfallegt.

Then there was the weirdest ride Arnon and I ever got on our hitch-hiking in Patagonia. Two ultra-nerds from Berkely University discovering Patagonia, in a Nissan Micra without a CD-player, in just under 4 days. Now get yourself a world map. Look at South America. Find Patagonia. Imagine Kjolur- and Sprengisandur-type roads. Listen while you're at it to salsa-trash. You've got their trip in a nutshell. They were so wonderful, the one driving even tried to explain string theory to Arnon and I!! Ok, I didn't understand a word, so in the next town I bought the famous "The Character of Physical Law" by Richard P. Feynman (in Spanish, actually, but it was just piece of cake after the Vargas Llosa ordeal). Yes!, an idiot-proof bluff-your-way guide to physics. Or so I thought, until already on the first page the author warns his readers from being a reader like I. Bø. The book is brilliant, though, it's not Feynman's fault that abstract thinking hasn't been my cup of tea lately (i.e. not since the happy few weeks in 4. grade in MR when Yngvi Petursson taught me math).

Any other books of note? The phone book... these crazy Norwegians put a short story in last years phone catalogue! It was utter crap. But the fact that I read it maybe tells you something about the kind of boredom I'm experiencing these days....