Under My Thumb

Pitons from our mooring spot
As you would imagine, Tom and I have a lot of time on our hands. So we tend to get fairly obsessive about things; like the Rolling Stones, for example. The boats anchored around us must marvel (or cringe) at the sheer length of time we can listen to the Stones greatest hits (purchased on itunes while anchored - thank you internet signal). Amazing music, still. Neither of us liked their music or really knew anything about the Stones before reading the Keith Richards book "Life". The boat at times seems like one big chattery book club, "Can you believe the amount and variety of drugs this guy took?" "How is he still alive?", etc.

Because Tom spent much of his life on planes or waiting for planes, he has been a consistently voracious reader. I absolutely love to read but the average work week flew by with me still attempting to catch up on the Sunday New York Times; much less a book. We are both catching up now...We thank the technology gods for our Kindles each and everyday.

"Behind the Beautiful Forevers" is our latest obsession and about as far away from "Life" as you can get. It is a stunning non-fiction book about an Indian slum and its incredibly unfortunate residents. Beautifully written and incredibly sobering; it seems so wrong to discuss it when sitting at a restaurant filling our faces with food. I spent a month in India in college (a long time ago) so I was familiar with the scale of Indian slums but hoped, almost 20 years on, that the situation had improved.  This book definitely dashed those hopes. Not uplifting but certainly eye-opening.

Rodney Bay, St. Lucia
Other great books have included:
The Last Resort (a memoir of Zimbabwe)
The Greater Journey (Americans going back to Paris across the 1800s and early 1900s)
In the Garden of Beasts (the early days of Hitler)
Nicholas and Alexandra (the Romanovs)
The Forever War (Dexter Filkins on Afghanistan and Iraq)

We are always looking for the next read so if you have any ideas for us send us an email to lorient422@gmail.com. We have also added a lot of new pictures so check out our photo album on the right side of the blog!
Looking North from Pigeon Island, St. Lucia (Martinique in distance)