![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I’ve never been much interested in the planet Mars I thought Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (1950) was dumb. I don’t even like Mars bars. It felt adolescent, escapist, and elitist, oblivious to the school of hard knocks of which, I told myself, I was an alumnus, whereas Harris was forever flitting off, apparently never actually having to work for a living and oblivious to the history of colonialism so closely tied to our European explorers’ vaunted “Age of Discovery,” etc. My grumpy predisposition was further stoked early in the book as the author went on about her fascination with travel to Mars and the noble history of European exploration. After all, I’d cycled many thousands of miles across continents when I was younger than her, and then spent time in a lot of the places she would traverse, from Turkey and Central Asia to Nepal and India. I worried it might be a “been there, done that” kind of read, wherein I would smugly second-guess the author. I have to admit I was not positively predisposed towards this book. Like the author, her story has aged well. Kate Harris’s tale of bicycling the Silk Road of Central Asia, her Land of Lost Borders, came out a couple of years ago and it describes two rides, one in 2006 and another, longer one five years later. Toronto: Penguin Random House (Vintage Canada), 2018 Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road ![]()
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