In our work we often meet people, whether single travelers, groups, or even other organizations, that follow a similar lifestyle of work and travel.  One of our favorite of these – The Lost Girls – has been doing some great work recently not only with the launch of their new site (www.lostgirlsworld.com/) but also their own book.

As quick background the Lost Girls are three friends(Jennifer Baggett, Holly Corbett, and Amanda Pressner) who, like ourselves, left behind comfortable jobs and lives of security to set out and see what kind of adventures they could find in the rest of the world.  After a full year of travel and documenting their stories online, they compiled their tales into their upcoming book. 

We just recently got a copy of it and its a great insight into where some of these journeys can take you when you leave behind what you know to find something new.  The stories follow all three girls as they travel through nearly a dozen countries and across four continents.

You can learn more about the Lost girls over on their site, and you can also pre-order their book by clicking here or heading over to Amazon. 

As a bit of a teaser, this won’t be the last time you’ll hear of the Lost Girls on our site.

Yesterday I posted about a visit to the Temple of Literature, so in keeping with that theme I thought that today I would write about books! Travelling offers a fantastic opportunity to catch up on all that reading that you always mean to do but can never seen to find the time to do at home. In a foreign country and away from your usual routine, you often end up with many long bus or train trips on the agenda, lots of downtime (for me, often spent in coffee shops and the like) and less distractions. I generally have a book on the go at home but read WAY more on the road.

What have I been reading lately? I am normally a fiction reader, but I’ve been reading quite a bit of non-fiction lately for some reason, perhaps because those are what books have circulated among our crowd. I thought I’d compile a list of the books I’ve tackled since we’ve gotten to Saigon.

Shantaram – Gregory David Roberts

My Sister’s Keeper – Jodi Picoult

Tears of the Desert – A Memoir of Survival in Darfur – Halima Bashir

A Long Way Gone – Memoirs of a Boy Soldier – Ishmael Beah

Into Thin Air – Jon Krakauer

River of Time – Jon Swain

The Rum Diary – Hunter S. Thompson

Reading at the moment (and loving it):

Anthony Bourdain – A Cook’s Tour

Next on the docket:

Graham Greene – The Quiet American

I’ve always been pretty adamant about not stealing anything, and that used to include MP3′s, bootlegged DVDs, and books. Well, it seems that the whole of Vietnam is pretty keen on photocopying and burning discs, so I succumbed to the desire to get whole books for about $2-$3 each. At home, most of these would probably cost about $15, and I proudly spent that cash to support the authors that I love. Now, I’m supporting families with cheap photocopied book purchases in the local stores of Saigon. Sorry all of my beloved authors, your words have touched me, but my being broke as all hell has gotten the better of me in Vietnam!

On the other hand, you get what you pay for. There are quite a few pages that you can’t read because of paper jams placing multiple copies on one page, other pages that have been folded over to hide that the paper was cut wrong, and even misspellings on some of the covers.

Ah the page that sticks an extra inch out of the binding....

Now that's some hot page on page action.

Book selection à la Jen Cheng and Serene Hayes