Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road by Kate HarrisMy rating: 2.5 of 5 stars
The book has some flaws, is it an autobiography or is it a travelogue? Is it about an adventure and how that changes you or is it about the rigors of biking the Silk Road for nine months?
It starts as an autobiography, first when Harris was young and honored for her essay about Mars. There is a few chapters about her college years in Oxford, her boyfriend (why was he in here?) and a little about her next degree. Oxford was a time of fooling around to get a degree in something she really didn't care about. Her main purpose was to get into NASA so she can be a Mars explorer. Then suddenly she is diverted, maybe because biking was around for her and she went on several long haul biking trips already, now there is this trip to take a good part of a year to bike the Silk Road with her friend Mel (Melissa), to finish what they started years earlier. Maybe it was too much research in the lab. Maybe she just wanted to explore.
The bulk of the book is about this nine month journey. but it falters here. She talks about some interesting ideas, but doesn't dive very deep into any of them. She tries desperately, especially near the end, to tie back into NASA and space exploration. Harris wants to be an explorer and she tries to justify her trip as exploration, going into the wilderness and finding something new, but of course it isn't new. She knows this as Marco Polo was someone she looked up to, until she realized he explored for mercantile reasons. And how is it wilderness? She is traveling in "old" countries.
The more the book goes on the worse her descriptions of the local people and places. It becomes horrid at times, appalling. She's supposed to be perceptive, intelligent? Definitely not humble. And she just butchers Buddhism, says nothing about other religions that are expressed in the areas she travels.
Oddly, I had almost no sense of her biking partner Mel, someone who was her constant companion for more than half a year. About the only real description of her personality consisted of how Harris was jealous of her in high school being popular, more pretty. She also seemed to charm the men more on the trip. Even more oddly, I learned more about the boyfriend in Oxford, which I'm not sure why there was so much written about him, to what ends?
It's an uneven book. Clearly Harris can write well when she puts in the effort, as there are some very lovely sentences. This book needed more time in the writing process. There are some good sentences, good writing, but also many false starts into ideas that aren't fully realized. Sadly the thing I came away mostly was the privilege of Kate Harris.
Book rating: 2.5 stars
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