Turn off the TV and e-games and travel through time, space

Movies usually pale beside the pictures that master writers can conjure in your head.

One of the many good things I have experienced since I moved to China has been an invigorated interest in reading. With my favorite television programs harder or impossible to access, I turned to the (electronic) pages of an e-reader.

Since I was eager to learn all about my new home, I turned to Chinese authors as well as foreign authors, including those of the Chinese diaspora. (I had read a biography of early revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen when I was about 12, long before I ever imagined living here.)

One of my early favorites when I arrived in China was US writer and journalist Peter Hessler, who took the name He Wei in China. His River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, about his introduction to China in 1996 as an English teacher in Fuling, Sichuan province (now part of Chongqing), is an excellent primer for newcomers.

His descriptions of dayto-day life are insightful, and he captures an interesting point in time as China opened up.

I devoured two other wellknown Hessler books about China, Oracle Bones and Country Driving.

I also read Red Sorghum by Mo Yan, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China, novels by Pearl S. Buck and Amy Tan and many more.

Lately I have returned to reading books about Latin America, a region that was Matt Prichard my first foreign love.

I am now reading Love in the Time of Cholera by Colombian Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who was a master of magical realism.

The book is set roughly in the period from 1880 to 1930 in a Caribbean port based loosely on Cartagena, Colombia. The book, first published in 1985, centers on a young couple. The woman, Fermina Daza, goes on to marry a blue-blood doctor, while the man, Florentino Ariza, tries to lose himself in affairs while pining away for her for 50 years.

But it is far from a flowery romance novel, and incorporates death, the meaning of life and how “happily ever after” is never so simple. Cholera is compared with love, in that both can strike quickly, destroy lives and respect neither class nor race.

His depictions of an insular, stratified society in a crumbling colonial city being dragged into the modern age are vivid. Garcia Marquez describes a scene in which Fermina disappears for a time: “No one knew anything in a city where everything was known, and where many things were known even before they happened, above all if they concerned the rich.”

I also have been reading the works of another Nobel winner, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, who often ties his works more directly to history. His War of the End of the World revolves around an uprising in 19th century Brazil motivated by a messianic cult. Death in the Andes portrays the gritty reality of Andean towns caught amid the Shining Path terror of the late 20th century.

The Feast of the Goat is a masterful story of the Trujillo years of the Dominican Republic, complete with courage, cowardice and cruelty and set in the penetrating humidity of the Caribbean country.

My wife and I have not totally foresworn the screen — Beijing has some very nice movie theaters, and we enjoy videos on DVD and Youku.

But movies usually pale beside the pictures that master writers can conjure in your head. You can go as fast as you want or slow down and savor a scene.

I have heard that reading has been declining as electronic devices make access to streaming and video games possible virtually anywhere. But my hope is that young people don’t lose the pleasure of reading.

As Garcia Marquez once said, “The duty of the writers is not to preserve the language but to open the way for it in history.”