"North to the Orient" by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

This was the last of pile of books-as-Christmas-presents that I received, and like most of them, this was not at all what I had expected.

A memoir of a lady pilot? I thought. Is this just going to be the journals of some ace flying gal who was able to cobble some basic writing skills together to make a legible account of her adventures?

Apparently not - Anne Morrow Lindbergh didn't do most of the flying (her husband, Charles, did), but instead she eloquently, articulately, and beautifully recounts the trip she and her husband took from Maine to China in their two-seater airplane. She goes on at length about her humiliating incompetance with operating their Morse code radio, the Thanksgiving dinner they shared at an isolated village in Northern Canada, and how she almost drowned in the Yangtze river.

She doesn't just provide a blow-by-blow account of her travels, she delves into thoughtful introspection about the nature of the landscape, the purpose for their trip, and the learning experiences she goes through. She, like me, discovered a lot of things that she wasn't expecting.

It was a joy to read this.