The Year In Books - March 2015

My February read was "Bicycle Diaries" by David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame).  David Byrne takes his fold-up bike with him when he goes on tour and this book is a record of his thoughts about the things he sees, and the people he meets, as he cycles around some of the major cities of the world.



 

I enjoyed reading his thoughts about the cities that he visited especially the chapters about his visits to Manila and to Baltimore.  What I didn't enjoy about this book were his thoughts about some of the meetings he had with  people in the music and arts industries.  I didn't find these very observant or interesting.   Fortunately though they only took up a small part of the book.

My choice for March is "In The Eye Of The Sun" by Ahdaf Soueif.  

Ahdaf Soueif is an Egyptian author, although she writes in English.  I've read another of her novels "The Map of Love" which was the book that started my interest in the Middle East and in learning Arabic.   "In The Eye Of The Sun" was her first novel  and according to the blurb on the back cover, it is a love story and a story about what it's like to be a woman in the Middle East and in the West.    Ahdaf writes lovely prose with descriptions that evoke time, place and characters so I am really looking forward to reading this book.

A Year In Books - January 2015

I found the "A Year In Books" posts last year when I serendipitously found the "A Circle of Pine Trees" blog.   This year I thought that as well as being a reader I would be a participant as well so here's my first post for "A Year in Books":

Hopefully I will have the time to read more than one book this month, but if I do only read one it will be The Harafish by Naguib Mahfouz.  I read a lot of books written by authors from the Middle East.  The Harafish is a series of episodes in the lives of several generations of an Egyptian family so I think it will be an interesting journey through the way the politics and history of the region affected the lives of ordinary people, as well as being a good family saga.

I've also recently picked up a copy of Kenneth William's Diaries and my intention is that during the month I'll be picking my way through that as well.

My health wasn't very good in December and I feel like I spent most of it asleep.  However I did re-read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, a perennial favourite of mine; and East Wind, West Wind by Mahdi Issa Al-Saqr, which is set in Iraq in the 1950s.  It's a story, about life in a camp at an oil well, told from two different perspectives both describing events that occur among the British managers who run the oil well.  It's a mix of scandal, gossip and eventually betrayal.   It was an enjoyable read.