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Thursday, December 07, 2006
A Year in Reading by Andrew Saikali
Along the way, Philip Roth's American Pastoral made me rethink modern history, Graham Greene's The Power and The Glory introduced me to a whiskey priest in Mexico's past, and William Boyd's An Ice Cream War took me back further still, to World War I as it affected the lives of colonists in what are now Tanzania and Kenya.
All great, but what lingers the most:
Re-reading J.P. Donleavy's A Fairy Tale of New York which Andrew Saikali (that would be me) previously described as the story of "an educated rascal with an appetite for life, intertwined with social satire."
And especially stumbling upon Gustave Flaubert's Flaubert In Egypt, his actual journey, at age 27, along the Nile, told through journal entries and letters home that are passionate and ribald, frustrated and clear-eyed. To quote, um, myself (in a previous post), "Flaubert In Egypt pulls together these various strands and stands at once as 19th century Egyptian travelogue, youthful memoir, geopolitical Middle Eastern history, and literary artifact - the nexus of Flaubert the youthful romantic and Flaubert the keen-eyed realist."
- C. Max Magee @ 8:10 AM ~ comments: 2 ~
A Year in Reading 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005
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As a one time superfan of travel literature, I loved this selection, but wasn't sure if I'd enjoy the entire thing. Maybe I need to rethink that notion.
Anonymous @ December 07, 2006 9:36 AM it's a fun read. it also contains some pretty remarkable photos from 1850 which his travelling companion took with his new-fangled photographic apparatus !
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