At the beginning of 2008, I set myself a lofty goal…to read one book per week this year.  Well…I’ve not been successful.  I have about 6 books in progress…but we are well over 6 weeks into the year.

This past weekend I was ecstatic to have a few days off, all to myself, so I went to my favorite store in the world, Barnes and Noble, and picked up a book entitled The Cry of the Dove written by Fadia Faqir, a woman from Amman.  I’m not Muslim, but reading this book, I got a sense of the tension that a woman in the Muslim religion must experience.  The book was beautifully written.  The language in the text is so vivid that I smelled the smells, saw the sights.  It’s a great book. 

When I was an English major at Temple, I took a world literature class that both pissed me off (excuse my honesty) and piqued my interest.  I attempted to real Salman Rushdie (too much for me) as well as a few other foreign authors.  In that class I discovered some of my favorite authors, such as Zadie White.  My professor in the class took the imagery, etc, too far, as do most post-modernists.  But all in all, that class opened my eyes to a whole world of literature.