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.
