The Dark Side of Love by Rafik Schami

I think I just found another favorite author. This past week, but mostly Friday and Saturday, I have been swept away to Syria in the the novel De duistere kant van de liefde (The Dark Side of Love; original German title Die dunkle Seite der Liebe) by Syrian-German writer Rafik Schami. I read slightly more than half of the 760+ page book on Friday and Saturday. Friday was my day off and I had no other plans. I ended up reading and reading and reading, because I couldn’t put the book away. Then on Saturday morning I woke up, made coffee and decided to read for a bit in bed before I’d go get some breakfast, because we didn’t have anything to eat in the house. Next thing I know, I close the last page and it is three hours later. And I still hadn’t had breakfast!

The story starts and ends with the murder of a Muslem officer in Damascus, the capital of Syria. In between we learn what led to the murder, we learn about the vendetta between the clans of the Shaheen family and the Mushtaak family, the forbidden love between Rana Shaheen and Farid Mushtaak, their lives and those of their families, how the Syrian dictatorships influenced the lives of individual people. The story shows the depth of love, but it also shows the darkest side of human beings. It is a great story spread over most of the twentieth century, a grim and at times bloody and at the same time a sensuous and colorful story of love and hate. And at the same time a lovesong to Damascus and to the Arab world.

The previous paragraph is as close as I will get to disclosing the plot, because really there is too much in the book. It would turn into an and-then-and-then-and-then summing up. Which doesn’t do any justice to the story at all. Besides, way too much happens in the book to tell the plot in a few sentences. There are lots of characters in this book, but somehow it was easy to keep them all apart. They are all different, but also the family-trees of the Shaheen and the Mushtaak families included in the book helped a lot.

Rafik Schami is a Syrian writer who has been living in Germany for about 35 years. He writes in German, which is interesting because that is not his first language. He has written novels, YA-fiction, and children’s books. Some of it has been translated into English. I had never heard about Schami unil a German friend gave me a copy of his YA-book A handful of Stars (this one has been translated into English for sure). It was her favorite book. I loved it as well. When I was in Holland last winter, I spend a couple of hours browsing in a big bookstore, where I found De duistere kant van de liefde on the table with new books. Despite the book being big and heavy (had to take it back to Armenia with me), hardcover and expensive, I couldn’t leave it there and had to take a copy with me. Boy, am I glad I did!

Can you tell how much I loved this book? This is definitely going to end up very, very high on my list of favorite books of this year and it also goes on my list of favorite books ever. At the same time, I realize how little I have to write about this book here. I want to share and tell so much, but that would all be spoilers. I guess I’d love to share my thoughts with someone who has also read the book. I somehow feel that this review doesn’t do the book justice. It does in showing how much I loved it, but not in talking about the book itself. Isn’t it weird, how sometimes the best books you read are the hardest to write about?

Apparently Die dunkle Seite der Liebe will be published in English. If it won’t, I hope someone somewhere in the publishing industry will change his mind, because the English speaking world is missing out on something. If you can get a hold of a copy in a language that you read, do pick it up. I highly recommend this book.

I am starting to overdo my praise, am I not?

Update October 23, 2008: I have some good news! Pam left a comment on this post saying that The Dark Side of Love will be published in English in 2009. For more information keep an eye on the website of Interlink Publishers here. I had never heard of this company, but if you are interested in world literature, the site is definitely worth a visit. They have lots of interesting titles in their catalog.

The Read-a-thon is coming up!

Just thought I’d remind you all that the Read-a-thon is coming up this weekend. If you haven’t signed up yet, go here to add your name. If you are not sure you’ll manage 24 hours of reading, you can also sign up as a cheerleader to encourage those who are “torturing” themselves. You can sign up as a cheerleader here. Or you can of course do both.

More info on the Read-a-thon is here.

I had signed up to be both a reader and a cheerleader, but I’ve had to cancel the reading part. I am so disappointed about that, because I was really looking forward to reading. I had a stack of books ready. I will still be cheerleading during most of the second half of the 24hrs. So I am still around to take part in the fun, fortunately!

Weekly Geeks #9: Challenge Time

This week’s Weekly Geeks theme is all about challenges:

1. If you participate in any challenges, get organized! Update your lists, post about any you haven’t mentioned, add links of reviews to your lists if you do that, go to the challenge blog if there is one and post there, etc.

2. If you don’t participate in any challenges, then join one! There’s a good selection of possibilities over on my right hand sidebar (scroll down) where I list those I participate in. There’s also A Novel Challenge, a blog that keeps track of all sorts of reading challenges.

3. Towards the end of the week, write a wrap-up post about getting your challenges organized OR if you’re joining your first challenge, post about that any time during the week. Once you have your post up, come back and sign Mr Linky with the link to the specific post, not just to your blog.

I didn’t have that much updating to do, because I try to do everything immediately once I put up a review of a book I read for a challenge: post it on the challenge blog or add the link to the linklist for the challenge. I just posted a review for Reading Lolita in Tehran here and on the In Their Shoes Blog. This actually means that I have completed that challenge! I don’t want to write a wrap-up post yet, because the challenge runs until the end of this year and I still have some books on my TBR-pile that are memoirs or (auto)biographies. If I read them before the end of the year, I will add them to the challenge-blog as well.

These are the other books I read for the In Their Shoes challenge:
Young Stalin
Iran Awakening
Black Dog of Fate

The other challenges I participate in are still ongoing and I haven’t finished them yet. I am in the middle two books that will count both towards the Chunkster Challenge and the Orbis Terrarum Challenge, Don Quixote (set in Spain) and De duistere kant van de liefde (The Dark Side of Love) by Rafik Schami, which is set in Syria (and is one I highly recommend already, even though I am not even halfway through). When I finish them both, I will be done with the Chunkster Challenge as well, though I plan to read a couple more chunksters before the end of the year.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Reading this book ended up being a somewhat mixed experience. I read the book twice, once in February or so and once last week. I don’t really know why I picked it up again, I guess somehow “I wasn’t done with the book” yet. This is probably also why I didn’t manage to write a review after the first time. I started writing a review, but never finished it. This review you are reading now, uses parts of the original, half-finished one, but they have all been rewritten and added to.

When I finished the book the first time, I somehow couldn’t get to grips with it. I finished it at the time, but I also felt that maybe it just wasn’t the right time to read it. You know, how sometimes you are not enjoying a book, but you feel that you would probably like it better if you read it at some other time when your mood is different or you have less other things on your mind? That’s how I felt when I first read Reading Lolita. I think it had something to do with not having time to read in larger sittings. For most of the book I only had time for a few pages at a time. I thoroughly enjoyed the few parts I managed to read in one larger sitting.

For me the weakest part of the book was the first part, both times I read the book. The first time I started the book, I read the first part (about 80 pages in my edition) in short stretches, a chapter at a time. This obviously didn’t work, because I didn’t get into the story. Even the second time around, being already familiar with the story, for me the first chapter was the weakest part of the book, it was too much all over the place. Only when I read a larger part in one sitting, did I like the book. For example, the first time I read the book I read the second part in one sitting and loved it. This second part ended up being my favorite part of the book, both times around.

As you can probably already guess, I am not one of those people who is gushing over Reading Lolita in Tehran. In fact, I have mixed feelings about the book. That is why this review might come across as a bit unstructured. I enjoyed the book, the first time probably more so than the second, but more on a rational level than an emotional level. If that makes sense. Rationally, I can definitely agree with all the praise that this is indeed a good book, one that gives a very good picture of life in contemporary Iran. I very much liked Nafisi’s way with words, especially in portraying a person or showing a situation. Also, in the writing I could feel that Nafisi cares about the people she writes about. I actually enjoyed reading the book, more so the first time than the second time around.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is divided into four parts, each part centered around an author and one or a few of his/her works, Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), Henry James, and Jane Austen. I haven’t read any of the books and authors that form the core of the book, except for some of Jane Austen’s work, but not being familiar with them didn’t really hinder me. Though I think it does add to the experience of Reading Lolita in Tehran if you are familiar with the authors and books discussed. And it does make me for one more inclined to pick up works from the authors discussed when I will come across them.

Each part of the book also covers a central theme or period in Azar Nafisi’s own life branching out to cover the stories of the seven female students that Nafisi chooses for a special literature class she teaches every Thursday at her house. One of my problems with the book is that I had a problem keeping most of the girls in the reading class and their histories separate. Somehow they blended into each other in a way, even though their stories and backgrounds were very different. The one that stood out most and became the most individual to me, was Yassi.

Something that started to bug me the second time around, was the question: “If this is a memoir, then how much of it is true and how much of it is made up?” The Author’s Note at the beginning of the book says:

Aspects of characters and events in this story have been changed mainly to protect individuals, not just from the eye of the censor but also from those who read such narratives to discover who’s who and who did what to whom[...]. The facts in this story are true insofar as any memory is ever truthful, but I have made every effort to protect friends and students, baptizing them with new names and disguising them perhaps even from themselves, changing and interchanging facts of their lives so that their secrets are safe.

I am perfectly okay with changing things to keep people’s identities safe, no problem with that at all. The phrase that bothers me more, is “The facts in this story are true insofar as any memory is ever truthful”, especially because in the story Nafisi mentions several times that her memory is not that great, implying there may be things she doesn’t remember correctly. After coming across similar remarks a few times, I started thinking to what extent this is still a memoir and to what extent is it no longer. And if not, what is it then? Fiction? Semi-fiction? (Did I just invent a new word and genre?) How much of the book is based on real events and how do we know that? Don’t get me wrong, I do not intend to discredit Nafisi or the book. It just got me thinking.

I think that a review written after the first time I read the book, would have been a lot more enthusiastic about Reading Lolita than the one you are reading now. I think that the first time around, despite my difficulties keeping the characters apart, I felt more strongly about the people in the book. Maybe, I shouldn’t have read the book a second time, I don’t know.

Still, despite this less than glowing review and the questions the book raised with me, I do recommend Reading Lolita in Tehran. I think the problems I have with it are more connected to me than to the book itself. It is a good book, well written, informative, giving a good picture of life in Iran (or at least of the intelligentsia in Tehran), though it needs time to get going. I have the feeling that it is also one of those books you need to take time for, it is best read in larger sessions I think (Sunday afternoons on the porch maybe or rainy days). For me, it is not one of those books you take with you to read in a few stolen minutes while waiting somewhere.

Other reviews of Reading Lolita in Tehran:
An adventure in reading
Trish’s Reading Nook
Age 30 – A Year in books

If you have reviewed Reading Lolita in Tehran as well, leave a comment with the link to your review, or send me an email with the link. I will add it to this post

The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

I mentioned in my review of Iran Awakening that I had read Persepolis recently. Sunday morning the house was quiet with my boyfriend and the kids…uuuh, cats still sleeping. I decided to use this time to write some reviews, starting with Persepolis. Well, let’s just say I didn’t get much writing done: I ended up reading the entire book again from cover to cover. And enjoying it as much as I did the first time.

Persepolis is the author’s story of growing up in Iran in the 1970s and 1980s. It is not just any memoir, though, as the author tells her story in the form of a graphic novel. As an aside, I dislike the term graphic novel a lot, because it sounds like porn. And that is not what it is at all. Are there any alternative names for this genre of books? Well, apart from comics, which doesn’t sit well with me either, but for completely different reasons.

Late last year, Persepolis was made into an animated movie. I haven’t seen it, but would love to. If you have seen the movie: I’d love to hear your opinion.

Satrapi grows up in an intellectual, fairly liberal family in Tehran. Her great grandfather was one of the country’s rulers in the early twentieth century, before he fell into disgrace when the first Shah came to power. Satrapi recounts what it was like to be a child before and during the Iranian Revolution (Satrapi was nine years old in 1979), not understanding everything that she hears or that happens around her. As the Islamic Republic takes shape and with it the restrictions on the lives of women, Satrapi has to find a way to combine the values that her parents and grandmother instilled in her at home with the extremely conservative and female-unfriendly world outside. Young Marjane also has to learn to keep her outspokenness in check; she has a tendency to fail miserably in this, which makes for some hilarious, absurd and sometimes heartbreaking situations.

The drawings are fairly sober, black and white. But they are not boring or monotonous, there is a lot to see in te drawings. The artwork and the text belong together, they complement each other. Satrapi tells her story in an honest and direct way, not shying away from difficult topics and taboos, but at the same time with lots of humor and perspective. She is not afraid to show her own mistakes and “failures”: her drug use and living on the streets in Austria, her attempt to save her own ass by having an innocent bystander arrested, her failed marriage after her return to Iran.

Of course, a large part of the story is very specific to Iran, but it is not just a story of a girl growing up in (pre-)revolutionary Iran, it is a story of a girl growing up. Period. Many topics will be recognizable for any woman who was once a teenager: loneliness, trying to fit in, relationships, uncertainty, thinking you’re not pretty enough, etc.

Persepolis is a wonderful book that will make you laugh out loud and think deeply at the same time. I am pretty sure it will end up high on my list of favorite books of 2008. If you are one of the two people left who hasn’t read Persepolis, please get hold of a copy and read it. If you have never read any graphic novels and think it is just for kids, forget all your previous notions, pick up a copy and read.

This was the first graphic novel that I read (apart from the comics when I was young), and I’d love to read more. The same bookshop where I bought Persepolis also has a copy of Art Spiegelman’s Maus II. Unfortunately, they don’t have the first part, so I will leave it at the bookshop for now.

You can read other bookbloggers’ opinions on Persepolis here:
Dewey (the hidden side of a leaf: here and here
Bethany (B&b Ex Libris)
Rebecca Reads: here and here

If you reviewed this book as well, but your link isn’t in the list, please leave a comment or send me an email with the link to your review so I can add it.

Weekly Geeks #7: My reading companions

I spent Saturday and Sunday mornings in bed with coffee and breakfast reading. These two cute guys were keeping me company:

Edit: After I posted this picture, I found out that this week’s Weekly Geeks theme is pictures.

1. Decide what to illustrate and start taking photos: Most of you are book bloggers, so you may want to post photos of your favorite reading spot, your TBR pile(s), your local book store, your favorite librarian, your child reading, etc. You may want to post several photos of a certain topic (like all nine of your kids reading!) or a mixed bag of photos that are unrelated except that they’re bookish. Or you may want to post just one photo, it’s up to you. If you have a different type of blog, post photos of whatever you think is suitable.

2. Create a post of your photos.

3. Don’t forget! Also link in your post to another participant’s WG photo post. Weekly Geeks is a community thing, remember! If you’re one of the first finished, of course, you may have to add your link later. See if you can find someone you don’t normally read to link to.

4. Once your post is up, come back and leave a link to that specific post (not just your regular blog url) in the Mr Linky at the bottom of this post.

I figured I could just as well revamp this post to be my Weekly Geeks assignment.

I found some great pictures at other participants’ blogs as well. These are just a selection: Jaimie over at Bell Literary Reflections (including some wonderful reading companions as well!), Terri at Reading, Writing and Retirement shows a great solution to stop temptation, and Suey at It’s All About Books shares pictures of her gorgeous library.

Celebrating 100 Years of Anne

I signed up for another challenge, though this one should be very doable. Over at Blue Archipelago, Clare started a minichallenge to read any one book of the Anne-series. The challenge started on June 7 and will last till July 31, 2008. I am cheating a bit, since I already started reading Anne of Green Gables before June 7. Also, I am not sure I will manage to end in time, as I am reading it through Daily Lit, getting a part every day. We’ll see. I will write about the book once I have finished it.

These are the other rules for the challenge:

You need to read at least one of the books from the series (if you’ve already read one in 2008 I’m happy for you to join in!)

Write a post on your blog sharing your thoughts on the book; favourite scene, relationships etc

When your post is written come back here and post the link to your post in the comments box

If you don’t have a blog then write your thoughts in the comments box.

There’s a Mr Linky to sign up on Clare’s blog here.

Read-a-thon Meme

Eva tagged me for the Read-a-thon Meme that Darcie started.

f I had 24 hours to read, be my goals would be… to stay awake, have fun and make sure that reading wouldn’t become a drag! But that’s why I signed up to be a cheerleader as well.

This is what I am going to have to do to get 24 hours of reading… Ask my boyfriend for advice, because he is very good at skipping nights. He has already adviced drinking Red Bull (which I hate). Though that might give me too much energy to sit and read. When I told him about the Read-a-thon, he had a difficult time grasping that there is no real purpose and there is nothing to win at the end. And that I don’t plan on cheating.

Oh, and I have to get the internet at home up and running, which I have been putting off for way too long.

If someone asked me for recommendations of “can’t put down” books for the read-a-thon, I would recommend: As it stands now, I have a mix of short stories, YA, a few essays, some detectives, and some novels of 350 pages max. I put some books in my native language Dutch on the stack as well. For when my head gets tired. Yesterday I decided that the read-a-thon was a god excuse to buy two books I had noticed before in our local English language bookshop with a possible third (a Ruth Rendell mystery) to be added. One is a collection of short stories by Australian writers which I found in the second hand section of the shop. The Ruth Rendell was standing next to it, also second hand. I only realized later when I was on my way to work already that that would have been perfect for the Read-a-thon as well. So I might have to go back soon… The other book I bought is the second part in the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series. I read the first part a few months ago and loved it. So I figured I could just as well read the next book in the series during the Read-a-thon. Isn’t it great when you can ‘rationalize’ your book-buying spree? Huge, enormous wink!

For you, what was your favorite part of the October read-a-thon and why? I didn’t participate, though I had signed up. The marriage of the daughter of friends was rescheduled to exactly the Sunday of the Read-a-thon (Due to time differences with the US, the Read-a-thon for me is pretty much from Saturday evening till Sunday evening). That’s why I am dead-set on participating this time!

If any participants of the Read-a-thon (cheerleaders and readers) read this who haven’t done this meme yet, consider yourself tagged!

Iran Awakening by Shirin Ebadi

I have gone off on a little Iran-reading spree recently. It started with Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (review to come. Short verdict: I absolutely loved it!), Iran Awakening was number two and this weekend I started Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

Shirin Ebadi is a human rights lawyer and activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. She is a woman I have enormous respect for. Iran Awakening is her memoir. I loved the book. It is well written; journalist and writer Azadeh Moaveni co-wrote the book (the link goes to her blog). The writing is not difficult to read and the book could make for a fast read. Still, I feel it is a book that needs to be read with attention, because every single sentence is packed with information, even if it is only three words long.

About her youth, Ebadi writes:

It was not until I was much older that I realized how gender equality was impressed on me first and foremost at home, by example. It was only when I surveyed my own sense of place in the world from an adult perspective that I saw how my upbringing spared me from the low self-esteem and learned dependence that I observed in women reared in more traditional homes. My father’s championing of my independence, from the play yard to my later decision to become a judge, instilled a confidence in me that I never felt consciously, but later came to regard as my most valued inheritance. (p. 12)

I think this was my favorite passage from the entire book. The part about learned dependence and low self-esteem struck me, but also what it says about how children learn by example.

Ebadi studies law and starts out as a judge in 1970, at the age of twenty-three. Initially, she supports the Islamic Revolution in 1979, not really grasping yet what this will mean for her as a woman. This changes however, when first she is forced to wear a veil covering her hair and later when she is demoted to some clerical position, because a female judge on the bench is not exactly the image the new regime wants to display.

The following, rather long passage is about the changes in the status and the rights of women in Iran after the Islamic Revolution and about how far-reaching the effect of that is:

I prepared myself for all the possible ways the imposition of Islamic law could affect my life. I thought of all the ways it would make a difference: the courtrooms in which I could no longer preside, the ministry it would fill with clerics, the religious books I would now use as legal references. But in all my anxious speculation, I never imagined that fear of a new legal regime, albeit a catastrophic one, would follow me into my living room, into my marriage. Yet there was no use denying it. Ever since I’d read about the new penal code in the newspaper, I’d been behaving differently with Javad [Ebadi's husband]. It was as though I was wearing my skin inside out. The smallest perceived slight or off-tone remark set me on the war path or, as the Persian expression goes, guarding my front. I couldn’t help it.

The day Javad and I married each other, we joined our lives together as two equal individuals. But under these laws, he stayed a person and I became a chattel. They permitted him to divorce me at whim, take custody of our future children, acquire three wives and stick them in the house with me. Although I knew rationally that inside Javad lurked no such potential monster, just waiting to break out and steal our hypothetical children and marry up a storm, I still felt oppressed. A couple of weeks into the new sullen, defensive person I had become, I decided that Javad and I should have a talk.

“Listen, I just can’t deal with this anymore,” I told him.

“We don’t have any problems,” he said. And he was right. Before all of this, our biggest disagreement had been over household chores.

“I know,” I responded, “but the law has made problems for us. We used to be equals, and now you’ve been promoted above me, and I just can;t stand it. I really, really can’t.”

“So what do you want me to do?” he asked, throwing his hands up.

And then inspiration struck. I knew what he could do! He could sign a postnuptial agreement, granting me the right to divorce him, as well as primary custody of our future children, in the event of separation. (p52-53)

Eventually, in the mid-eighties Ebadi resigns from her work at the Ministry of Justice. She resumes her career in 1992 when the Iranian regime allows women to practice law again. This time, though, Ebadi stands on the other side of the bench: She starts working as a lawyer taking on mostly pro bono cases and cases that show how the Islamic Regime’s discrimination against women is enshrined in the country’s laws. In this way, she starts making a name for herself, both inside the country and abroad, and that name keeps growing and growing.

When I watched that broadcast [an interview Ebadi gave on CNN], aware that it was being beamed around the world, I also realized for the first time that I had become what you might call famous. Prominence is something that accrues gradually. You work and speak, write articles and lecture, meet with clients and defended them, day after day, night after night, and then you wake up one day and notice that there is a long trail behind you that constitutes a reputation. That’s how it happened for me, anyway. How unimportant it was to me as a person, but how useful it became to my work. It meant journalists would listen if I approached them with a case and would help publicize it both inside the country and abroad. It meant that human rights observers around the world knew and trusted me, and launched swift appeals for urgent cases I brought to their attention, It meant there was now a face and a name attached to the abstract term “human rights” in Iran, and that finally millions of women who could not articulate their frustrations and desires had someone to speak on their behalf. I would never assume such a role for myself, but in the Islamic Republic, we have a problem with representation. Our diplomats around the world are, naturally, loyal to the regime, and the regime’s credibility is not such that it reflects the true opinions of the people. The responsibility falls, then, on unofficial ambassadors to relate Iranians’ perceptions and hopes to the world. (p.126-127)

The final chapter relates how Ebadi found out she had won the Nobel Peace Prize while she was in Paris and how she was received by tens of thousands of people, mostly women, at the airport upon her arrival in Iran. This chapter is very moving.

The chapters about Ebadi’s human rights work were among the most interesting for me, but also among the most disappointing parts of the book. She mainly covers her human rights work by picking out a few notable cases she was involved in, but other than that, she doesn’t write much about her work and her life during that period. The cases she uses are worth recounting. I also understand that there are probably large parts of her work that she probably cannot talk about because it would be too sensitive or possibly endanger people’s lives inside Iran one way or another. I can also understand that she might not want to share a lot of her private life. But still, I would be interested in how her human rights work developed over time, how that influenced her position in Iran, how she goes around setting up her cases, getting information, things like that.

Despite this minor flaw (which is more my personal opinion, than really a flaw I would say), I enjoyed Iran Awakening very much and my respect for Shirin Ebadi has only increased. Together with Persepolis and Reading Lolita in Tehran, Iran Awakening is one of the books I recommend to anyone who wants to read and learn about Iran and about the position of women in that country.

A common theme in all three books is that they are all about women trying to cope with the restrictive regime after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The three women all come from families that were well-connected, well-educated and (reasonably) well-off before the Islamic Revolution: Ebadi’s father was at one point a deputy minister, Nafisi’s father was mayor of Tehran at one point and one of Satrapi’s family members (I think her grandfather or great-grandfather) was prime-minister under the Shah or the Shah’s father (I couldn’t find the passage back to check). Also, they are all ethnic Iranian, none of them belongs to any of the many minorities in Iran and are all from the capital Tehran. So in a way, all three books do present a picture of Iran that to a certain extent is limited, because all three women write from the same background. On the other hand, I am not sure in how much this really distorts the general picture they give of life in contemporary Iran or to what extent their stories are only representative for a certain section of Iranian society. All three books, especially Reading Lolita in Tehran and Iran Awakening, do give glimpses of life in other segments of Iranian society as well. In the reviews of the other two books, I might touch upon this again.

If you have reviewed this book as well, leave a comment with a link to your review or send me an email with the link. The address is in the sidebar.

Weekly Geeks #6: Catching up on Reviews

This week’s theme of the Weekly Geeks was extremely timely for me after my blogging break:

1. Catch up on your reviews as much as you can this week.

2. Towards the end of the week, write a wrap-up post about how that went for you. You could list all the books you reviewed, if you like, and if some of the posts are up already, you could link to them.

3. Come back and sign the Mister Linky at the bottom of the page with your end-of-the-week wrap-up post.

I was offline all weekend, so that’s why I am a bit late with my wrap-up post. I had four reviews to write, plus one that came up on Friday as I finished the firs part of Don Quixote. Also, I had an almost-finished review to finish.

So how did I do?

I finished and posted the review that was almost done for Dansen in een strafkamp. You can find it here.

I wrote the post about the first part of Don Quixote, which I am posting together with this post. The link is here.

Then, I wrote a review for Iran Awakening by Shirin Ebadi. I will post this later this week.

The three books left for me to review are The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling and Montagne Russe by Pieter Waterdrinker. So I didn’t do nearly as much as I planned to do, but I at least got back into the rhythm of writing after my almost-month-long break. And at least I didn’t let my backlog increase. So all in all I am not unhappy about what I did do. And do come back soon for the three reviews I still have to write!