Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz

Palace Walk is the first part of Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz’ Cairo Trilogy, which had been high on my wishlist for a long time. When I was in a bookshop in Holland last year, I came across a beautiful hardcover edition of the entire trilogy, I just couldn’t let it lie there. I had to take it with me to Armenia, all 1313 pages with hardcover and all. Just holding this book is a joy because of it’s cream-colored pages and nice size. Fortunately, the nice outside was matched by a great story.

Palace Walk follows the family of Ahmad Abd al-Jahwad from Cairo between 1917 and 1919. He is the fairly well to do patriarch of the family, owner of a shop, beloved by his friends. To his friends he is known as a womanizer, a lover of music, wine, and laughter. This is not how his family knows him, though, because to them he shows a very different side of his character: he tyrannizes his family, raising his children very strictly.

Ahmad’s wife Amina is not allowed to leave the house without his permission. She serves her husband obediently. Despite Amina being no more than her husband’s servant in many ways, once he is out of the house Amina takes on a personality and a dignity of her own. She clearly is the master of the household, in charge of the food preparation in the oven room. Amina is the one who gathers the other family member around her.

Ahmad’s eldest son from his first marriage Yasin is the least likable character, a womanizer and a drinker like his father, a guy who confuses lust with love and considers women little better than domestic animals. The middle son Fahmy is a student and the youngest, Kamal is only ten years old. He adores his mother, and tries to make sense of all the adult things going on around him. In between there are two daughters, sixteen year old Aida, who is beautiful, rather superficial and very aware of her beauty, and her older sister Khadija, who is not as pretty as her sister is (and very aware of that too) and who searches for flaws in every person so she can criticize them with her sharp remarks.

Palace Walk is set during the last years of World War I, when British and Australian soldiers occupied Cairo. During this time, the call for independence of Egypt becomes louder and demonstrations against the occupier more frequent. The growing unrest in the country increasingly affects the Al-Jahwad household and one by one its members secretly start to disobey their father and husband. But over time each member of the family also starts to realize that he may not only be the strict tyrant they know, that he may have a different side as well.

The novel takes its time to get started, set the scene and introduce all the family members and their relations with each other. I loved getting to know them, with their flaws, their (misguided) dreams and hopes. I even felt involved with the not so likable characters, and I got angry especially with father Ahmad and Yasin because they were such complete idiots at times. On the other hand, despite the way he treated his family, I couldn’t help but like the father when he was out of the house.

I loved this book. I loved the way Mahfouz paints Cairo, the way he writes about the characters in the book. I got involved with each and every one of them, even the ones I didn’t like. I felt like I was living in the house with them, sharing the coffee hours in which the entire family except for Ahmad would get together. Mahfouz’ writing style is very sensory, food plays an important role, and I could almost smell the bread being baked and hear the noise on the streets of the neighborhood.

I kept rooting for every member of the family, to find his or her dreams and hopes. I kept rooting for Ahmad to shed his hypocrisy, even for Yasin when he got disappointed in marriage because he realized that marriage doesn’t just mean that you have a woman and a servant to your beck and call. I still wanted him to ‘get real’. And yes, you must have noticed what an incredibly ridiculous attitude Yasin has towards women. From time to time I really wanted to hit him on the head with my nice and heavy hardcover.

Palace Walk was the first book I finished in 2009, and the trilogy may well end up among my favorite books ever. Based on this one book alone, Naguib Mahfouz already made it to my list of favorite authors and I will definitely try to find more of his books. But first I have Palace of Desire and Sugar Street to look forward to. It won’t be long before I will take up Palace of Desire and find myself back in Cairo with the al-Jahwads again.

If you reviewed this book on your blog, leave a comment with the link to your review and I will include it in this post.

War on the Margins by Libby Cone

Before I say anything else about this book, I have to confess something. I owe author Libby Cone a huge, huge apology. She approached me more than six months ago and asked if I was interested in reading and reviewing her novel War on the Margins on my blog. I agreed, received her novel, and read it in early October. Then I put it aside because I wanted to think about the story before I wrote my review and to find a bit more background information on the actual people playing a part in the story. Then life sort of kicked in and the book stayed on my to-be-reviewed pile. And stayed there and stayed there. In an effort to start 2009 with a clean slate when it comes to reviewing books, I picked War on the Margins up again late December for a quick reread to refresh my mind and to finally write my review of the book. My taking so long to get around to posting about War on the Margins has nothing to do with the book not being good or my not liking it. Quite the opposite: I enjoyed the book a lot.

The reason why I agreed to review War on the Margins, is because it deals with a part of modern history that I actually knew very little about: the occupation of the English Channel islands by the Germans during the Second World War. I have to admit, that I wasn’t even really aware that these islands had been occupied by the Germans.

Marlene Zimmer is a young woman with Jewish ancestry living on Jersey, one of the English Channel islands. At the beginning of the German occupation of Jersey, she works as a clerk at the local Aliens Office. When her office gets the task of registering all Jewish people on the island, she decides it’s time to disappear from the face of the earth. Marlene ends up hiding at the home of Lucille and Suzanne who are active in the Resistance movement on the island. Marlene joins them in their actions against the German occupants. When Lucille and Suzanne are captured, Marlene has to fend for herself again. She meets Peter, a Polish
guy who escaped from a forced labor camp on Jersey. As a result of her meeting Peter, Marlene will have to come to grips with the consequences of some of her decisions and judgments from the beginning of the War.

The book is based on a Master’s thesis Libby Cone wrote and some of the characters in the story are historical people. Lucille Schwob (Claude Cahun) and Suzanne Malherbe (Marcel Moore) were a French lesbian artist couple who were active in Jersey’s Resistance movement during World War II. You can read more about them here, here and here, all with links to further information.

One of my favorite aspects of the novel was that two of the main characters were a lesbian couple and that this was not an issue. The story was not about issues of coming out, social ostracism or things like that (though in between the lines you could read that Lucille and Suzanne presented themselves in public as sisters rather than as a couple). Their sexual orientation is just part of who Lucy and Suzanne are and that’s it.

I think that some parts of the book could use a bit more editing, but on the whole the novel is well written in a solid and no-frills style and it kept me interested in the fate of the main characters all through the end. I turned the last page feeling like I was parting with people I had gotten to know well and that I had indeed learned quite a lot about a part of history that I knew very little about, so in that way reading War on the Margins was a mission accomplished.

Due to its similar setting, War on the Margins seems to form a natural companion to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, which I haven’t read. If you are interested to read more about the occupation of the Channel Islands by the German army, then I highly recommend picking up War on the Margins as well.

You can read the first chapter of War on the Margin here (scroll down a bit).

This book has also been reviewed here:
Dovegreyreader Scribbles
Rob Around Books (here and here)

Update added Jan 28: I just received an email from Libby, telling me that she has signed with a publisher, which will (re)publish War on the Margins this summer. This means that until then the book will not be available anymore. Libby also told me that she isn’t sure the book will be published under the same title. I will update this post if I can tell more about date and title. Good luck and well done to you, Libby!

And the award fest goes on…

Jew Wishes has given me not one, but two awards on her blog:

The first is the Premio Dardos Award which “ is given for recognition of cultural, ethical, literary, and personal values transmitted in the form of creative and original writing”. These stamps were created with the intention of promoting fraternization between bloggers, a way of showing affection and gratitude for work that adds value to the Web“.

The second one is the Butterfly Award. The image is self-explanatory:

Thank you so much, Lorri!

Please do go over to her blog Jew Wishes, because it is a great one. I only found her blog a few months ago, but it has quickly become a favorite of mine with insightful reviews of books on Jewish topics or by Jewish authors, Lorri’s wonderful pictures and a lot more.

I know I am supposed to pass these awards on, but after Saturday’s award fest, I am partied out for the moment and I do need to recover for a bit. I hope you will excuse me…

Blog Improvement Project Week 1

Kim at Sophisticated Dorkiness is hosting the Blog Improvement Project this year. It is a Weekly Geeks type project with a new theme every two weeks. Or in Kim’s own words:

The 2009 Blog Improvement Project is a year-long challenge that will consist of twice-monthly activities to improve your blog. Every first and third Monday of the month I’ll post an activity here at Sophisticated Dorkiness that will related in some way to making your blog better. Each participant should spend the next two weeks focusing on that aspect of their blog.  Possible topics include goals setting, writing better content, building community with readers, getting more readers, and blog layout and design.

If you choose to participate in this project, there is no obligation to participate in every challenge, and you can customize each challenge so it makes sense for your particular blog and goals.  Think of the design as similar to Weekly Geeks — participate when it makes sense for you.  This is a group effort, because getting better is always easier when you have a support system, but the ultimate commitment remains with you — how do you want your blog to be better by the time we get to December 31, 2009?

Like Kim, I am by no means an expert, but I am interested in social media and blogging and read blogs about these topics (I do have more than just a zillion bookblogs in my feedreader!). Actually, this interest is not just because of my own blogging, but also because I am interested in and involved in encouraging blogging as a way of citizen journalism in Armenia. As a sidenote: I just realized I have been blogging for more than four years now. I would miss it if I were to stop.

I decided to join the Blog Improvement Project, because it seems to include many of the things that I try to do for my blog, but never get into my routine and I might just learn a thing or two along the road to help me in my own blogging or to help me transfer my knowledge to others. Let’s just say I am turning my own blog(s?) into a field for experiments. And hey! It just sounds like a fun activity!

So, the first task was about goal-setting:

* Set some goals for your blog. Think about where you would like to be a year from now, and try to set clear and specific objectives that you’ll be able to measure in some way once we get to the end of 2009.
* Write a post about your goals. If you can think of any, also include ideas about projects or activities that you think could help you achieve those goals.

These are my goals for my blog this year:

1. I want to post at least three times a week. Actually this has been a goal for quite some time. Go over my archive and you’ll see that I am slightly more irregular than that in my posting. I want to post more regularly and three times a week seems reasonable and achievable for me. If I manage to post more, great! If not, then three times is okay. This really is my most important goal for this year, because I want to get (back) into a routine of writing one to two hours every morning (blogposts, emails to friends, other writing). I have this routine off and on, but usually I only manage to keep it a week or two-three before it disappears into thin air. If I get this routine into my system, then most of the other goals below will follow.

2. I want to stay one or two posts ahead of publishing. In other words, I want to have one or two finished, but unpublished posts at all times.

3. I want to keep up with reviewing the books I have read. I don’t want to have more than two books near my computer that I need to review. This means that I need to get writing, because I currently have five books that I really want to blog about (three of them are from 2008, but I do want to write about them). In a way this is not bad, because it will help me achieve and maintain my previous goal. In the next two weeks I will write the posts for these five books and from then on, I will not have more than two books on my to-be-reviewed pile.

4. I won’t participate in reading challenges anymore (rare exceptions possible) because for me it doesn’t add to my reading experience. I think that is because I live in a country where there is no wide choice of English books and Amazon is not much of an option because of finances and unreliable mail service in Armenia. If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know that my main source of books are my parents’ visits to me and my visits to Holland.

Instead of challenges, I want to become more active (again) in the Sunday Salon, the Weekly Geeks and in this activity. I signed up for the first two, but hardly ever participate (partly due to less than stellar internet, partly due to my lack of a writing routine, see under 1). So, I will write at least one Sunday Salon post per month and I will participate in the Weekly Geeks and in the Blog Improvement Project as often as I like the assignments, but no less than once a month.

5. If I am the lucky recipient of an award from a fellow-blogger, I will not leave that unanswered for a month (see my previous post). I will post about and pass the award on within a week of receiving it.

All these goals are about blogging regularly, keeping a rhythm, because really that is what I lack most of the time. I hope this blogging and writing rhythm will help me in my email-writing as well, because I have become such a lazy a** email writer (I apologize, dear friends and family!). I know from when I am in a rhythm of writing daily or almost daily, I am much more productive and get much more done. I hope putting these goals out there in the open will help me commit myself to them.

The best way to spend a Saturday evening

I am working on something that has a deadline tomorrow, but someone in my house is thoroughly enjoying his Saturday night…

Weekly Geeks and Awards

It’s been a while since I last participated in a Weekly Geeks activity, but one of my blogging resolutions for this year (more about those in a separate post) is to participate in Weekly Geeks more often.

After Dewey died, Weekly Geeks was out of the air for a few weeks, but it has been taken up again by a some fellow bloggers who set up a special site with a blog for the Weekly Geeks.

This week’s (actually last week’s, but I couldn’t get this post up earlier) assignment is brought to us by Terri:

In the spirit of the amazing community building that Dewey was so good at, tell us about your favorite blogs, the ones you have bookmarked or subscribe to in your Google Reader, that you visit on a regular basis. Tell us what it is about these blogs that you love, that inspire or educate you or make you laugh. Be sure to link to them so we can find them too.

Another option: Reading goals for ’09 and wrap ups for ’08 have been pretty well covered by now on a lot of blogs any other memes. But if you haven’t done this, feel free to make that your first WG of the new year, in addition to or instead of the above.

As I recently won two awards, I decided to combine the Weekly Geeks with passing both awards on two some of the many bloggers whose blogs fill my feedreader.

First up is the Honest Scrap award that Susan gave me way back in December (ouch! Another of my resolutions: reply sooner when I was tagged for an award or a meme!). It has a meme attached to it.

1. List 10 honest things about yourself (have some fun with this!).
2. Pass the award on to 7 bloggers (I was told that you can give out fewer if you’d like.) who are honest and speak their minds in a thoughtful manner.

Now, since I have another award to hand out as well, I am not sure I will get to seven bloggers, but I’ll give it a try. But first the ten honest things about myself:

1. I will be unemployed soon, most likely from the end of February. Not my fault, but it sucks nonetheless. I work for an international company that is going to close its Yerevan branch.

2. I will not leave Armenia because I will be unemployed. I will find (am trying to find) a new job. Not an easy task, but there you have it. I didn’t move to Armenia for this particular job, so I am not going to leave now that the job is no longer there.

3. I can be very direct, embarrassingly or rudely so at times, because sometimes I just blurt out stuff. Want a recent example? I have a friend who goes out and drinks a lot (and I really mean A LOT). With another friend we have decided she is in an “experimental phase”, because it apparently started after she broke up with her long time boyfriend. Recently, at a party she complained to me that she should diet and loose some weight, because she is growing a belly (I think she looks perfectly fine, but there you go…). My reply: “Or maybe you should just drink less beer.” That did not go down well…

4. I hardly ever regret things I say, including the above comment.

5. I am a bit of a loner, I don’t like being in (big) groups or at parties and I often feel like a social moron. But that is apparently not the way I come across.

6. I cannot hide it if I am bored or if people bore me. People who know me well, notice it from the look on my face and from the fact that I get very quiet and stop participating in any conversation.

7. I have little or no patience with people who only care about status, outward appearance and material things.

8. Hardly ever do I really dislike a person or have no respect at all for someone. Usually I try and find a way to understand this person better, to try to understand where a person comes from, why s/he thinks the way she does. But once I do loose my respect for someone, there is no way back: That person is doomed.

9. I am a feminist and I think it really is too bad that that word has such negative connotations these days (man-hating, bra-burning, etc.).

10. I am a loyal friend.

Now, as for the bloggers I nominate, these are some that I appreciate for their honesty or for their well-argued opinions:

Rebecca of Rebecca Reads, because she always gives good and reasonable arguments why she does or doesn’t like what she read and she always poses questions that make me think.

Raych of Books i done read: If there is one blogger out there who honestly gives her opinion about the books she reads, it is Raych. And she often is hilarious at that as well!

Bibliolatrist of Bibliolatry is also one of those bloggers who doesn’t mince her words.

Becca’s Byline, for writing about the good and the bad and making me smile and think.

The second award I received, is the Inspiration Award which I received from seachanges at 51Stories. These are the rules for this award:

1. Please put the logo of the award (see on the left) on your blog if you can make it work with your format.
2. Link to the person from whom you received the award.
3. Nominate 7 or more blogs.
4. Put the links of those blogs on your blog.
5. Leave a message on their blogs to tell hem.

Having done points 1 and 2, I will continue with my (drumroll please!) nominations of bloggers who for different reasons give me inspiration. Actually, I could nominate the blogs for the previous award for this one as well, because they make me think or give me inspiration about reading or writing.

Jew Wishes is a blog I discovered recently. Lorry writes about books, music and other things Jewish. She posts beautiful pictures as well. Since I started following her blog, she has given me lots of new ideas of books to read.

Rob Around Books who not only reads interesting books, but has features like Reader of the Week (where he usually lets other bloggers introduce themselves) and Bookshelves of the week (do check out the amazing pictures he finds on the net!). And he is planning to read my all time favorite book The Chosen by Chaim Potok soon!

Kevin from Canada is a new bookblog, but Kevin has been around for quite some time, building himself a reputation by leaving thoughtful comments on some of the bookblogs I read. Which is why I didn’t hesitate to add his blog to my feedreader when I found out he started a blog of his own.

Natasha from Maw Books Blog who uses her blog not only to post book reviews (and recently started to make and post short videos as well), but also used it last year to raise awareness for Darfur.

Heather from Age 30+ – A Lifetime of Books because she gives me tons of new reading ideas. And because I love her posts about the books she reads with her young son, I have tons of respect for the way she is trying to make her son think about the books he reads, what he likes about them and why. I don’t have children, but her mother-son bookclub posts are an inspiration in trying to instill a love of books in young children.

A non-book blog for a change: Glued Blue Glass. I have been reading Margaret’s blog for years now. Her pictures of all the crafty things she makes, remind me of how utterly un-creative I am in that regard. Plus, I find her social awareness and compassion very inspiring.

There you have it, all my nominations (and yes, I know I mentioned only six blogs for the second award) . These are all blogs I very much enjoy reading, though that list is much longer than just these eleven blogs.

Russian Reading Challenge Roundup

For the Russian Reading Challenge we had to read at least four books related to Russia between January 1 and December 31, 2008. That was an easy target for me as I had a lot more books on Russia on my TBR-pile. The year ended up being very much colored by my reading for this challenge, but that was not a problem at all! I ended up reading sixteen books for this challenge and almost all of them were worth reading. In fact my two non-fiction favorites of 2008 are on the list. I have only two Russia-related books left on my TBR-pile, which I plan to read this year.

These are the books I read for the Russian Reading Challenge in 2008 (links are to my reviews):
* Orlando Figes – The Whisperers
* Simon Sebag Montefiore – Young Stalin
* Fazil Iskander – Tali, Het wonder van Tsjegem (Tali, The Miracle of Chegem)
* Vassily Aksyonov – Generations of Winter
* Факко & Сакко не теряют надежды – Reid, Geleijnse & Van Tol
* Corine de Vries – Dansen in een strafkamp
* Pieter Waterdrinker – Montagne Russe
* Anna Brouwer – Land van gebroken beloftes: Dochters van Rusland
* Anne Applebaum – Gulag: A History
* Jelle Brandt Corstius – Rusland voor gevorderden: Berichten van een overlever
* Edward Rutherfurd – Russka
* Tom Rob Smith – Child 44
* Åsne Seierstad – The Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya
* Chaim Potok – The Gates of November (De familie Slepak)
* Laura Starink – De Russische kater
* Peter d’Hamecourt – Russen zien ze vliegen

There were a couple of books I read but didn’t review. They are Факко & Сакко не теряют надежды (Fokke and Sukke won’t loose hope), a Dutch comic translated into Russian. It was not really a book or a novel, but it was a quick and fun read. It was interesting to see how the Dutch jokes and blunt sense of humor of  the comic had been translated into Russian. Some worked very well, but other jokes kind of lost the edge they have in the Dutch language.

I didn’t review Pieter Waterdrinker’s Montagne Russe either. Initially I didn’t get around to it and then I realized that I didn’t have much to say about the book as I found it rather repetitive. It is a collection of short stories and essays by a Dutch writer/journalist living in Russia. It won’t be a surprise then that this was the book I liked least. You can read an excerpt in English here.

The other two books I didn’t review were actually rather good, both of them. I had planned to write about them, but then I postponed that too long so I don’t really remember what I wanted to write.

Chaim Potok’s The Gates of November (De familie Slepak in Dutch) is a biography of Volodya and Masha Slepak, a Jewish couple who became leaders in the refusenik-dissident movement in the 1970s and 80s in the Soviet Union. Chaim Potok is my favorite writer ever and I used to reread his books regularly when I was still living in Holland. His book The Promise is my favorite ever book, the only book I would reread every year. I miss reading his books, so next time I am in Holland I will dig into my bookstacks and bring some of his books back with me. It is high time for a reread. Though Gates of November is not my favorite Potok (I think this is partly because I read the book in Dutch translation, which was good but nothing like reading Potok in English), I still thoroughly enjoyed reading it and highly recommend it. Jew Wishes has a more extensive review on her blog here.
The final book I didn’t get around to reviewing was Åsne Seierstad’s The Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya. Seierstad is a Norwegian journalist who became well-known as the author of the controversial The Bookseller of Kabul. She lived in Grozny, the capital of war-torn Chechnya, illegally in 2006 and 2007. Seierstad writes a gripping account of what life is like for ordinary people in a country ruined by war and where, despite Russia’s official stance that the war is over, a simmering conflict is still going on, fueled in large part by the Russia-backed president Ramzan Kadyrov and his private army of Kadyrovtsy. Seierstad focuses on the inhabitants of the orphanage where she lives during her stays in Grozny, and especially on the children who grew up only knowing war and violence. Seierstad’s writing and her compassion for ordinary people suffering from the violence in Chechnya reminded me of murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya’s writing on Chechnya. If the subject interests you, I highly recommend The Angel of Grozny.

Though, as I said, I thoroughly enjoyed the large majority of the books I read for my challenge, there were two that stood out easily: The Whisperers and Gulag. They are easily my two favorite non-fiction reads of last year. In fact, The Whisperers was one of the first books I read in 2008 and already then I knew that it would end high in the list of favorite books of the year.

Thanks so much, Sharon, for hosting this challenge! It was easily the favorite challenge I participated in last year.

Cats and books: an irresistable combination

Just a quick one. Someone recently came to my blog with this search term: “no book is worth reading if a cat won’t”. Now this is intriguing. If a cat won’t what? Pee on it? Read it too? Tear the book apart? Sleep on it?

Any other suggestions?

The Famished Road by Ben Okri

The Famished Road by Ben Okri is one of the most unusual books I read last year. I didn’t race through it, though. Well, I did through some parts, but at other times I couldn’t read more than, say, forty pages a day before I was ’saturated’. It took me about ten days to finish this 570-page book, so you see that the average amount of pages I read per day, is not that high.

The Famished Road is set in Nigeria and it tells the story of Azaro, a spirit-child. Spirit-children are children who are born and live only for a short time before they return to the spirit world. Azaro, however, refuses to return to the spirit world and decides to stay in the ‘real’ world with his parents. Azaro’s world is a world in which the spirits are just as present as the ‘normal’ world. Sometimes it took a while before I realized that Azaro was seeing and interacting with the spirits instead of with real people. Not everyone can see and interact with the spirits, Azaro’s parents, for example, can’t.

His mother is a small trader, selling her goods on the market or peddling the streets; his father is a day-worker carrying loads of twenty or thirty kilos on his back. In this way they try to make ends meet. Azaro’s father is also a supporter of the ‘wrong’ political party, the Party of the Poor, which gets him into trouble with their landlord, who is a staunch supporter of the Party of the Rich (aka the Party of the Bad Milk). Azaro’s father is always thinking about ways to get out of the poverty they live in: he wants to join the army, he dreams of becoming a professional boxer and of becoming a politician. We also meet Madame Koto, the local bar owner who hooks up with the Party of the Rich, which brings her business, fortune, and money. And blows up her ego. She is one of the people who can see spirits as well. In fact, the spirits frequent her bar just as often, if not more, as the ‘real’ people do. Finally, we meet the many spirits who are sent to take Azaro back to the spirit world.

There is no real plot in this book, in the sense that there is no major problem to be resolved or some event to deal with with a climax or a solution or something like that. The story is more or less a linear narrative of a few years of Azaro’s youth. It is more of a ‘life goes on’ story. But it is also so much more than that. It is a story about poverty, politics, greed and how that corrupts people. About hope, family and dreams.

It wasn’t the storyline itself, though, that captivated me. It was Ben Okri’s writing: so rich, so descriptive! Sometimes I would reread a sentence, just for the beauty of the description. It took some time to get used to Ben Okri’s writing style, in fact I don’t think the book would have passed a 50-page test: I would have tossed it away before that. The beginning was tough, but once I realized what was going on and once I had gotten used to the writing, I loved it. On the other hand, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, it is not a book I raced through, there was only so much I could take in every day. For me, The Famished Road really was a book to savor slowly and to take my time with.

There is a sequel to The Famished Road, called Songs of Enchantment, also about Azaro and his parents. That one is on my wishlist now.

If you reviewed this book on your blog, please leave a comment with the link to your review and I will add it to the post.