Diwa
Suddenly, Cairo seems much more tolerable.
I found a bookstore.
It was AMAZING. I actually knew of this bookstore, but never went ... but I'm officially out of reading material, so decided today I could put it off no longer. And I went inside, and there were actual BOOKS! In ENGLISH! On SHELVES! It's really the little things that make me happy. :)
Unfortunately, stuff was pretty overpriced - that is, the books were almost at American prices, which means I spent 203 LE on three books. But quite honestly, it was TOTALLY worth it. The store has a bunch of Arabic books translated into English, so I picked up a book by Nagub Mahfouz, who's kind of Egypt's national writer, and well known for his social realism. I wanted to get a copy of The Yacoubian Building, but they only had it in hardcover, and I have a strong bias towards paperbacks.
Also, because I figured I couldn't JUST get Arabic books (the books are to ESCAPE Cairo), I picked up something by Jose Saramago, an AMAZING writer who wrote Blindness, a great book that I loaned out and haven't gotten back yet (ahem ...). He's put out a new book, Seeing, that I want to read badly enough that I'd have gotten it in hardcover, but I think it's too new for Egypt, so I got something called The Cave, which also looks pretty interesting.
And, finally, I got a book called Someone Like You, by - brace yourselves - Roald Dahl! Be honest - did you know that he wrote adult fiction? Because I had NO IDEA! But it's a collection of short stories described as "vendettas and desperate quests, bitter memories and sordid fantasies thwarted," so I'm thinking it's definitely not a sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Okay, I think I'm going to go read something - reading over this, I can tell how excited I am by the excessive use of capital letters. No time to waste!
I found a bookstore.
It was AMAZING. I actually knew of this bookstore, but never went ... but I'm officially out of reading material, so decided today I could put it off no longer. And I went inside, and there were actual BOOKS! In ENGLISH! On SHELVES! It's really the little things that make me happy. :)
Unfortunately, stuff was pretty overpriced - that is, the books were almost at American prices, which means I spent 203 LE on three books. But quite honestly, it was TOTALLY worth it. The store has a bunch of Arabic books translated into English, so I picked up a book by Nagub Mahfouz, who's kind of Egypt's national writer, and well known for his social realism. I wanted to get a copy of The Yacoubian Building, but they only had it in hardcover, and I have a strong bias towards paperbacks.
Also, because I figured I couldn't JUST get Arabic books (the books are to ESCAPE Cairo), I picked up something by Jose Saramago, an AMAZING writer who wrote Blindness, a great book that I loaned out and haven't gotten back yet (ahem ...). He's put out a new book, Seeing, that I want to read badly enough that I'd have gotten it in hardcover, but I think it's too new for Egypt, so I got something called The Cave, which also looks pretty interesting.
And, finally, I got a book called Someone Like You, by - brace yourselves - Roald Dahl! Be honest - did you know that he wrote adult fiction? Because I had NO IDEA! But it's a collection of short stories described as "vendettas and desperate quests, bitter memories and sordid fantasies thwarted," so I'm thinking it's definitely not a sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Okay, I think I'm going to go read something - reading over this, I can tell how excited I am by the excessive use of capital letters. No time to waste!
posted by Teale at 6:32 PM
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