I've been checking out Women of Sand and Myrrh, by Hanān al-Shaykh, as a candidate for my World Literature course. I finally got to finish it during a recent trip, and it has definitely secured a place on my next syllabus.

I first read al-Shaykh in the Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction, and that put this book on my radar.

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         A major computer snit has interrupted the flow of postings to my LJ, as has the beginning of the undergraduate semester. I closed the month of August with exactly 60 titles completed, but I'm eight behind in the matter of reviewing.
         My college-instructor in-laws, who live not far from Cooperstown, NY, suggested I pick up The ( Read more... )

         The edition of Frederic Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune that I found on the Intertubes was the Filiquarian Publishing version, a cheaply done POD, with no copyright information or explanatory material. You'd do better to find a proper copy of it, which probably means buying it used, or downloading it.
         That said, it's a ( Read more... )

         I'll keep this comment short, because I don't want my students just feeding me back my review. The latest South Asian novel I read for class is The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, and this goes straight onto my A-list.
         The previous two novels were depressing, and this one tends to be, as well. Didn't intend the course to ( Read more... )

         The last novel I read was by Kiran Desai. The next one I started was Snow, by Orhan Pamuk. I'd taught his My Name Is Red, toward the end of last term, and that motivated me to pull another one of his off my unread shelf and get to it. In looking something up online, I discovered that Desai and Pamuk are, or at least recently were, a ( Read more... )

          Since I'll soon be teaching The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai's Man Booker Prize-winning, and National Book Critics Circle Award-winning novel, I probably shouldn't review it in detail. I can affirm, however, that I will be reading her other novel (I strongly approve of novelists who turn out only one book per decade, which makes it ( Read more... )

          I'm getting very little book reading done the last couple of months, except for volumes related to the classes I'm teaching. One more, and I'm done with that. Well, really, one more and then I can start on the books for next semester.
          The second-to-last was Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, which I first read in 2008, when I first ( Read more... )