Books to Read Around the World

Another find today, (all on my own), is The Guardian's World Literature Tour. The current destination is Egypt. The reading list is growing; of course Naguib Mahfouz and Alaa al Aswany are included, as well as authors that date back to the Pharoahs.

My suggestions to add to the list:

Map of Love by Ahdaf Soueif.

The book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, its author compared to Tolstoy and Flaubert. I devoured this book two summers ago. Although the central theme is a blend of politics and love, forbidden or otherwise, the book is much more than the tale of forbidden love, or yet another tome decrying the arrogance and destructive effects of colonialism. The emerging Egyptian Nationalist struggle against British imperialism, is explicated through the means of a culturally forbidden love affair between Lady Anna Winterbourne and Arab nationalist Sharif al-Baroudi. Close to one-hundred years later, Isabel Parkman, Anna and Sharif's great-granddaughter, discovers Anna's journals and letters, (translated by Amal, her lover's sister), and thereby discovers the parallel between her Great-Grandmother's choice to marry a man outside her own culture, to that of her obssessive love for Egyptian American composer and political activist, Omar Ghamrawi. If you're not paying attention you might miss that Amal is a quiet symbol of the effects of postcolonialism and the current state of Egypt.

Memoirs of a Woman Doctor by Nawal el-Saadawi

I read Nawal el-Saadawi's fictionalized memoirs when I was in my early twenties, back in college, and I can remember thinking the character was very angry, and also, that a lot of what was written, the social and political oppression of women as a whole, just couldn't be true. Turns out the character had every right to be angry, and yes, the injustices were true. el-Saadawi wrote this novel in her twenties, and the book was instantly hailed, yet also considered highly controversial, so many parts were deleted. The book is considered a revolutionary feminist book which showcases the struggles of ordinary women, for basic rights. Speaking truth to power is risky business. el-Saadawi has never strayed from telling her truth, the truth of Arabic women, the truth of her life as a professional and as a wife and mother, nor from working to better the political and cultural lives of Arab women.