Category: Reading

Arabic books

I’ve bought a couple of Arabic books.

The other day when I was feeling all enthused about learning Arabic I got online and ordered a couple of books from Amazon just to get me started. I don’t have time to do a course at the moment so I thought books would be a good way for me to at least begin familiarising myself with the language. Today they arrived.
 

The first one is a child’s book – ‘The Usborne First Thousand Words in Arabic’ by Heather Amery and Stephen Cartwright. The slim volume is slightly bigger than A4 sized and consists of a series of double-page, full-colour pictorial spreads, each on a different theme e.g. the kitchen or the hospital. The main picture shows a large array of items in situ, whilst around the border there is a selection of the items which can be found in the main picture. These each have the relevant word written in Roman and Arabic scripts. At the back of the book is a dictionary with each of the words from the books written alongside the English equivalent. This seems to be a good book for me to leave lying around so I can keep dipping into it.

 

The second book is ‘The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read and Write it’ by Nicholas Awde and Putros Samano. This A5 sized slim volume has an introductory chapter on the language and then goes into detail about each letter and how to write the different versions of it. There don’t seem to be any exercises in it, but the letters are laid out in such a way that I can easily copy them to practise my writing.

I read a lot of reviews of different books before choosing these two. They both had plenty of positive reviews and they seem to fit my needs at the moment. When I improve, and when I have more time, I’ll look for a book which includes grammar and sentence structure and has exercises I can work on.

Book Database

When you have a lot of books you need a system to organise them. I have a lot of books. I need a system.

For years I’ve catalogued the majority of my books. I started with one plastic box with a set of 4×6 inch index cards. I now have 6 absolutely stuffed boxes. I include fiction, travel writing, biographies, ‘academic’ (e.g. history, anthropology, religion), poetry, current affairs, etc. What I haven’t included are books such as recipe books, travel guides, dictionaries and so on. There’s also the question of when does a pamphlet or booklet become a book and deserve a card in my index box? I’ve always been a bit stuck with this one.

I write the name of the author or editor at the top of the card in red ink. Underneath I list all the books in my collection by that author/editor in blue or black ink. If a book has more than one author or editor I note this in brackets after the title and have a separate card filled out for each author or editor. The cards are then filed in alphabetical order of surname.

This has always been an effective way of keeping track of my books, but now I’m starting to wonder if I need to go digital. A few things have prompted these thoughts. One is my recent purchase of a Kindle. If I have a book on Kindle should I add it to my catalogue? Or should my catalogue solely be a way of keeping track of the books that are sitting on my shelves? Also, I’d quite like to know how many books I’ve got. I used to be able to look along my shelves and count them. That’s not that easy any more. And with six stuffed index boxes, counting titles written on cards isn’t that practical either. And anyway, a lot of my books aren’t included on the index cards such as my three shelves of recipe books, or my two shelves of travel guide books.

Something else that has got me thinking recently is the proliferation of sites such as Shelfari and Goodreads. I’ve had a bit of a play around with both and I like the idea of them. They have so many categories including the date you finished reading the book, if you have loaned it to someone, what rating you give it, and so on. There’s also space for a synopsis. As much as I like filling things in and ticking boxes I know I’d never have the time and patience to do this for all my books. And although I like the advantage of being able to access my book database from anywhere in the world, there’s also the disadvantage of not having complete control over it. What if the website ceases to exist? Or if it morphs into something I don’t like? Or if a charge is introduced? So although I’ll put a few of my books on Shelfari and Goodreads, I’m probably better with my own database.

Last night I started playing around with Access on my laptop. I’ve set up a basic database and started entering books thinking of categories as I go. There’s no point me having a ‘date read’ category as for most of my books I’ve no idea of the exact date I read them. So instead I’ve included a box that can be ticked if I’ve read that particular book. I’ve also got tick boxes for whether or not the book is fiction, if it’s edited, if it is has more than one author and whether I have a paper copy, a Kindle edition or both.

Other categories I’ve included so far are the author’s name and the title of the book and three ‘genre’ categories. In these I’m entering if it’s a children’s book or a thriller; if there’s a particular Scotland or Peak District interest; if there’s a theme running throughout e.g. dogs or biscuits; and so on.

As I’ve only just started working on this, I’m not sure how it will end up. Will I finish with some really elaborate database, or will I give up after a few weeks and go back to my index boxes? If I do continue with the digital database I know I’m probably looking at a few years to get all my books catalogued sufficiently and appropriately. Ah well, no point in doing things by halves is there?

Stephen Booth and the Chinley Book Festival

A tiny book festival and a talk by one of my favourite authors.

This afternoon I went along to the first ever Chinley book festival. It hadn’t been well advertised – I only found out about it when I saw Stephen Booth mention on his website that he would be speaking at it. A google search didn’t turn up much more information. I arrived not really knowing what to expect but hoping that the Stephen Booth talk wouldn’t be sold out as I’ve wanted to attend one of his talks for a while now. 

Chinley is a village in the Peak District not too far from Chapel-en-le-Frith. Booth’s books are about two police officers who are based in the fictional town of Edendale in the Peak District. They have an alarming number of murders to solve and their cases take them all over the Peak to many real locations as well as fictional ones. 

The book festival was rather small scale, but then I wasn’t expecting a Derbyshire equivalent of Hay-on-Wye. One hall had a few stalls including one which had second hand books for sale very cheaply. I bought eight. Another stall was advising people on the advantages of e-readers and had a Kindle and a Kobo to show people. After talking to the lady on the stall I’m finally thinking seriously about getting one.

My entry ticket which cost £1 included a free drink, so I had a bowl of broccoli soup and then indulged in a piece of banana cake with my free coffee. There were tables and chairs set out in the middle of the room so I was able to sit with food and coffee and peruse my new books. 

At 3pm I went to another hall a couple of minutes away for the talk. I think most of the talks had been quite poorly attended, but Booth’s talk had about 40 people in the audience. As the hall was only small this was quite a lot. He talked for the best part of an hour and it was really interesting. He spoke about how he decides on the locations for his books (the 12th is coming out in June) and why he has a mix of real and fictional places. He realised quite early on that the locations were really important to his readers and that many readers try to work out either where the places are that the fictional places are based on or where the places are that he only vaguely refers to and doesn’t actually name. He gets lots of emails from readers who go to specific places just because they are in the books. 

I can understand this. Although I wouldn’t go out of my way to look for a telephone box just because it had been mentioned in a book (as one reader did), if I was near that telephone box and someone pointed it out to me, I’d be quite interested and would probably take a photo. 

All in all it was quite an interesting talk and I was glad I’d made the effort to go.

Silent Spring

It’s the golden anniversary of a book that was one of the most influential of its time.

By Rachel Carson

I first came across this book more than 10 years ago when I read a mention of it in a friend’s Open University course materials. It was suggested background reading for a course on the ’60s. It went onto my reading wish list but I only got round to getting myself a copy recently. This year celebrates 50 years since it was published, so I suppose it’s as good a time as any to read it. Unintentionally it was actually quite appropriate to be reading it in Germany as the Germans got more than a few mentions.

This book was the first of its kind – a real wake-up call to society, pointing out the issues and problems caused by a fast-growing reliance on pesticides. It was highly influential in the fledgling environmental movement and really makes me wonder how ‘green’ conscious we would all be today if Carson hadn’t written this book. It probably helped that the ’60s was also the era of the hippie and a book like this would have fitted right in with hippie culture.

Carson, chapter by chapter, talks us through the different pesticides; how and why they were invented, how they may have seemed to work at first, but how the ‘pests’ they were supposed to kill soon adapted and become resistant. A real example of Darwin’s survival of the fittest and evolution in action.

She points out how many unintended species had their populations decimated and in some cases were completely wiped out. As many of these species of insect, bird or fish are either a food source to ourselves or are natural predators to the ‘pests’ this was disastrous. The pesticides also had a detrimental effect on human life causing health problems and even death to many people who were exposed to them.

Many of the pesticides seem to have been invented by Germans. The irony of how they are now one of the most environmentally conscious nations on the planet was not lost on me. I did wonder why though – is it because they had pesticides before anyone else, did the damage before anyone else, and so got cleaning up before anyone else? Or is it because they feel guilty? Or do I need to be more cynical? They were the forerunners in producing the pesticides and so made lots of money from them. Now they’re the forerunners in cleaning up the mess (they sell a lot of solutions apparently), so they’re still making lots of money.

Reading the book you wonder how people could have been so stupid. ‘This pesticide we tried has killed lots of fish we used to like to eat and harmed a lot of people and the insects are still as abundant as ever. What shall we do? Oh, I know, let’s use an even bigger dose of pesticide’. But of course it still goes on. Do we never learn?

As an alternative to pesticides Carson proposes importing natural predators, but with hindsight is this a good idea? Could the imported predators create problems of their own?

The book starts to seem a bit repetitive after a while, but then I’m used to hearing this. At the time of writing it was something completely new. It was revolutionary in its time and changed the way people thought. That we take the environmental movement for granted now and use words like ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘green’ as part of our normal vocabulary is a measure of it’s impact.

Carson was trained as a scientist and researched many scientific papers for this book. However, it is written in a way easily understandable to a layman, which of course helped it become so popular. After researching and writing about cancer inducing pesticides and chemicals it is another irony that she died from cancer in 1964 a mere two years after publication. How sad that she never got to see the impact her work has had on the world.

The Killer’s Guide to Reykjavik

This novel set in Iceland doubles as a guide to the country.

This is another book that I read around the time I was last in Iceland. Here’s the review I wrote of it at the time.

by Zane Radcliffe


This is the first of Zane Radcliffe’s books I’ve read. I enjoyed it so much I immediately ordered his other two off Amazon.


The main character Callum is a successful Glaswegian internet entrepeneur. He sells his travel website and moves to Reykjavik to live with his Icelandic girlfriend, her daughter and mother. Both Callum and his girlfriend Birna have skeletons in their respective closets which lead to Birna’s daughter being kidnapped and/or killed (I’m trying not to give too much away).


As well as a great story the book really is a ‘guide to Iceland’. Radcliffe interweaves numerous facts and lots of information about Icelandic culture, geography, food, beliefs and so on into his story. If I’d read this book before visiting Iceland the storyline would have stood out much more than the guide part of the book. But having spent a month there last summer I can really appreciate just how much information he has melded seamlessly within the story.



Get more information on the book and the author here.

Lonely Planet vs Rough Guides (Iceland)

A comparative review of the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet guides to Iceland.

June 2010

I bought the latest Rough Guide to use as a guide book for Iceland on this trip. I was only going to Reykjavik which I already know quite well and so didn’t really need a guide book, but I never need much of an excuse to buy books.

I chose the Rough Guide as it was more up-to-date than the Lonely Planet (ok, only by a month which probably makes no difference at all) and I’d used the Lonely Planet last time and fancied a change. Whilst in Reykjavik I looked at other people’s copies of the more recent Lonely Planet.

I usually like Rough Guides, but have to say that I wasn’t too impressed with this one. It seemed to be lacking information. Places I knew were in the Lonely Planet and just wanted to check my book for the address, couldn’t be found in the Rough Guide. This would have been ok if there’d been alternative places in the Rough Guide, but there didn’t seem to be. Also I noticed a few mistakes. For example, the Rough Guide refers to the Downtown Hostel as the City Hostel, and the City Hostel as the Reykjavik Hostel.

2007
May 2010

When I looked at the more recent Lonely Planet it seemed just as good as the older one I had at home. I didn’t need to use the Rough Guide for travelling around the country, but my impression is that it wouldn’t have been as good as the Lonely Planet for this either. So it’s not that the lesser Reykjavik section is balanced out by a much meatier rest of the country section.

But the best guide book for Reykjavik has to be The Real Iceland by Pall Asgeir Asgeirsson. I bought this whilst I was in Iceland last time and it has lots of quirky information in it, such as the addresses for each of the Sigur Ros band members and the address for Bjork’s mum (as well as for Bjork herself, but it warns her son can be bad-tempered if you turn up on the doorstep). It’s only a slim little book (so nice and light to carry around) but is really informative and I’d highly recommend anyone heading to Reykjavik to get hold of a copy.

Independent People

Laxness is Iceland’s Dickens or Tolstoy. This is a wonderful saga-like tale set in Iceland at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

I read this book whilst I was in Iceland the first time and wrote the review shortly afterwards. I thought I’d include it here as I visited Laxness’ house on this trip and it made quite an impression on me. I’ll write about the house later.

By Halldor Laxness

Laxness is Iceland’s Dickens or Tolstoy. This is a wonderful saga-like tale set in Iceland at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
 
Bjartur is a sheep farmer trying to make it as an independent man. Life throws everything possible at him, including demons and his stubborn pride, but he almost makes it. By the end of the story he has lost the little he had and is back to working for others for a living. Reading this story in the year or so after the Icelandic financial crisis I wondered how many Icelanders had actually read this most well-known novel from their most well-known writer. Surely if they had the crisis would have been averted as it seemed to have been caused by the same mistakes that caused the crisis for those trying to be independent in Iceland over 100 years ago.
 
Laxness is so convincing with his descriptions and setting of the scene that I frequently looked up from this book only to be surprised that I wasn’t actually in the middle of nowhere on an Icelandic farm. Bjartur is such a convincing character that I wanted to strangle him at times (metaphorically speaking of course) for his stubborness. But at the same time I could understand his reasoning and his reluctance to give even an inch of his hard fought for independence away.



When Bjartur meets with other male characters the long conversations that ensue veer from poetry, sheep and politics to their ideas of what is happening in the Great War that is engulfing the rest of Europe and how wonderful this war is for them. Suddenly everyone wants to buy their sheep and prices have soared. They wish for the war to never end. These conversations give wonderful insights into the lives of people at this time, the things that were important to them and their interpretations of the world around them.

At Home

Now I know what was happening when my houses were built.

By Bill Bryson

As I didn’t have to be in work till 11 o’clock this morning I stayed in bed with a cup of coffee and finally finished the book I’d started when I went to Norfolk. It’s taken me a while as it’s so chunky – 632 pages of text and another 70 pages of bibliography and indexing.

I chose to read this book in Norfolk as it was the only book I could find with a Norfolk connection, albeit a bit of a tenuous one. Bill Bryson lived in the UK for years with his English family before returning to the States for a few years. When he came back to the UK he moved to Norfolk and bought an old rectory. The rectory was built in 1851 which I think is the year my houses were built.

Bryson became interested in the history of his house and using each room as a starting point ended up writing what seems to be an all-encompassing social history. He discusses the history of servants, food, clothing, childhood, sex, comfort and luxury, hygiene, plants, science, and so on and so on. He sets the scene by referring to events going on at the time his house (and so my houses too) was built. The Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace was in 1851. This was also the time that Darwin was first finding fame (with a large and detailed book on barnacles) and the year that Moby Dick was published.

Bryson lives up to his usual standard of writing an easy to read, page-turner of a book that is informative and engaging and full of facts about the evolution of everyday products that I’ve always taken for granted and didn’t know I needed informing about. The book is injected with light humour, but finished with a detailed bibliography for those who want to take it all more seriously and maybe do some further reading on a particular topic.

The Blood of Flowers

A wonderful depiction of life in 17th century Iran.

By Anita Amirrezvani

The un-named narrator is a a girl in her early teens. She lives a contented life with her parents in a small village in rural Iran. The unexpected death of her father leads to severe poverty for her and her mother and they take the decision to travel through the desert to Isfahan in the hope that relatives will care for them. Although the relatives take them in they are treated as servants rather than family and feel powerless to change their situation. The narrator has always been interested in making carpets and as luck would have it her uncle is a well-known carpet maker. He sees her interest and recognises her skill and so becomes her teacher and mentor. At the same time as learning to design and knot carpets and working as a servant, her aunt and uncle arrange a sigheh for her. She spends many nights as a rich man’s concubine and is often completely exhuasted. Eventually she ends the sigheh and is thrown out of her uncle’s home. Both she and her mother now have to fend for themselves and find themselves in their worst situation yet. Through her resiliance and carpet making skills the narrator manages to begin building a new and independent life for herself and her mother.

I found Amirrezvani’s depiction of 17th century life in Iran fascinating and her descriptions of Isfahan make me even more desperate to get there than I already was. Iran has interested me for a long time and I wrote my Master’s disertation on the practice of temporary marriage (known as sigheh or muta). This is the first novel I’ve read that features this practice and this made it all the more interesting for me.

I almost got to Iran last year, but it fell through at the last minute and I had to make alternative holiday plans. This book has brought it to the forefront of my mind again and inpired me to have another go at getting there.

Thinking about reading

Deciding what books to take to Shetland

It’s not long now until I head up to Scotland for my summer holiday. I’ll spend the first week walking the Great Glen Way and then catch the ferry from Aberdeen to Shetland and spend the next 3 weeks there. I’m so busy at the moment trying to get everything at school organised for next year, plus completing my web design course and trying to work on the post grad course, and sorting out umpteen things that keep going wrong in my house and with my car, that I’ve barely had time to think about the summer and plan for my holiday. Luckily, I’ve been to Shetland before so I don’t have to do too much planning for that, but I do still have some things to think about. One of which is deciding what books to take with me.

I’ll be in my car, so for most of time I can carry a good selection. When I’m walking the Great Glen Way though, I want to keep my weight down as much as possible and get rid of things as I go, so I’ll probably just take a selection of magazines and as I read them I can rip out the pages and throw them away.

But what books to take …

Usually I like to read books either by authors from the place where I am or else set in or about the place. Last year I read a lot of books with a Shetland theme, so I don’t have that many left to read. So I have to decide whether to read books –

  • about Scotland in general
  • about wildlife
  • that I’ve started in the past and never got round to finishing
  • from the BBC Big Read list
  • to do with my studies
  • that I think I should have read but haven’t yet.

Maybe I’ll just take a few from each category and then I can decide what I feel like when I’m there.