Any book that has been banned has to be good, right?!

It definitely was a good read, lifting the veil (so to speak) on modern life in Egypt. Like any repressive society, Egyptians prefer to keep their "dirty laundry" (homosexuality, corruption, promiscuity, harassment, terrorism, etc.) hidden. The book reveals what most students of modern Middle Eastern regimes know; neglect the people and they will resort to various means to either eke out a living, or make sense of their predicament. Some work within the system, tweaking the laws to survive, others go outside of it.

I've put it on my list. I love banned books.

We just loved The Dog Stars, hermetic.

This past week I read Safe From the Sea by Peter Geye. I was deeply involved with the people inhabiting this book. Very moving. Just wonderful. Thank you, scarletwoman, for calling Safe From the Sea to our attention.

Now I'm reading River Thieves by Michael Crummy. You might remember that Michael is the author of the wonderful Sweetland which several of us read. River Thieves is another historical fiction novel, just the sort that captures my imagination. So far so good.

This past week Mrs. Enthusiast read Wilderness by Lance Weller. We both liked this one very much. Thank you, japple. Now she's reading The Wailing Wind by Tony Hillerman. She is flying through this one as she does all the Tony Hillerman books.

I thought it was something very special.

I hope to get around to reading River Thieves eventually, but if you read my post #5 below, you'll see that I'll be spending time (figuratively, not literally) in Tibet for awhile.

Hope you liked it. Glad you liked it and Wilderness, Mr. & Ms. Enthusiast. I am still struggling through River Thieves but haven't been able to do it justice. Being out of town for a week and also having lots of volunteer work to do, I haven't had time to devote to reading and River Thieves does take a fair amount of concentration. While on vacation, I borrowed a book list from a friend and added a few to my own.

Jim Shepard - Book of Aron
James Hannaham - Delicious Foods
Jeffrey Lent - A Slant of Light (have read In the Fall and A Peculiar Grace by this author and liked both books very much.)
Paulo Bacigalupi - Water Knife

I started out with good intentions yesterday, but somehow never made it over here to start the weekly thread. I was having an absolutely miserable day - high heat, high humidity, sick dog, and so much smoke in the air coming down from the Canadian wildfires that it was hard to breathe. I was definitely not in a good mood.

As I said last week, I haven't had much time to read lately. The last time I checked in and actually talked about a book I was reading was on June 7 - I was about to start reading book #10 - Six and a half Deadly Sins - of Colin Cotterill's Dr. Siri Paiboun mystery series, set in 1970s Laos. I love this series, and this latest entry did not disappoint. Not heavy, not deep, but the characters are so delightful, the plots so convoluted, and the political and cultural background so intriguing, that these books are wonderfully satisfying. They are so very human, and written with such love for the characters, that reading them has never failed to leave my heart and soul lighter.

I next read a relatively newly published book that had popped up as a GoodReads recommendation, The Ice Twins, by S.K. Tremayne - a pseudonym for a supposedly well-known author. It was described as a "psychological thriller", and I suppose it was, but I was not particularly impressed. It was dark and weird, but by the time I got to the end I just felt like it was rather pointless. The setting had some promise - a tiny island off the coast of Scotland in the region of the Hebrides - but aside from providing a certain amount of isolation, one didn't get much of a feel for that part of the world. The plot felt contrived and it is not a book I would recommend.

My next pick was more satisfying, Elizabeth is Missing, a first book by a new British author, Emma Healey. The narrator is a woman in her 80s who is gradually succumbing to dementia. I was very impressed with the writing, you find yourself inside a mind that is no longer capable of holding a thought or a memory of what happened just a minute before - yet older memories rise to the surface in great detail. It's something of a murder mystery as well, but the reader only gradually realizes that there was a crime committed over 60 years ago because of the unreliability of the narrator's memory and her totally fragmented train of thought. Really well done, if rather sad. I would recommend this one for the quality of the writing, the uniqueness of the story, and the beautifully-drawn character of the elderly woman struggling to keep as many of her wits about her as she could, even as her mind was deteriorating.

Meantime, two books that had been on order at my library for months both came in while I was reading the Emma Healey book: Gathering Prey by John Sandford, and Buried Angels by Swedish author, Camilla Läckberg. Both books are the latest in each author's respective series.

I was still in a somewhat melancholy mood from the previous book, so I decided to set the Sandford book aside - it's #25 of his Lucas Davenport series, and having read every entry in this series, I knew it was going to be full of blood and violence and I just wasn't in the mood for that. So I started in on the Läckberg book instead. It's #9 of her Detective Patrik Hedstrom series - I've read all of them, as well.

This series is set in a coastal area in the south of Sweden. While Läckberg isn't among my very favorite Scandinavian mystery writers, her books up to now have been serviceable and interesting, and generally entertaining reads. This one just didn't do it for me. Some of the plot elements seemed utterly ridiculous, and it felt like she had grabbed a bunch of different story line fragments and decided to just mash them all together into one book. It was sadly disappointing. And by the time I had finished slogging through this one, the Sandford book was due back at the library - I returned it unread, maybe I'll put in an order for it somewhere down the line.

Which brings me up to today. I've had my eye on a completely new (to me) crime/mystery series for awhile, and just started on book #1, The Skull Mantra. I think I'm going to like these. The author is Eliot Pattison, and the series is Inspector Shan. They are set in Tibet, and Inspector Shan is a former Chinese official who fell into disfavor and was sentenced to hard labor in a Tibetan province where he is held in a prison camp with a number of Tibetan monks. There are 8 books in this series, so far, spanning the years from 1998 to 2014. The author writes with great sympathy for the fate of the Tibetan people under Chinese rule - which is where my own sympathies lie as well. I believe I will be very happy that I've taken on this series.

I didn't know you had a dog. I hope the dog feels better now. I hope you are alright too. [url=http://www.freesmileys.org/emoticons.php][img][/img][/url]

I did not know there was a new John Sandford book. We are crazy about John Sandford. Mrs. Enthusiast will put in a request for Gathering Prey tomorrow. There is always a long waiting list for a new John Sandford book.

I ordered a used copy of the first book in the Dr. Siri Paiboun series by Colin Cotterill.

I'm interested to hear more about the Inspector Shan series. Tibet! Just imagine.

the heat and the smoke as I was.

I hope you enjoy meeting Dr. Siri! I'm betting that you'll find him as delightful as I do.

As for the Inspector Shan series, I will definitely post more as I get farther into it. I have a great love of Tibet - although I've never been there, I've studied Tibetan Buddhism with several Tibetan Lamas, and many years ago spent a few weeks in Nepal, where there is a considerable Tibetan presence. I've been a long time donator to Free Tibet as well. My heart breaks for the cultural genocide that the Chinese have inflicted on the Tibetan people.

I do not understand the Chinese motives. They should just give Tibet full autonomy and forget it. Maybe it is actually about competition with India? I can't see what they hope to gain from controlling Tibet.

Well, as I have gotten past the first two parts of Joseph and His Brothers, I have come to discover the influence of Gnosticism (and its place in literature) on Thomas Mann and his work. So now I'm having to read more on the history of Gnosticism and the way Mann deals with it as first he presents one view of the process in Joseph and then inverts it in Doctor Faustus, which I will read next.

This is also taking me down the road of theosophy and Theosophy (yes there's a crazy distinction here), the occult, the I Ching, the Tarot, hermeticism, etc. It's also moved me towards the poetry of Yeats, Eliot, and Auden. Looking more deeply into Eliot and Auden has been very rewarding. I hadn't quite realized what a great poet Auden was, though I always appreciated some of his work to some extent. As for Ezra Pound, I can't get past his rather unpoetic and oppressive system of poetics which takes what I consider the poetry out of poetry, although I can appreciate his emphasis on imagery and the concrete as opposed to the abstract. The power of the language really is in the image, though for poetry it's also in the metrical numbers and other devices as well. Much of this has been lost due to Pound's influence, and obviously not for the better.

I'm also looking into Mythopoesis in regard to Mann's work.

Anyway, I am open to suggestions on where to go for more on Gnosticism and its place in literature.

Thanks in advance,
ananda

You are delving into some heady stuff there. I haven't done any esoteric reading for over 20 years now so I have only two suggestions. Valis by Philip K. Dick, which I vaguely recall. And join GoodReads dot com. It's free. Put Gnosticism into the Genre search box and you will find many books. Well, a dozen anyway.

Do stop in again and let us know how your search is going.