Book shopping!

My Half-Price Book finds for today:




Lipstick Jihad by Azadeh Moaveni, which is a memoir of growing up in an Iranian diaspora community in the U.S., and also moving back to Iran as an American.

The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad, which I talked about in this post.

Kabul Beauty School by Deborah Rodriguez, about an American woman who helps women in Afghanistan by opening a cosmetology school and allowing Afghanistan's women to become breadwinners for the family.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, a memoir about teaching Western literature to Iranian women.

The Solitude of Self by Vivian Gornick, a short reflection on Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who fought against slavery, pushed for women's suffrage in the mid-1850s, and then finally took on the power of the church. Awesome much?

I have also been trying out Swap Tree, which I have enjoyed thoroughly. This week I traded Faust and The Member of the Wedding from a comparative studies class I took last quarter. In return, I received:


Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, is on the Oprah's Book Club list, which is good enough for me.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, about an autistic kid who doesn't understand human emotions, and is initially blamed for the death of a neighbor's dog.

Cody's finds for today:



Moby Dick by Herman Melville, you know.

Black Hole by Charles Burns, because it's my favourite graphic novel! Totally creepy, it's about a mysterious STD that's being passed around at a Washington-area high school in the 70's.

Spring break reading.

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene had a lot of grand themes, like love, hate, and God, but it actually wasn't that good. Mostly it was about loss and hatred, but it did have a few very lovely redeeming parts. I guess books written almost entirely about hate and jealousy aren't really worthwhile reading to me.

I'm endlessly interested in Middle Eastern culture, so The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad was a natural read. Although the translation was a little lacking, it was still a really interesting portrait of a family living in Kabul. Mostly it was written about events that occurred in the everyday happenings of a Islamic family, but it was over much too soon. Once you were completely involved in the family's life, it was time for the epilogue.

Mmm, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Dad sent me a suggested reading list a few years ago with this novel on it, but I never got around to reading it until now. I know it's a classic, and it's a classic for a reason, but I was completely blown away nonetheless. It all tied up so neatly and I just loved everything about it. It is, on the surface, about war, but it is about so much more, encompassing the past, present, and future in Billy Pilgrim's life. For a while after reading it, I was echoing Vonnegut by finishing thoughts with, "So it goes." Fantastic.

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang also blew me away. Mostly because I began to realize how very little I was taught about the Pacific limb of World War II in school. The Japanese invasion of the Chinese city of Nanking (at the time the capital of China) was incredibly brutal and devastating. Well-known German Nazis who were in Nanking at the time of the invasion wrote to Hitler, horrified by how terrible the events were. However, after WWII, China became communist which is apparently worse than fascism or something, because many of the Japanese war criminals associated with the Nanking massacre were let go, and even today in Japan, it is known not as the Nanking Rape or Massacre, but as the Nanking "Incident." Yikes.