I have a bad habit of starting three or four books at the same time. The variety part is good, but I think it fosters short attention span; one chapter of this, one chapter of that, then a little of something else.
But I keep doing it, and I guess it’s not too dissimilar from the way I eat my dinner. A bite of this, a bite of that, then a few tastes of something else. It works.
Right now I’m reading:
Mara Daughter of the Nile, by Eloise Jarvis McGraw. This is a historical adventure/romance set in ancient Egypt. One of my first loves. I have read it nearly a dozen times. I’m currently writing a blog post about all the hundred reasons I love it, and my near-blindness to it’s flaws (such as the really excessive use of the word ‘beribboned.’)
A Natural History of Dragons, by Marie Brennan. This is just good Victorian-flavored, Dragon-infused fun. It’s the memoir of famous dragon naturalist Lady Trent, beginning with her interest in bird skeletal structure, her penchant for collecting, preserving, and categorizing ‘sparklings’ (teensy pest-sized dragons), and leading to her determination to seek out and study dragons in the wild. There are lovely illustrations, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it.
Refusenik, by Mark Ya Azbel. Non-fiction account of the author’s life and experiences in the Soviet Union as a ‘refusenik.’ A refusenik is someone who tried to emigrate, but were ‘refused’ by the Soviet government. Most typically this refers to Jewish citizens, as it does in this book. Persecutions often followed if one persisted attempts to emigrate, or protested repeated denials.
The author did make it out of the Soviet Union, so he was able to write this book. What is interesting to me is the timing of the book’s publication. 1987. The book has tremendous value and relevance (this I can already tell from the first 40-some pages), but since it was published so shortly before the fall of the USSR, I imagine it fell off the radar. Accounts of Soviet atrocities, suppression, and propaganda are just as relevant today as they were then.
ALSO, I got a few new books over the past couple of weeks, each a special little thrill to my soul. Each is a sort of purposeful adventure; you’ll see what I mean.
The first was “The Golden Carpet” by Somerset De Chair. This book is, I believe, long out of print. In fact, if I’m not mistaken, I think it went out of print promptly after it was published, in 1945. Luckily, the edition I found is not one of the highly sought after special copies (which sell for $100 or more!!) and I was able to acquire it.
This book is something of a curiosity. It was written by a British Army officer and is an account of the Anglo-Iraqi war, a campaign which occurred during WWII when the Iraqi government (following a coup led by Rashid Ali) refused to break ties with the fascist governments against which Britain was fighting. Fearing that Iraq would become a base of Nazi operations in the region, Britain returned to Iraq (which they had essentially vacated by 1937) to secure the area for the allied cause and re-install a pro-British government.
The specific interest for me is that first-hand accounts of this war are a bit hard to come by and I am hoping it will give me at least some account of the duties and experiences of the Iraq Levies.
The Iraq Levies are a strange bit of history unto themselves, one that is a bit tricky to explain if one has no background in modern Iraqi history. During the British mandate in Iraq, the British trained and maintained local troops which became known as the Iraq Levies. This was initially something of a scout system, starting during WWI, and at a certain time consisted of a fairly wide variety of ethnicities and religious groups. At the outset, there were Arabs, Kurds and Turkomani people in the Levies, but when the actual Iraqi Army began to take form most of these, naturally, became part of the national army.
Nevertheless the Levies remained, and came to be dominated by an ethnic and religious minority, the Assyrians, although a few other minorities still made up a portion of their number.
The Assyrian minority has a complex history, in some ways parallel to the better-known Kurdish situation, and in others rather more akin to the Jewish Iraqi experience prior to the late 1940’s. Regardless it’s a history I want to study further and I’ll take any first-hand accounts I can get. I do suspect that if this book were of stronger literary and historical value, it might have run quite a few more printings, might even be in print today. But I’m excited to see what it has to offer nonetheless. I’m not in an academic context and I don’t have all those delicious historical journals to draw from. I must be creative.
The next book I got was Dear Martin, by Nic Stone. I actually heard about this book a long time ago, not long after I was in the querying trenches. The author had signed with an agent that I had also intended to query, so I followed her. I started to hear about her book and I thought the premise sounded really good:
A young black man named Justyce who goes to a fancy prep school has a bad encounter with a cop, who profiles him and mistreats him. Justyce wants to be like MLK so he tries to process his experiences through that lens (hence, ‘Dear Martin’), but he struggles and becomes increasingly discouraged as he encounters (and becomes aware of) more and more issues.
Yeah I was just going to “read a couple pages to get a feel for it” because I had other books at the front of the line. No dice. Blazed through this book. I had a few small quibbles, but I am so glad I read it and I certainly recommend it. I may go into a bit more detail at my end-of-year reading round-up.
The third book I got is called Salt, by Mark Kurlansky.
Few words in any language thrill me as much as the word ‘salt.’ Salt is a background theme of my book and my favorite candidate for a “literalized metaphor” as author and translator Ken Liu put it.
Salt has the best and most versatile metaphors! I have such a visceral reaction to that word and it’s meaning, purpose, and history. “Salted with fire.” “Salt of the earth.” “Worth your salt.” “Take with a grain of salt.” “Salt in the wound.” “Salt and light.”
So there’s a whole book about the history and meaning of salt??!?! Yes, please, and thank you.
J. L. Odom 