I want to be a Good Person, who is Interested in the World, and Open to Learning, and it has always seemed to me that part of such a person is reading non-fiction books. Seems like the most expeditious way to learn more about cultures and science and phenomena of the political and social type and all. I get excited about the titles of non-fiction books. In college and law school I tended to check out large numbers of such books with interesting, challenging titles. And then those books would sit on the floor in piles while I read yet another novel.
So the same thing happened when I got to Nairobi. I raided the MBEA and MCC Kenya bookshelves and picked out books on the MauMau revolution and the upcoming Third World revolution and pastoralists and agriculture in Kenya. And I’ve ended up reading novels. Only a few African ones too, and I’m ashamed of that. Instead I’ve been escaping into snow-covered places, landscapes populated with revolutionaries and norse gods and anglican priests.
i recently picked back up one book (A Short History of Islam, by Karen Armstrong), continued reading in one book I borrowed from the MCC Uganda library in Kampala (Tales from a Thousand and One Nights), and chose another from the Guesthouse bookshelves on a whim (Snow, by Orhan Pamuk). For the last week I’ve skipped from the one to the other depending on my mood, and they are each really beautiful and together are even better. I got the Short History of Islam because I’d read a memoir of Karen Armstrong and since I’m even less likely to read a memoir than I am a non-fiction subject book, and because reading the memoir was an engrossing and moving experience, I figured maybe I could get myself to read a non-fiction book about something i really Want to Know about and really Don’t Know about if it was written by Armstrong. Turns out it isn’t helping me understand African islam particularly, but in general the world is making a whole lot more sense now. The role of belief and practice, of politics and history in the Muslim religion, the rise and fall of the communities - I don’t know, man, having a bit of a better understanding of helping give some sort of context to all sorts of things about life in the 21st century. It also helps interpret the 1001 nights and the Caliphs and prophets who populate the stories, and the expressions of faith and outlooks on life that make them so different from German märchen. And Armstrong’s telling of the secular and religious revolutions in the East are adding to the richness of Snow, a Turkish story in which Turkish secularists, Kurdish Islamic revolutionaries, religious high school youths, atheists, Socialists, Communists, and poets are engaged in a small revolution in a small snowbound city in Turkey.
(ps - the author of Snow, Orhan Pamuk, just won the Nobel Prize for Literature! I feel very cutting edge!)
# posted by debbyscott @ 5:12 PM
