Reading Journal: Summary for remainder of Week 4 2010

And so a new month commences and it always feels like a fresh new beginning to me – a slate wiped clean, new reading prospects laying ahead. But before I move on to those new reading prospects myself, I need to finish talking about the old ones first . Thankfully (for you and for me) this summary of the final few days of last week isn’t lengthy, partly because I kept up with my reading journal entries for the most part last week (yay!), and partly because my focus for what little reading time I had, remained on just the one book.

The book of course was Kader Abdolah’s The House of the Mosque (Canongate). and despite dedicating all of my reading time to it at the weekend I’m only up to page 242 of 436. Does that mean I’m finding the book boring or difficult to read? Absolutely not! So far Abdolah’s incredible novel has given me a wonderful, wonderful reading experience; one which I’ll remember for a long time to come. Never let it be said fellow readers that a novel based around the Iranian Revolution and beyond can be anything but dull and labourious, because so far I couldn’t be more taken with the book. The intermingling of fact, fable, Qur’anic verse and contemporary Iranian poetry is simply stunning. Yep, that’s right folks, the world’s biggest poetry hater (possibly), has found something he likes for once . Hopefully this flicker of poetry love will continue to the end. The reading continues…

::Monday’s reading plans::

• It’s Monday so a dose of Maupassant awaits. Normally I try to tick off a pair of stories on a single day, but the one I’ve got lined up, A Family Life (which again comes from the Oxford University Press collection, A Day in the Country and Other Stories), is rather long at 29 pages. So I’m only going to schedule one Maupassant short for myself today.
• Well, I’m nearing the end of my journey with Arthur Miller’s Presence: Collected Stories (Bloomsbury). Up today is the third last story in the assembled collection, The Last Manuscript. Goodness knows what to expect, but I’ll be finding out soon enough.
• Hopefully I’ll get around to reading another 100 pages Kader Abdolah’s The House of the Mosque.

‘Reading Journal’ provides an unedited, on-the-fly record of the bookish highlights in Rob’s reading day.