After-India, Pre-Sri Lanka Syllabus

We're back from India, and we're behind on our reading. City of Djinns by William Dalrymple got us hooked on all things Delhi, Mughal, or otherwise tinged with red stones and political intrigue. The stack of books worth reading keeps growing. Here's our list so far.

India
City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, William Dalrymple.
    Dalrymple chronicles a year in Delhi, as he pieces together the history of the buildings and world       around him. (Also on our long-term list, Dalyrmple's White Mughals and The Last Mughal.)

Slowly Down the Ganges, Eric Newby.
     A wonderfully comic account of a boat trip down the Ganges River, a long-time dream of ex-              fashion-designer Newby. Margaret has been going slowly through the book -- it's fun to pick up  
     every few months to watch Newby inch through India, one scraped boat-bottom at a time.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Katherine Boo.
     Boo spent three years in a slum in Mumbai to research & write her non-fictional account. It's
     beloved by book clubs the world over, and -- better still -- friends recommended it. We haven't
     started yet, but soon....

And fiction, you ask? We should reread Rushdie, try out some more V.S. Naipaul, and crack open Amitav Ghosh's lightly fictionalized account of an Indian slave in the Middle East in the twelfth century, In an Antique Land. Nick should probably finish Gora. We'll get to it. But we're also headed to Sri Lanka soon....


Sri LankaRunning in the Family, Michael Ondaatje.
   Ondaatje visits Sri Lanka, and traces his Dutch-Celanese heritage.

A History of  Sri Lanka, K.M. de Silva.
   The standard history of Sri Lanka. At 780+ pages, we might skip around.

The Cage: The Fight for Sri Lanka and the Last Days of the Tamil Tigers, Gordon Weiss.
   An account of the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict, lauded by the Economist as "scrupulously fair." We're      halfway through, and it's a tough and sad read. 

Sweden & Scotland Reading Lists

Sweden

Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796). Full of interesting observations (one, "it may be delivered as an axiom, that it is only in proportion to the industry necessary to acquire wealth that a nation is really benefited by it," might resonate with Abu Dhabi residents). 

Selma Lagerlof. The Saga of Gosta Berling. First woman to win a Nobel for literature. 

Tomas Tranströmer The Great Enigma: New Collected Poems (contains his 1954 17 Poems, for which he won the 2011 Nobel). 

Stieg Larson. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Perfect plane reading....we can find out what all the fuss was about. Henning Mankell is also on the list, should we run out of material. 

Scotland

Samuel Johnson. Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775).  

James Boswell. The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785). Yes, these are straight off of Margaret's lists for oral exams. Did she read it then? She can't remember. Will she read it now? Definitely.

Robert Burns, Complete Poems (includes his 1786 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect).

All things Walter Scott. All things. But perhaps his 1802 - 1803 The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border is best for evening reading, and lolling beside lochs, and huddling over tea to avoid summer rain. And John G. Lockhart's Memoirs of the Life of Walter Scott (first published 1837 - 38) - but very selectively. There are ten volumes -- that's at least nine too many, for carrying purposes -- in the second edition.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped (1886). Loads of Scottish landscapes, and loads more adventure. 

And tour books, but we haven't got those yet. If we splurge, we will go with Eyewitness, as usual, but if we find extremely cheap, older guides in our favorite Abu Dhabi used bookstore, we may be tempted into roughing it with those. Suggestions -- on reading of any kind -- are very welcome. 

Our Rome Syllabus

We are getting ready for Christmas in Rome...and are planning our pre-travel reading, watching, and dining seriously. As all good courses begin, we begin ours with a syllabus.  

A Florence syllabus might be a bit ambitious (we have jobs and stuff), but we do want to read 

Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture. 

Selected reading:
Non-Fiction
Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (ambitious, but one of us definitely should have read it)
Goethe's Italian Journey (1786-1788). Massively popular account that popularized travel writing along with it.
Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad (1869). Since we want to know what Mark Twain has to say about everything, we'd better look into what he thinks about Italy. And travel. And everything.
Henry James' Italian Hours (1909). It's dubious, but it is said that Henry James actually warms up a bit in his travel descriptions. We'll believe it when we read it. 
DH Lawrence's Etruscan Places (1932). Lawrence visits Etruscan tombs and gets generally very excited.

Fiction

Edith Wharton's "Roman Fever" 

EM Forster's A Room with a View
Robert Graves' I Claudius.
         And fun to take along for the ride: A Literary Companion to Rome, by John Verriano.

Selected viewing
Obviously, Roman Holiday over and over and over. And Three Coins in the Fountain.
Felini's La Dolce Vita 
and

Rossellini's Open City

Listening

The History of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan (aired between 2007 and 2012, won several awards)

Eating/cooking

Marcella Hazan and Elizabeth David non-stop! (As soon as we have a functional kitchen.)