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. 

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.)