I just finished this book two days ago. I bought it right before I went to Istanbul, breaking my own book-buying moratorium. (I have 10+ books that I’ve bought or have been given to me that I haven’t read yet.) It was very interesting, and in a lot of ways was an impressionist painting of the city of Istanbul. My main problem with it? It doesn’t have much of a narrative or momentum. It’s a series of varying length mini-essays about various aspects of the author’s life growing up in Istanbul, in roughly chronological order. Overall very good, but sometimes slow.
MeFi points out that Orhan Pamuk’s trial will begin in about two weeks for making comments to a Swiss newspaper about the Armenian and Kurdish genocides that were perpetrated by the Ottoman government in the early 20th century.
I also finished John Battelle’s The Search yesterday. The last chapter on IBM’s research on search is pretty amazing — it’s verging on Star Trek level complexity.
I’m going to start The Ends of the Earth : From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran to Cambodia, a Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy on the BART ride home today. Can’t wait.
In other news from the literary world, my good buddy David Boyk is reading Genghis Khan and the making of the Modern World. Moral of the story? Genghis (CHING-iss) was the ultimate badass baller that ever lived.
