Sunday, April 17, 2005

Saturday is Guardian Review day

Yesterday's Guardian Review happened to serendipitously coincide with the launch of Chaikhana, a new cyber literary group that I was invited to join with the endearing

You've passed a rigorous selection process and been specially selected to join Chaikhana! Umm, well I mean at some point you happen to have read a book I've also read... and this has resulted in this dubious honour...Inspired partly by the chaikhane in the Si o Seh Bridge in Esfahan, Iran, this tea house could equally be anywhere else between the Bosphorus and the Ganges ... When I read a good book, I wish that life were three thousand years long ~ courtesy Waterstones bookmarks
So by way of inauguration, this week's Review features a glance at the second installment, The Hall of a Thousand Columns, of Tim Mackintosh-Smith's wonderful series following in the footnotes (and literal footsteps) of Ibn Batuttah the great medieval Tangerine traveler; Samir El-youssef, co-author of Gaza Blues, muses on attempts to explain what turns people into suicide bombers; Kamila Shamsie's Broken Verses is placed under the electron microscope AND most intriguingly, Tarquin Hall (a self-confessed public schoolboy coming from a family with middle-class habits) has his Salaam Brick Lane: A Year in the New East End feted as 'charming, brilliant, affectionate and quietly impassioned'. Here's an apertif:

Mr Ali, however, is the star turn; an anti-hero who shovels himself full of halal fried chicken while Inland Revenue envelopes pile up unopened in his shambolic office, he is the ultimate cockney Muslim, announcing the message of his faith: "The Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon 'im, yeah, 'e said, 'Be a worker; don't sit around on your arse, innit.'"

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