Emory > Recent Status Updates

The Canterbury Tales style storytelling is pretty cool for story exposition within the larger framework. I definitely find myself wanting the individual stories to be closer together within the encompassing narrative, though.

Liking this a lot. Not only am I enjoying the stated topic - why Islam should return to the Quran as the sole religious guide to repair some of the damage from the hadith (oral tradition, although it's been written down by now) - but I'm learning a lot I didn't know about Islam itself, which I think is important.

This will certainly be kind of slow going, but partly because I keep writing down my own thoughts. Plus the forward and preface were another 19 pages - really, I've read 31 pages. So there.

Too much for this box, but I feel like I need to pick up an atlas of the world and read the history of all the different places, then talk to people, then start again because it will all be different...the parts in the US, I can recognize the setting even as I realize that we do really weird things. But others? I feel like I have no idea what's going on in the world around me...

So far, not too impressed. The characters are pretty 2-D and I'm having trouble keeping track of them all. This mostly seems like a thinly veiled way of saying the neo-con/Tea Party/libertarian movement is dogmatic, illogical, can't actually support their views in a discussion, can't deal with a crisis, are crazy, and tonight, Pinky, want to take over the world with a pack of thugs.

I take back most of my last comment - I wandered into an interview with Intisar where she mentioned that the book is based on the fairy tale (Grimm's) of the Goose Girl. Falada's comments throughout the book, especially the early bits, definitely fit the fairy tale...feel to a story is the best word, I think.

Only problems are a couple spots where I couldn't find something referenced earlier, ie cloak loss.

Absolutely loving the book so far. In a few places, the story seems a bit like it got stuck and Falada was used to move it along (always handy to have the wise companion animal who pushes the heroine in the direction she needs to go), but it's not nearly as bad as many of the instances I've seen of this, especially in an author's first book.