Persepolis

I think I'm on some strange Iranian/Middle Eastern kick with my reading right now, and it's not intentional. I started and finished Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis this weekend. Persepolis is a graphic novel dealing with Satrapi's experience of growing up in Iran from ages 10 through 14. Often funny and heartbreaking in the same page, it is an excellent work. This would be set in the early 80's, I believe.

This ties in with a book i finished a week or so ago, Reading Lolita in Tehran. While this is also non-fiction, this is completely different from Persepolis. Reading Lolita is a narrative written by Azar Nafisi and it focuses on Nafisi's teaching Western Litature in a time when possessing these materials is enough to be taken to jail and perhaps executed.

I'm on the hold list for Satrapi's Persepolis 2, which, logically, is the sequel to the original.

I'm currently reading Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner. I'm only 25 pages into it, so I have no idea what it's about. I saw it at Barnes and Nobles on a table with some good books and decided that I should read it. I reserved it at the library and here I am. The spine of the paperback has a blurb from Entertainment Weekly: "A moving portrait of modern Afghanistan". So, I'm still in the region, just a little farther East.

I don't think I have any Middle Eastern books on the way, but you never know.