Ripsnorting Reads Recommended by the Booklouse
October 5, 2009 by admin
Filed under Arts & Culture, Booklouse, Features
Image Credit: Illustration by Baldinger
My fellow insects,
Here are a couple of books that I thoroughly enjoyed reading and hopefully you will enjoy them too, as we cruise into the fall.
The Island by Victoria Hislop
This is a debut novel about a girl, Alexis, who is madly in love but at the same time wants to find out about her mysterious family history which mainly took place on the Greek island of Crete. Hislop has obviously done a great deal of research on the island of Crete and its much smaller offshore neighbour, Spinalonga, the once Greek leper colony.
This is a saga of ruined relationships, resurrected love affairs and a wonderful insight into the all too complex feelings of various family members over two generations. Hislop writes with true feelings for her characters, both from their points of view as well as her view through the sharp lens of history. There are absorbing comparisons made between the Cretan characters and those who have been cast out to the leper colony. It never fails to amaze me how history can still cause dramatic effects on later generations.
The British newspaper, the Observer, said of this book: “At last – a beach book with a heart.” Believe me, it reads just as well in front of a roaring fire with or without a glass of Domestica.
There is another very good book by her based on the Spanish civil war which I have just finished reading and I will be writing about in a later blog posting.
And now for a little non-fiction:
White Gold by Giles Milton
I have to confess that this is written by one of my favourite historians. This is the story of the more than one million slaves of Islam in the 18th century, and it centres around the history of a cabin boy named Thomas Pellow who was captured by the Barbary pirates in 1716. Milton used the published versions of Pellows diaries and notebooks and those of others, on which to base this factual history.
This book is an incredible account of a little known piece of history about white slaves under the Islamic regime of the sultans in Morocco in Africa. The sultan of the Imperial Moroccan court is a man who had 2000 horses in stables alongside his palace, where the horses could enjoy stained glass windows in their stables and crystal fountains in the stable yard. He had an army of some 10,000 men in the same palace that was surrounded by a wall which he attempted to build, measuring 300 miles long.
This is a fun and fanciful story, but at the same time a disturbing account of what it was like to be a white slave in Africa, where the characters of the minor players are as colourful as the events in which they take part. They even managed to keep the flag of Islam flying for six months on the island of Lundy off the North coast of Cornwall – so much for to-day’s concerns about Islam.
For those of you who might not know the marvelous work of this intriguing historian, he is also the author of Nathaniel Nutmeg and Big Chief Elizabeth, amongst other good non-fiction reads.
Good chewing till next time,
"The Booklouse" - A published children’s author and former James Bay resident who now works at Russell Books on Fort Street in Victoria, BC
