Active interest in books

2012-11-30


Being a Literary Studies major, I have an active interest in books and I keep an eye out for new releases when they come out.


Recently, I purchased J. K. Rowling's new book "The Casual Vacancy", but I was a bit let down by the book. It's not that I thought Rowling should have kept producing more books like Harry Potter, it's just that the book was quite flat and the fictional town of Pagford didn't really interest me as much as I had hoped it would.


More appealing to me was Salman Rushdie's new release autobiography titled "Joseph Anton". In the autobiography, Rushdie refers to himself in the third person and the whole narrative has a very adventure-genre-like quality. The way Rushdie recounts his experiences after the Ayatollah Khomeini had issued out a fatwa on Rushdie is really interesting.


Rushdie mentions that small sections of the Iranian peoples had worked together to translate and circulate some of his writing in Iran. It pleased him to know that the people of Iran could recognise that his novel The Satanic Verses was meant as a parody and not as an insult to the Koran.


Glossary

Autobiography: a story of one's life to date, written by the author.

Fatwa: a ruling that is handed out by an Islamic authority on a point of Islamic law.

Fictional: a created or imaginative narrative.

Parody: To create a humorous version of a narrative, make light of a serious matter.


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