And still here. How can it be that an entire year has passed since my last blog post? Is time actually speeding up? It certainly seems so, since I can't believe that I am slowing down. At any rate, I have not abandoned this blog, which, according to Blogger stats, still attracts some readers, although I admit that I write it primarily for myself. The fact that it's “published” also motivates me to continue.
As I have been doing since the first year of this blog, twelve years ago, I'm sharing the books that the members of my long-time Foreign Authors Bookgroup have chosen for the year. The group goes back much farther than that, and there have been some departures as well as newcomers. We have changed from evening to an afternoon meeting time as most of us are no longer constrained by a work schedule. But our criteria remains the same: fiction and non-fiction by foreign authors or about foreign lands and cultures.
This year we have more non-fiction than usual. Our
August book is one which I am reading for the second time. No prior
interest in hieroglyphs is necessary to enjoy The Writing of the
Gods: The Race to Decode The Rosetta Stone by Edward Dolnick. It
is a thoroughly entertaining book. As the author says “...the saga
of the Rosetta Stone is as far as could be from a narrow tale of
arcane scholarship in musty libraries.” There are “...stories of
archaeological swashbucklers tumbling through ancient tombs; peeks at
the first-ever attempts to set down words in writing; excursions into
big subjects like the struggle against death and forgetting – and
it would be a mistake to forgo those adventures in favor of sticking
to hieroglyphs alone.” The wealth of content in the book is
presented in such a lively style to make it a real page-turner. I'm looking forward to the bookgroup's discussion next Tuesday.
