Summer Reading List

I’ll trust my mom to keep her silence on how much of my summer reading list so far has consisted of various types of romance novels and just tell you about the Turkey-related books I’m working on. (The links in this post are just to Amazon pages.)

1. The novel Snow by Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in literature. I’ll write up an entry about this when I finish it; for now, I’ll just say that the slog through Snow has made me understand why I’ve heard such mixed reviews of Pamuk’s work, but it has been an interesting primer on the issues that concern contemporary Turkish intellectuals, such as Islam and secularism, Turkey’s political and cultural relationship with Europe, and authoritarianism versus democracy. If anyone’s interested in Pamuk, I’ve heard great things about his non-fiction Istanbul: Memories and the City.

2. The Turkish Language Reform: a Catastrophic Success by Geoffrey Lewis for the Oxford Linguistics series. On the reforms that de-Arabicized the Turkish language in the 1920’s and ’30’s and created a sharp enough divide between Ottoman Turkish and Modern Turkish that I’ll probably never be able to read the former without special training (step one: learn Arabic alphabet). Swoon. My Turkish professor recommended this back in November or so, and I’m shocked and slightly embarrassed that it’s taken me this long to get around to it.

3. Crescent and Star (could be a Yale secret society?) by Stephen Kinzer, or, “even better,” Turkey: a Modern History by Erik Zurcher. Both recommended by my classmate Dave, who’s spending his summer in scenic Baku, Azerbaijan (like Turkey, but post-Soviet). I chose the former for now, since it’s shorter and I’m on a schedule (one week til departure!).