Hahaha, ain’t it always the way? But maybe his others are better. If I read any I promise I will let y’all know. :p

Sometimes I am embarrassed at how often I use Wikipedia and then believe everything it tells me. If it turns out Yasmina Khadra is really a girl I will be embarrassed. :p

(I’m kidding! I know he’s really a guy! His book jacket said so too.)

WITH MAGIC AND GLORY.

I believe the book blogger in charge of it, Nicki from Fyrefly’s Book Blog, keeps a list of all the book bloggers she knows of, and the search engine searches all their websites. People can ask her to add them to the search engine, though it’s been so long that I don’t remember how that process goes, but anyway it’s on her website. The Book Blog Search Engine is the best bloggy thing ever. Seriously.

His American soldiers are jerks, don’t get me wrong, but they’re jerks in ways that I believe would really happen — scared to death themselves, and really don’t understand the culture in a lot of ways. So I liked that.

Me too. I read the end in advance of the rest of the book, and I thought it was a bit predictable. I was hoping it would pay off emotionally once I’d read the rest, but it didn’t really. :/

Is that why? Did you read something that said that’s why? Because of the lower status of women, and not because of the military censorship thing?

Yes, it seems he is very critical indeed of extreme religious practices. Although he does try to make the reader aware of the motives behind what the characters are doing, it’s clear that he dislikes extremist religion.

Was it fiction or nonfiction? I know very very little about Bedouins, sadly, and although I like to read what I feel like reading most of the time (lots of Victorian novels), I know it is good to broaden my reading horizons.

I’ve never heard of Djebar, but I’ll have to look into her. It seems like there are a lot of countries that it is menacing to write the truth about them, sadly.

I know! Who knew? I’ll be interested to see what you think of The Swallows of Kabul — wonder if it’s mainly the same ideas or a different take from a different perspective.