January 17, 2008 -- Thursday afternoon

Reading Girls of Riyadh, by Rajaa Alsanea, in the original Arabic. When she was a teenager her family moved to Saudi Arabia. She became interested in the culture and learned the language. There are words she doesn't understand, but she pretty much gets it.

The story is about four girls, between the ages of twenty and twenty-one, who live in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The book is considered racy. In a culture where marriages are arranged, one woman definitely has a boyfriend, another chats on line all the time to a guy, and another woman did get an arranged marriage, but it didn't work out, so she got a divorce and she has a kid and the ex-husband doesn't want anything to do with her or the kid.

A book she recommends--Palace Walk, by Naguib Mahfouz--the first book of The Cairo Trilogy. It's about a large family in the early Twentieth Century in Egypt under the British occupation. To see someone reading The Cairo Trilogy, click here.

Her absolute favorite book--Dune, by Brian Herbert.

When she was a kid she really liked the picture book, Helga's Dowry: A Troll Love Story, written and illustrated by Tomie dePaola.

If she were to write her own book? She's actually in sixty pages into writing a fantasy novel about political activists fleeing a war torn European country, set in the early 20th century.