{"id":2658,"date":"2008-07-31T07:17:22","date_gmt":"2008-07-31T07:17:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/?p=2658"},"modified":"2008-07-31T07:17:22","modified_gmt":"2008-07-31T07:17:22","slug":"2008-7-31-travel-reading-html","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/?p=2658","title":{"rendered":"Travel reading"},"content":{"rendered":"<div data-src=\"v5\">I packed several books in Arabic when I left Cairo on vacation. While I haven&#8217;t gotten that far with them, I&#8217;m greatly enjoying reading the classic &#8220;Maalak al Hazeen&#8221; (The Heron) by Ibrahim Aslan. I&#8217;d tried to read this book in English several years back and (as often happens to me when reading Arabic literature in translation) hadn&#8217;t really gotten caught up in it&#8211;something in the language seemed stilted, a song drained of its rhythm. But this time around, in Arabic, I can appreciate all the novel&#8217;s charm and humour, its nimble and inspired weaving of anecdotes and characters to give a picture of a neighborhood&#8211;Kit Kat&#8211;going through irreversible changes.<\/p>\n<p>This is the novel that the classic film &#8220;Kit Kat&#8221; (a must-see) is based on. For an excellent in-depth discussion of Aslan&#8217;s work, see this <a href=\"http:\/\/baheyya.blogspot.com\/2007\/08\/art-of-ibrahim-aslan.html\">post <\/a>by Baheyya.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div data-src=\"v5\">I packed several books in Arabic when I left Cairo on vacation. While I haven&#8217;t gotten that far with them, I&#8217;m greatly enjoying reading the classic &#8220;Maalak al Hazeen&#8221; (The Heron) by Ibrahim Aslan. I&#8217;d tried to read this book in English several years back and (as often happens to me when reading Arabic literature in translation) hadn&#8217;t really gotten caught up in it&#8211;something in the language seemed stilted, a song drained of its rhythm. But this time around, in Arabic, I can appreciate all the novel&#8217;s charm and humour, its nimble and inspired weaving of anecdotes and characters to give a picture of a neighborhood&#8211;Kit Kat&#8211;going through irreversible changes.<br \/>\nThis is the novel that the classic film &#8220;Kit Kat&#8221; (a must-see) is based on. For an excellent in-depth discussion of Aslan&#8217;s work, see this <a href=\"http:\/\/baheyya.blogspot.com\/2007\/08\/art-of-ibrahim-aslan.html\">post <\/a>by Baheyya.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2658"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/amrani.cc\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}