Reading season. Not that we don’t read the rest of the year but more time in the winter. So “real books” in the daylight hours (of which there aren’t very many this time of year) and ebooks the rest of the time. Or whenever - they work well anywhere but bright sun and, happily, you can adjust the font.
There are, in both categories, books we read separately and ones we read aloud because they’re too good not to share. So currently in the aloud pile is William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns. Began in my silent reading pile, though really everything of Dalrymple’s is worth sharing. So this book, his second, written in the nineties, describes the year he moved to India and alternates between his daily life and historical information. Hence the description of the Emperor Shah Alam:
‘He was a brave, cultured and intelligent old man, still tall and commanding, his dark complexion offset by a short white beard. He spoke four languages and maintained a harem of five hundred women; but for all this, he was sightless—years before, his eyes had been gouged out by Ghulam Qadir, an Afghan marauder whom he had once kept as his catamite.’
Impossible not to share, and reminiscent of the opening line of a novel we read twenty-five years ago, also it happens in North Cyprus:
‘It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.’
But that was fiction (Anthony Burgess). And in those days we thought that eighty-one was old.
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