Marion James's Blog (12)

Reading Marco Polo's "The Travels" this week, I was struck how like a very early Lonely Planet Guide this 13th century manuscript is. Except, the venerable Marco desperately needs a great modern editor to make his chapter titles a bit more zappy, and to create history boxes and culture boxes to highlight features of interest. Maps and some illustrations would make the text a bit less stuffy, too.

That got me thinking ... how much of a book's success is from the original content, and…

Far too many times I have picked up a book on a specialist subject to find it is heavy and indigestible!

Full of long, technical words, and pompous opinion, I am turned off before I have finished chapter one.....

John Shindeldecker avoids this pitfall in "The World of Alevis". He creates a readable but informative introduction to this group of Islamic believers in the Middle East. He says, "My hope is that the reader will have a tasty, balanced meal, and the appetite to come…

Have you ever stopped to consider how children learn language, or how they develop reading skills?

If you are a children's books author, this is an essential part of your understanding of your target customer.

Peter Pikkert is an expert in this area, and he has written a book that helps adults learn a foreign language in the same way that children learn their native language.

Click here to…

Houses often form an important character in a book. Just think of "The Lake House" in the film of that name. Click on my review in today's paper for another house that is the eponymous hero of a Turkish book ....

http://www.sundayszaman.com/sunday/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=2088

The 2005 Independent Newspaper "Best Foreign Book of the Year" - The Flea Palace by Elif Shafak - certainly doesn't have a compelling plot.

What it does have, though, is three clever styles of writing:

1. The whole book is a "story within a story" - a bit like peeling away the layers of the onion skin. Some call this style Kafkaesque.

2. Play on the names of characters. e.g. Injustice Pureturk suffers terrible injustices (a style most famously associated with allegories…

Famous Turkish author Buket Uzuner would give this question a resounding YES. She once wrote an essay entitled "My soul-mate İstanbul, ex-husband Paris and lover New York."

This emotional relationship with the city is encapsulated in "İstanbul Blues", the subject of my Turkish book review this week:

http://www.sundayszaman.com/sunday/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=1942

Edwin Starr asked the Question in his Motown hit record, and he answered it as "Absolutely Nothing!"

No, this blog post is nothing to do with whether troops should be in Iraq or not .... but today's book review is about an Empire that spent nearly 850 years fending off attacks from neighbors before it finally succumbed to the Ottoman Turks in 1453:

Click here to join readers in Turkey exploring "Byzantium at War":…

200 years ago, if you wanted to hear a story, you wouldn't switch on the TV, and probably wouldn't even curl up with a book. You would sit at the feet of those older than you, and listen to the stories they tell. In the old days, wisdom was passed on by word of mouth: stories, tales and legends from one generation to another.

This oral tradition is dying out, with the advent of books, newspapers and the internet.

I think it is one of the responsibilities of those of us who are…

In researching for this Sunday's book review - Stamboul Train by Graham Greene, I discovered that his second and third books were a flop. So much so, that in later life he disowned them.

Now, I know that writing a book means it almost becomes a part of you like your child, but disowning it ...?

Well, he never disowned Stamboul Train, a book he called "an entertainment", something written to amuse author and reader alike.

Click here for my full review:…

How about a coffee shop as a place to get your inspiration? Poet Richard McKane often chases his muse in a coffee shop. Anywhere in the world ... Istanbul, London ... the atmosphere is the same.

For Richard McKane, the coffeehouse holds a special magic. In the coffeehouse, he says, the poet and the reader need not be alone. A good conversation in a coffeehouse, for him, lays itself in the memory like a good poem. He sees a coffeehouse as a place to feel safe and warm…

I loved reviewing this book as Macaulay's drawings are EXQUISITE, and I have often wondered how on earth people centuries past could have created such architectural masterpieces as the mosques that adorn the Istanbul skyline.

Not a dry and dusty architectural text book, but a storyline that breathes life into these old stones ... next time I visit the Blue Mosque I swear I will be able to hear the ghost of the architect giving orders to the chief foreman, as the artisans' hammers and…