Which is actually why I'm writing this post.
As part of a new kind of reading challenge I'm doing a check list instead of reading to a book count. One of those checks is a book in a forgien language.
Now I'd just recently watched a Ted Talk with Elif Shafak and immediately knew i wanted to use one of her novels for this challenge. My local bookstore only had Bastard of Istanbul (which she wrote in English) and The Forty Rules of Love, which i bought after trying to clarify that it was written in Turkish (I'm still not sure. Shhh)
Anyway, Forty Rules sat at the bottom of my TBR pile for about a month. I didn't touch it during the readathon, and after I started a large Murakami (again for this challenge) instead of diving into a more digestible novel.
I finally packed it in my bag for an early Saturday flight to Boston and immediately knew I made the right choice. The main character lives just outside of Boston, and while this setting isn't relevant to the story other than to show a distance between 2008 America and 13th century Turkey I clung to it.
You see I don't know much about Rumi, and while I hate to admit it I'm fairly ignorant of most customs of Islam. I'd jumped so far out of my comfort zone that I had to claw at the one thing that felt like home when my head was swimming with religious passages.
In the bookish side of the internet we talk a lot about how books change us, or how we find them at the right time. I don't know that I learned more about myself here, or that I am changed by Shafak's story. However I do know that this small setting, just outside of Boston, kept me reading even when I wasn't sure I wanted to finish. It gave me a connection sometimes that's all a reader needs.
