98. I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

listened on Audible/own
narrated  by Christopher Ragland
Unabridged audio (22:41)
2014 Atria/Emily Bestler Books
612 pgs.
Contemporary thriller
Finished 10/9/2019
Goodreads rating:  4.25 - 105,039 ratings
My rating: 5

First line/s: "There are places I'll remember all my life - Red Square with a hot wind holwing across it, my mother's bedroom on teh wrong side of Eight Mile, the endless gardens of a fancy foster home, a man waiting to kill me in a group of ruins known as the Theater of Death."

My comments:  This was a long one, over 600 pages and took about 22 hours to listen to the audio.  I think it is the way that it's written that most fascinates me.  the crux of the story is the hunt for a terrorist, but it gives all sorts of background and form to both the protagonist and the antagonist.  It is the story of an incredibly brilliant empathetic man who is also very lucky.  The story is a woven one, and it's woven brilliantly.  It gives you background without going from point A to point Z in order.  and every tiny detail is interesting...and believable.  AND well written.  I was mesmerized.  I loved this book, this story, this protagonist, this narrator.  22 hours well spent.  It looks like from skimming the reviews of this thriller that you either love or hate this book.  I just can't imagine hating it for some of the reasons given, and when I read the reviews I wonder if, for the most part, I read the same book!
     NOTE: Quite a bit of the book takes place in Bodrum, Turkey, a city I have visited.  Many of the descriptions really took me back and I could picture it perfectly.

Goodreads synopsis:  A breakneck race against time...and an implacable enemy. An anonymous young woman murdered in a run-down hotel, all identifying characteristics dissolved by acid. A father publicly beheaded in the blistering heat of a Saudi Arabian public square. A notorious Syrian biotech expert found eyeless in a Damascus junkyard. Smoldering human remains on a remote mountainside in Afghanistan. A flawless plot to commit an appalling crime against humanity. One path links them all, and only one man can make the journey.

MOVIE - Hologram for the King

R (1:30)

Limited release 4/22/16

Viewed date at El Con Monday, 5/2/16 - no one was at the movies, any of them!

RT Critic: 65   Audience:  87
Critic's Consensus:  A Hologram for the King amiably ambles through a narrative desert, saved by an oasis of a performance from the ever-dependable Tom Hanks.

Cag:  5/ Loved it
Directed by Tom Tykwer

Roadside Attractions
From the Novel by Dave Eggers

Tom Hanks

My comments:  This hasn't gotten the best of ratings, and practically no one's heard of it, so I wasn't expecting much.  But I really enjoyed this movie, other than for a few minor details.  The setting, Saudi Arabia (with its people, religion, culture etal) was fascinating...if it was depicted correctly.  The story was intriguing.  The protagonist Alan Clay, played by Tom Hanks, was a great study - his depression, anxiety, and observations about the world around him.  I particularly enjoyed his friendship with the "local guy."  And then there was the "situation" with the strange lump on his back....  So what did I not like?  All of a sudden it was the end of the story.  So much of the beginning took its time telling the story, and then - poof - it was over and done.  Voila!  Too quickly, I think....

Roger Ebert.com review here. (3 stars)

RT Summary:  Cultures collide when an American businessman (Tom Hanks) is sent to Saudi Arabia to close what he hopes will be the deal of a lifetime. Baffled by local customs and stymied by an opaque bureaucracy, he eventually finds his footing with the help of a wise-cracking taxi driver (Alexander Black) and a beautiful Saudi doctor (Sarita Choudhury).

SHORT STORIES - Triple Time - Anne Sanow

Drue Heniz Literature Prize 2009
2009 University of Pittsburgh Press

151 pgs.

Adult Fiction - 1980's Saudi Arabia

Finished

Goodreads rating: 3.87

My rating:    (5) Awesome  (4) Loved it  (3) Liked it   (2) It was okay  (1) Yuck

TPPL found it in Sedona

1st story:  "Pioneer" pgs. 1 -19
     A nine-year-old has accompanied his construction-worker dad and pregnant mom to a hot, boring village in the Saudi desert where they will spend at least two years.  It's still summer, he has nothing to do (their possessions have not yet arrived), and none of his family is happy.  The baby arrives - early.  The story gives a feel for this hot, depressing place with little going for it and seems somewhat pointless other than that.

Goodreads book summary:  For Jill, a young American living in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s, life is in “a holding pattern” of long days in a restrictive place-“sandlocked nowhere,” as another expat calls it.  Others don't know how to leave, and try to adopt the country as their own.  And to those who were born there, the changes seem to come at warp speed: Thurayya, the daughter of a Bedouin chief, later finds herself living in a Riyadh high-rise where, she says, there are “worlds wound together with years.”
           The characters in the linked stories in Triple Time are living an uneasy mesh of two divergent cultures, in a place where tradition and progress are continually in flux. These are tales of confliction-of old and new, rich and poor, sexual repression and personal freedom. We experience a barren yet strangely beautiful landscape jolted by sleek glass apartment towers and opulent fountains. On the fringes of urbanity, Bedouins traverse the desert in search of the next watering hole.
           Beneath a surface of cultural upheaval, the stories hold deeper, more personal meanings. They tell of yearnings-for a time lost, for a homeland, for belonging, and for love. Anne Sanow reveals much about the culture, psyche, and essence of life in modern Saudi Arabia, where Saudis struggle to keep their traditions and foreigners muddle through in search of a quick buck or a last chance at making a life for themselves in a world that is quickly running out of hiding places.

41. In the Kingdom of Men - Kim Barnes

2012, Alfred A. Knopf

324 pgs.

Written for adults

Finished 9/16/2013

Genre: Historical Fiction/1967

Goodreads Rating: 3.44

My Rating:  Liked it (3.5)

TPPL

Setting: rural Oklahoma but mainly the American Aramco company housing and desert surrounding it in Saudi Arabia (simply called "Arabia" in the book) in 1967

1^st sentence from the prologue: "Here is the first thing you need to know about me: I'm a barefoot girl from red-dirt Oklahoma, and all the marble floors in the world will never change that."

1st sentence from Chapter 1:  "In the beginning  --- these three words my daily bread, recited at the kitchen table in our shack in Shawnee, the bible open in front of me.":

My comments:  I have ups and downs with my reactions to this book. I loved the setting - a mysterious one, for me. Arabia in the 1960's, in the American-based housing commune - certainly nothing I had any prior knowledge about.  The Bedouin.  The animosity.  The "kingdom of men"......  And I was unprepared for the ending, a feeling that left me pleasantly surprised, because it was unexpected and perfect for the story.

Goodreads Review:   1967. Gin Mitchell knows a better life awaits her when she marries hometown hero Mason McPhee. Raised in a two-room shack by her Oklahoma grandfather, a strict Methodist minister, Gin never believed that someone like Mason, a handsome college boy, the pride of Shawnee, would look her way. And nothing can prepare her for the world she and Mason step into when he takes a job with the Arabian American Oil company in Saudi Arabia. In the gated compound of Abqaiq, Gin and Mason are given a home with marble floors, a houseboy to cook their meals, and a gardener to tend the sandy patch out back. Even among the veiled women and strict laws of shariah, Gin’s life has become the stuff of fairy tales. She buys her first swimsuit, she pierces her ears, and Mason gives her a glittering diamond ring. But when a young Bedouin woman is found dead, washed up on the shores of the Persian Gulf, Gin’s world closes in around her, and the one person she trusts is nowhere to be found. 

   Set against the gorgeously etched landscape of a country on the cusp of enormous change, In the Kingdom of Men abounds with sandstorms and locust swarms, shrimp peddlers, pearl divers, and Bedouin caravans—a luminous portrait of life in the desert. 

41. The Girls of Riyadh - Rajaa Alsanea

translated by Rajaa Alsanea and Marilyn Booth
for:  Adults (and YA's too)
Penguin Books, 2007 (originally published in Arabic in 2005)
paper $14.00
286 pgs.
Rating:  4

This is the story of four upper class Saudi girls and the customs and foibles they live with when it comes to dating (huh!), men, and marriage.  Even though I had some background, some pre-established knowledge, there were many eye-opening new facts to learn. It was written in an interesting way.  Supposedly, every week for a year or so, a "friend" of the four girls writes an email to a list of subscribers to uncover more and more of the girls' story. She gets quite a backlash - both good and bad - from different Saudis.  The book itself was very controversial in Saudi Arabia and other Arabic, Islamic countries.

Read no further unless you want spoilers.  The four friends:

Gamrah - first married, to a man who takes her to Chicago and goes out of his way to show his distaste for her.  Come to find out, he's had a loving relationship, but his parents would not allow him to marry her.  He continues this relationship, Gamrah gets purposely pregnant, and they divorce.  She is left bitter and angry.

Sadeem - becomes engaged to Wahleed, it seems to be a love match until she gives herself fully to him shortly before the actual marriage and he dumps her.  Then she meets Faras, an older-than-her politician and they are practically glued at the hip....until his family refuses to let him marry a "divorced" woman and forces him to marry another.

Michelle - half American, but fully a Saudi, since she's lived there through adolescence.  She falls in love with Faisal, but his parents have someone else in mind for him.  She eventually goes to the United Arab Emirates and becomes a producer.

Lamees - the most playful, flirtatious of the four, she knows how to have fun and finally, in medical school, sees the man she desires as a husband, plays her cards right, and follows the traditional path without too much glamour and fireworks. She was also the character that interested me the least.