What are you reading?

The Beirut Spring would like to contribute a grain of sand to the non-existing book culture in our Arab world

Apparently, the average reading time of the Arab individual is seven minutes PER YEAR. This sounds like an exaggerated figure. As my brother puts it: if you read a billboard everyday, you can make better time than that.

This figure sounds even more absurd to people like us; We’re the kind of snots that first read the news from all international sources possible, in all the languages we could muster (usually three in case you don’t know the Lebanese well). Then we move on to the commentary and analysis section. After that, as if all the above is not enough, we read blogs (also in different languages), and after reading the blogs, we start reading the comments to the blogs –and as the comments to my previous post show, this can be very beefy stuff-. How’s that for insatiability?

Which reminded me that we don’t have a book culture in Lebanon. Book reviews are not a big thing and books hardly make headlines. Let alone T.V shows and demonstrations.(The only combination of “book” and “demonstration” I can think of is when people go out en mass to protest something that happened to a Koran in some remote part of the world)

When international bestseller The DaVinci Code was banned from Lebanon, it was hardly mentioned in the newspapers. Yet this would have been very juicy material in the UK. It wasn’t banned in the Vatican, how could it be banned in Lebanon?? But then again, the Lebanese like to be more royal than the king.

I’m now reading Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy, By John Dunn (picture and link on sidebar). I read a review of it in The Economist to other day and it caught my attention. “Democracy” has been taking a lot of beating by being championed by the likes of George W. Bush, so I figured I’d give it another chance.

I’m inviting you to suggest relevant books to what’s going on in Lebanon, or comment on the one in the side bar if you happen to have read it. (Release date in The US is January 2006)

Last but not least, please bear with me, I’m a slow reader, so a book might stay on my desk for a month or two (too much to read!).

If you don’t have a subscription to The Economist, here’s a selected part of the review:

ALMOST all of us are for democracy now. But what is it? We tend to know until we ask. The news adds to our puzzlement.[...]
Many more people have a say in how they are ruled today, but there is less choice. Voters pick among small groups of politicians competing for the right to rule pretty much as they choose within the law until dismissed at the polls […]
So different are the direct and representative sorts of democracy that Mr Dunn wonders why we use one word for both. Yet he is not a despairing critic who sees modern democracy as a sham. Underlying it and the old kind alike he detects a basic and seemingly universal human preference for being persuaded rather than coerced.

Amen