I spent quite a lot of time this month planning for my trip (next month) to Egypt and Jordan. My preparations included reading a handful of books about those countries. I especially enjoyed Kent R. Weeks’ “Illustrated Guide to Luxor.” I’ve been to Luxor, but I had forgotten the sheer volume of historic sites there. The book helped me narrow my itinerary down to something reasonable, given the three days I’ll spend in the area.
I also dug into my stack of unread issues of Jacobin and read the Summer 2024 issue. I liked “Welcome to Utopia, TX,” which explores the history of a curiously-named town in Texas.
Otherwise, I’ve mostly read fiction this month. I don’t usually write about fiction here, but I will mention that I enjoyed reading Colin Thubron’s first novel, “The God in the Mountain.” It tells the story of a Greek town where a copper miners are planning to dig into a sacred mountain. This one has been out of print since its original publication in the 1970s. I’ve always wondered why that is, as Thubron remains quite popular and the book is pretty decent. Sourcing a copy for myself wasn’t particularly easy.
Since this column is running short, I’ll paste in one more sample of “real world” English for you to mull over. This one comes from a travel guide to the state of West Virginia. As I indicated a few columns back, this could be a fun way to prepare for the new TOEFL. Some day, perhaps, I will put together a collection of these with TOEFLesque questions. The idea of using real materials for this sort of thing is quaint in the AI area… but it wasn’t so long ago that all English tests were cobbled together using real articles and audio snippets not specifically made for testing!
