Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai

Category Archives: Books


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Going with the Zeitgeist

Sometimes I think I’m getting too old for comics.
One of my Christmas gifts was a complete set of the first ten issues of Flash Gordon Zeitgeist, the series by Dynamite Comics written by Eric Trautmann and Alex Ross with art by Ron Adrian.
And I said, hey, it’s Flash Gordon, right?

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Now I’m somehow halfway through it, and I will do a more in-depth review as soon as I’m through, and I wonder what that will look like, because right now I am still trying to decide if I like it or not. Continue reading →


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The alphabet ends at Y

51Gg8fx8UeL.SX160.SY160I have just got the sad news that author Sue Grafton passed away on the 28th of December, at the age of 77.
I enjoyed her novel, A is for Aalibi when I discovered it in the early ’90s during one of my mystery bouts.

It was her will that her novels should not be turned into movies or a TV series, and the family has announced no one will continue writing the Kinsey Milhone novels, also known as The Alphabet Series. The last novel in this solid PI series came out in 2017, Y is for Yesterday.
The alphabet stops here.

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A Christmas’ Eve adventure

It was a bit of Indiana Jones stuff, you see…
OK, let’s start from the beginning.
SFS_french_onion_soup-31Yesterday being Christmas’ Eve, my brother and I decided to treat ourselves with a hearty French onion soup. Nothing too complicated, but good and healthy, and unusual enough on our table that it feels like a festive dish.
We had the ingredients and the recipe down to pat, but we still faced a problem: finding two decent-sized bowls in which to cook the soup in the oven, and then serve it. So I started digging in the cupboards, looking for some fitting container.
No luck.
I moved to our father’s wine cellar, where we do not go normally now that our father’s not with us anymore, neither of us being a wine-drinker. Continue reading →


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Book gifts for Christmas

A short post to thank my friend Claire and my brother Alessandro for their Christmas gifts. They know me, and they gave me books.
Books make me happy. And two interesting books they are.

17611937Claire went for a historical thriller, The Tournament, by Matthew Reilly. I’ve long been a fan of Reilly’s breakneck-paced, higly-ballistic techno-thrillers, and this unexpected foray of the Australian author in a very different genre and setting intrigues me a lot. Espionage, the game of chess, intrigue and seduction, sounds like my sort of adventure all right. And the novel is set in Constantinople, which is an extra bonus.

51FZBwlQ-OL._SY346_My brother went for something completely different: a book about Taoist Poetry in the T’ang era (618-907 AD).
A.S. Kline’s Like Water or Clouds is both an anthology of T’ang poetry and an examination of how Taoist thinking influenced literature in China. The volume features a nice overview of the development of Chinese philosophy through history, and then offers a fine selection of annotated poems from the T’ang period. The book is beautifully illustrated with reproduction of Taoist paintings.

Two fun, unusual and highly appreciated books for these cold winter nights.


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Christmas Pudding in Kashgar, 1890

It’s been a while since we talked about the Silk Road, and I sort of miss my old obsession. So here’s a snippet from Frances Wood’s beautiful book, The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia.

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This was almost a decade before Lady Macartney turned the Kashgar Residency into what Peter Fleming affectionately called Kashgar-le-Bains, but that did not mean you could not enjoy a Christmas dinner, evidently… and what’s Christmas without the Christmas Pudding?

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Stockings-filler: a selection of books from Karavansara

1e4e33bc44b9444c889c0f204e1e7895There is this habit, in the blogsphere, of posting a list of suggestions for those looking for Christmas gifts. And it could be fun, right?
I’d like to suggest books, because reading is important, and fun, and is becoming a lost art  in my country.
But I decided to do it a little differently, this time, and for the readers of Karavansara I’ve compiled a list of books you might like to give away as gifts, based on some of my personal book fetishes.
And no, don’t make that face, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Fact is, while I’d go for an ebook any day of the week, thank you, I still have a sort of veneration for a number of publishers, and certain lines of theirs.
And what I’m putting together here is a selection of some of the best books by these publishers.
Shall we start? Continue reading →