Hype or not a hype, that's the question

She has read it and loved it and took some life lessons from it....
She has read it as well and recommends it to me and clearly thinks the cover is worth photographing as well :p...

She calls it a treat...

She tells me that each city has an opinion after reading the book...

She announced to her readers that she stopped blogging until she had finished the book....a matter of priorities because she was devouring the pages one after another.
She said it was one of the best books she had read that year (and she reads many many many of them!!!!) and it spoke to her in so many levels.
My friend Debbie tells me it is a good one...

Oprah dedicated a full show to this book and its author and readers whose lives got changed due to the book.

....and now it's laying next to my bed since 3 days and I am dreading to start reading in it as I fear it can only be disappointing. A book by someone who's made a journey across the world to find herself? Sounds quite "psychological" and "vage" and "transcendent" , not quite a story that drags you along. It really can't stand up to its expectations.

But for more than a year now it was on my to read list and when I finally found it available in the library my heart made a little jump in anticipation. The book is never there so this was an opportunity!! Of course I brought it home. And now I've read 2 small chapters and it's sitting there and I am dreading to continue.

I'll know in a couple of weeks if it's an empty bubble or not (I must bring it back in 3,5 weeks), after I've truly started reading it. And then I can be the last blogger finally sharing her opinion about "EAT, LOVE, PRAY" by Elizabeth Gilbert.

A book that did progress a lot better last week was "Mijn Vrijheid " (Infidel) , the autobiography by the controversial Dutch/Somalian politica Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I also started the book with some reservations. For as far as I had followed all the fuss in the Netherlands from far in the media, I had the idea she was searching needless controversy by shocking the moslim world with her extreme anti-moslim opinions as a new convert to atheism/western society while traumatised by her African youth. I remembered the fuss when her Dutch citizenship got questioned while she was a member of parliament, I remembered she had to live underground when she had made the anti-moslim movie Submission and the director Theo Van Gogh got murdered by moslim extremists.

I found the book very thought provoking and it didn't let me go right away. I am glad I know about her background and the context in which she has formed her opinions. She made me think about islam in our western society again and the western attitude to criticise or not to criticise anything out of fear being labeled narrow-minded and racist. I still think she is jumping a bridge too far, yet she is in a position to better know what the immigrant world is like than I do. And she made some interesting statements that stick around.