Reading matters

'The Yacoubian Building' by Alaa As Aswany

Fiction - hardcover; Fourth Estate; 272  pages; 2007. (Translated from the Arabic  by Humphrey Davies.)

The Yacoubian Building has been a best seller in its native Egypt and throughout the Arabic world since publication in 2002. It was translated into English in 2004 but has come to more prominent attention because it was made into a film of the same name last year. This hardcover edition was published in 2007.

Set in downtown Cairo at the time of the 1990 Gulf War, this intriguing novel shows modern Egyptian life through the eyes of a diverse range of characters, all of whom live in an apartment block called the Yacoubian Building.

'The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Fiction - paperback; Bantam Classics; 272  pages; 1994

This small tome features Charlotte Perkins Gilman's most famous story, The Yellow Wallpaper (first published in 1899), along with a selection of fiction (seven short stories and several excerpts from Herland) and non-fiction (excerpts from Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Men and Women and The Man-made World: Our Androcentric Culture).

According to the blurb on the back of the book, the author was an "enormously influential American feminist and sociologist", so it's no surprise to find that all her writing -- fiction and non-fiction alike -- concerns itself with the state of women in the early Twentieth Century. Such themes seem surprisingly before their time, but they were written during the height of the movement for Women's Suffrage -- although women in the United States did not get full voting rights until 1920 -- when such things must have been at the forefront of female minds.