Monday, May 15, 2017

Funny in Farsi



Funny in Farsi was the Audible "Daily Deal" for $1.99 yesterday.  Very few of such deals pique my curiosity, but this memoir did because I've enjoyed the graphic novels about Iran and the Middle East by Marjane Sartrapi and Riad Sattouf and because well, you can't exactly read graphic novels while driving six to eight hours a day.  At just over five hours long, with me reading it between rides with Lyft and while driving my son around, it took me a day to finish.  It is the memoir of Firoozeh Dumas, an Iranian immigrant who moves to the United States in 1969, at the age of seven.

It's funny, short, and easy to read, but it tries a little too hard to be funny at times.  I did laugh, I did enjoy it, but I'm just not a memoir person.  Nothing pleases me more than a novelist at the height of their powers putting a whole life's experience into a novel about space elevators or alcoholic robots.  I do enjoy memoirs, though.  Salman Rushdie's Joseph Anton: A Memoir remains one of my favorite of his books in part because he lived such an exciting life.  I do believe that Firoozeh Dumas's life is worth documenting, and I would read more of her novels.  If they go on sale.  That's the problem with a lot of these series I read; the first book is always cheap, the second and third, not so much.

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