Four Years On...

Four years since 9/11, four years in which I've tried to catch up and understand. It hasn't been a happy experience. I've read a lot of blogs, news, articles, books, and so forth. No one seems to really know what's going on. It's also difficult to get anything like rational, objective history or news. Everything seems to be either right-wing ranting, like Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch, or left-wing hand-wringing, apologetics and excuses, like Karen Armstrong, John Esposito, Juan Cole, and their ilk.

Here I'm going to post my ongoing, part-time, half-ass attempt to grok Islam, the Orient, terrorism. I'm just going to review what I read and see if it leads somewhere. I'll review some things I've already read and list what I'm going to read next...first up is What Went Wrong? by Bernard Lewis, which just happens to be the last thing I read and the first Lewis book I've read, though I did read an article of his about the roots of Islamic terror.

Some other books, omitting some authors whose names I don't recall just now:

Holy War by Karen Armstrong,

A Peace to End All Peace (subtitled: The Fall of The Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East) by David Fromkin

Islamic Government by Ruhollah Khomenei
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Persepolis 2
Lords of the Horizons, A History of the Ottoman Empire
A Short History of Byzantium
Mesopotamia
Why I Am Not A Muslim by Ibn Warraq
Among the Believers and Beyond Belief by V.S. Naipaul

Have a book or something worth reading? Leave it in the comments