Reading, reading, and more reading!

I finally finished my last Turkish cultural study book!  I've lost track of everything I've read since we decided last fall to take this trip.  Enough for a PhD dissertation!  The last two were about modern Turkey since the founding of the republic in 1923.  It's staggering how much has happened in that short amount of time.  We'll arrive the day after the elections—it looks as though the current administration will be re-elected, but the balance of power remains to be seen.  I've been keeping up with current Turkish affairs through two online news sources:  Today's Zaman, a more "Islamic" paper, tending to support the Justice and Development party currently in power; and the Hürriyet Daily News and Economic Review, an older paper that tends much more towards the secularist nationalist viewpoint.  Reading both gives me as well-rounded a perspective as I can find as a non-Turkish-speaking American looking for news on the internet.

The last two books I read were Turkey Unveiled:  A History of Modern Turkey, by Nicole and Hugh Pope; and Crescent & Star:  Turkey Between Two Worlds, by Stephen Kinzer.  The first is an extensive look at the Turkish republic up until 1997 when the book was published, with a couple of brief chapters at the beginning on pre-republican history (Byzantine and Ottoman empires, etc.).  The look is so extensive, in fact, that I skimmed more and more as I went along!  But I'm glad I read it because all that sometimes-suffocating detail really gave me a solid grounding in recent and current Turkish events.  Crescent & Star is a more interpretive look at the same history by the former New York Times bureau chief in Istanbul.  Kinzer's writing style is a little too "Look at me, the great foreign correspondent!" for me at times, but I did find it helpful to hear his perspective on things.  Unfortunately, both books were published before September 11, 2001, so there's no insight on how that has affected Turkey as a Muslim nation.

My 8 months of reading has definitely helped me understand better what I read now in the online papers, and I have a better feel for who Turks are as a people.  Before my self-education course, I didn't even know for sure where Turkey is, let alone who lives there and what their lives are like!  It's such a multidimensional country with a fascinatingly complex history—I feel like a child as an American, with my paltry 300 years of existence...