Pre-Trip Reading

Before I take a trip, I love to dig through books about the destination.  For me, it's the single best way to build up excitement for the trip.  Particularly when I'm visiting a country for the first time, it really helps me put sites and situations in context and it makes me aware of what is so unique about the place and its people.

The Morocco book haul has been a little disappointing.  I've amassed a giant stack of books, but there just aren't that many Moroccan novelists translated into English, and my Arabic is nowhere near good enough to read a novel yet.  Plus, a lot of the books that non-Moroccans write about Morocco aren't so great (I'm looking at you, Paul Bowles).  But I feel like I've learned enough to get started over there without being completely clueless or giving offense.

I've only finished a handful of the books in the picture, but I've spent time riffling through all of them.  So far, the best Morocco reads I've come across (and finished) have been A Street in Marrakech by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea and the absolutely breathtaking A Palace in the Old Village by Tahar Ben Jelloun (which is actually a novel about a Moroccan man who emigrates to France, so it doesn't actually take place in Morocco, but I'm counting it anyway.).  Fernea's book is the story of the year she and her family lived in the medina in Marrakech when her husband was on sabbatical from the University of Texas.  I enjoyed the fact that her husband was supposedly the renowned anthropologist studying the Middle East but it's her book that people are still reading and loving 35 years after she wrote it.  :)

In any case, I hope that I can spend a little more time with my stack of Morocco books between my visits to the DMV, taking the dog to the vet, getting to the bank, and taking care of all my other pre-trip errands.  One week from this moment I'll be on the plane!