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I finished A Thousand Miles Up the Nile by Amelia Edwards. It's a 19th century travelogue about taking a boat, well, a thousand miles up the Nile in Egypt. It has a lot of very interesting parts - her small party discovered a room and ruins buried under sand for thousands of years, in one town they were led through back rooms trying to buy illegal antiques and ended up trying to be forced to buy an actual mummy in front of them, boat racing up the Nile, at one point an angry mob (almost justifiably) attacking a member of her party, and seeing Egyptian life from the poorest "fellah" to the well-off "sheyk" with "hareems" full of women. I also really liked the writer's zest for adventure, and there's plenty of illustrations of various places made by the writer herself throughout the book.
However, I felt the book had many dry spots, as the writer was extremely interested in all the ruins and described many in almost too much detail. Even sometimes she'd say she'd "only give a brief description" of a particular ruin and then that would last 2 pages, so imagine the less brief ones! It becomes a bit monotonous when the descriptions occur because so many are so similar. I usually abhor abridged editions of fiction books, but for this old non-fiction book, I think it would do to have an abridged version with much of the ruin descriptions cut down.
Aside from over-description, it is interesting reading about ruins which quite a few of are now gone or inaccessible (especially near the end of her journey in "Nubia"; there is now a dam on the Nile that flooded many of the towns and ruins she visited and made a lake), and all the rest of the book is fascinating. Overall, I'd give it 3 out of 5 stars as a very interesting book of real-life adventure and a culture already so changed, but that one needs to put up with recurrent dry spells of overlong ruin descriptions to savour the sweet parts of the rest.
Next up for me is Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, the pick for the Lit Club here this month. Published five or so years ago, all I mainly know is that it's a story about a boy in England in the 80s. Hope it's good!
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