I think the theme of this year’s Canada reads program must be: “Go Canada! – because the rest of the world is scary, dangerous and all-around unpleasant”. Initially I was not going to read “Prisoner of Teheran” because between having already read a political book this month, having previously read about situation in Iran and having had talked to a number of ex-pat Iranians I figured I already knew a lot and could live without it. It arrived from the library sooner than I though possible so I figured I would just read the first couple of pages to get the sense of the narrator’s voice. Well, the narrative was so interesting I finished the book in three days. It is a memoir of a woman who, at sixteen, is arrested and spends the next two years in a notorious political prison. Compared to “Something Fierce”, “Prisoner of Teheran” is surprisingly easy to read due to narrator not focusing too much on negative things which is a pretty big feat considering the circumstances. I am not sure which book I think would be better suited to win the Canada reads. They are both informative about the part of the world and they both discuss difficulties living in a particular kind of state. “Something Fierce” is more emotional while “Prisoner of Teheran” is more pragmatic and balanced.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I think the theme of this year’s Canada reads program must be: “Go Canada! – because the rest of the world is scary, dangerous and all-around unpleasant”. Initially I was not going to read “Prisoner of Teheran” because between having already read a political book this month, having previously read about situation in Iran and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p278IQ-gp","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bojnberry.ca\/~boj\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bojnberry.ca\/~boj\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bojnberry.ca\/~boj\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bojnberry.ca\/~boj\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bojnberry.ca\/~boj\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1017"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bojnberry.ca\/~boj\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1017\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1033,"href":"https:\/\/www.bojnberry.ca\/~boj\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1017\/revisions\/1033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bojnberry.ca\/~boj\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bojnberry.ca\/~boj\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bojnberry.ca\/~boj\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}