If you have not yet been to the Amman Book Fair, you must go as soon as possible. The event ends on the 25th, and it is hosted at the Arab Society College on a hilltop opposite the Jordan University campus. Make sure to get cold water with you when you go because it is hot there, and dress lightly. There is a designated parking space outside the premises, and the fair is very organized like the previous one, but on a larger scale.

Ah. How I love books! I had a terrific time this morning when I went to the Amman Book Fair with my sisters, bookish women like me, and we spent whatever was left of our salaries on books, sweet seductive books! There were awesome deals in the UBCC stand, the Ahliyya stand, and MES Publishing stand; the three houses where we splurged the most.

I couldn’t get every book I wanted but I got a handsome portion of what I liked. My selections ranged from Orhan Pamuk to Nawal Sadaawi to Ibsen to Nietzsche to Son’allah Ibrahim. I am going again next week, and then I plan to buy works by Freud, Darwin, Spinoza, Marx, and Edgar Allan Poe, among others.

I was delighted today to realize that I am not starting with nothing in my ongoing library-building endeavors, that I actually have a respectable collection in my library and my mind so I do not have to start from scratch. That I found out by the number of books I snubbed because I have already read. Chasing knowledge is a fool’s occupation, true, but it’s an honorable martyrdom. My problem now is that there is not enough space in my room to hold the results of my bibliophilia.

Addendum: The prices at the three stands I mentioned were the best. At UBCC there are books for one-two-three JDs only, at Ahliyya I bought all of the Arabic titles for half the price written on the cover, and at MES (Al Nothom Al Haditha) I bought all the blue-covers for a little less than the cover price, and in all cases you find books for less than you would if you are going to buy them from regular bookshops. I can’t say the same about other stands though, at Collins books were more expensive than at Prime Mega Store, so you need to have an idea about prices before fishing for your wallet.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Jordan, Love. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.