What I'm reading ...

I have started The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet. I am very familiar with this author from her work on Radio 4 and saw her at a book festival last year, talking about her career and this book. Here’s the blurb:

In 1969, the luxury Hotel Inter-Continental Kabul opened its doors: a glistening white box, high on a hill, that reflected Afghanistan’s hopes of becoming a modern country, connected to the world.

Lyse Doucet first checked into the Inter-Continental on Christmas Eve 1988. In the decades since, she has witnessed a Soviet evacuation, a devastating civil war, the US invasion, and the rise, fall and rise of the Taliban, all from within its increasingly battered walls. The Inter-Con has never closed its doors.

Now, she weaves together the experiences of the Afghans who have kept the hotel running to craft a richly immersive history of their country. It is the story of Hazrat, the septuagenarian housekeeper who still holds fast to his Inter-Continental training from the hotel’s 1970s glory days – an era of haute cuisine and high fashion, when Afghanistan was a kingdom and Kabul was the ‘Paris of Central Asia’. Of Abida, who became the first female chef after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. And of Malalai and Sadeq, the twenty-somethings who seized every opportunity offered by two decades of fragile democracy – only to see the Taliban come roaring back in 2021.

Through these intimate portraits of Afghan life, the story of a hotel becomes the story of a people.

Precipice - by Robert Harris

As expected, this book was a great read. The story is very well paced, with just the right amount of detail. Also as expected, I learnt a lot about the time period - 1914-15. I now know much more about the beginnings of the war and the circumstances leading up to it. I have always respected the author’s integrity, as I know that he does meticulous research. His “author’s notes” give clear details on what is fact and what is fiction.

An example of something I learned: communications were quite different in those days. Telephone was used, but not much; I guess that only a small minority of people were connected. Telegrams were used extensively for everyday notes and also for international communications - much as we might use email today. The postal service was also much more extensively used. In London there were 12 postal deliveries per day, 6 days a week [a few less on Sundays]! A letter posted in the morning could be relied upon to be delivered before the end of the day.