The next book I plan on reading is Orhan Pamuk’s memoir of his birthplace, Istanbul. Pamuk is a Nobel Prize winning author, and I can tell from the few pages I’ve read thus far, that the book will be good. This is how Publisher’s Weekly describes the book:

Turkish novelist Pamuk (Snow) presents a breathtaking portrait of a city, an elegy for a dead civilization and a meditation on life’s complicated intimacies. The author, born in 1952 into a rapidly fading bourgeois family in Istanbul, spins a masterful tale, moving from his fractured extended family, all living in a communal apartment building, out into the city and encompassing the entire Ottoman Empire. Pamuk sees the slow collapse of the once powerful empire hanging like a pall over the city and its citizens.