"Reading Homer in Kabul"

The above is the after-the-jump title for an excerpt of Nelofer Pazira's memoir A Bed of Red Flowers: In Search of My Afghanistan printed in the LA Times over the weekend. It's not fair, really, but her love letter to her father's library does recall Azar Nafisi's blockbuster of a few years back. Anyway, it's a beautiful elegy.

The smuggler insists we cannot take even a piece of paper with us, let alone books. Even if we could take a couple, which ones would I choose? I think of Mohammad Hajozee's essay that describes a young woman in a flower shop sorting and separating flowers for two bouquets, one for a wedding, the other for a funeral, having to decide which will end up in the hands of a bride and which will lie over the dark soil of a grave. I understand this. Perhaps it will be easier not to take any at all.