Turkish author Orhan Pamuk was awarded the Nobel prize for literature last week. I was in Athens at the time, but I did get this photo of an Athens bookshop window the day after the prize was announced (click on the image to enlarge). You can see three books by Pamuk, translated into Greek. They are (I think) The White Castle, Istanbul, and My Name is Red. Click here for more about the prize.
I'm officially on vacation now, and in about 30 hours time I'll be in the air, on my way to the US. I visited Remzi Kitabevi to find something to read on the plane, and was pleased to find a couple titles that had been on my wishlist for a while: The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto, and Collapse by Jared Diamond.
Both books look at why some societies succeed, and some fail, in escaping poverty (in de Soto's book) and escaping environmental disaster (in Diamond's book). You might say they are comparative studies in organizational learning on a very large scale.
I've put both of them in my What I'm Reading Now list (on the left side of this screen). For more information, just click on the image of the book. When I'm done I'll let you know what I thought of them.
