2010 LAMINATED LIST # 5

Sugar Street is the last book in Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy. To get to Sugar Street, I'd first have to make my way through Palace Walk and Palace Of Desire - that's 934 pages, babycakes! Add Sugar Street's 309 pages, and that's an infinite jest... That's entertainment I most likely will never read...

I had picked up a like-new trade paperback edition of this trilogy for $9 at a rummage sale last summer. How could I, or anyone who reads, not snatch up a Nobel winner at that price? 1243 pages about three generations of the Gawad family in Cairo from 1919 to 1944...

Three books, 1243 pages, that might as well be laminated. Might as well be sealed in plastic because I'll most likely never read them. I think there will always be other, more interesting and relevant books for me to read.

Sugar Street, and the whole Cairo Trilogy, are not unobtainable to me, of course. They're well within reach, unlike Rosario Dawson.

Hotcha! Hank