Book fair

The Revolution caused the cancellation of the Cairo International Book Fair, which is a big annual event that takes place in late January. As a result of the cancellation, the university decided to organize a much smaller Tahrir Square book fair, which I attended with R yesterday morning for a couple of hours.

I was there relatively early in the day and it was still pretty quiet, which meant lots of space for R to safely run around and have fun. Not sure how things were later in the day, or throughout the weekend.

R collected lots of gifts—an Italian flag from the Italian cultural center (several embassies had tables set up); a bag with a book, magazine, and brochures from the Azerbaijan Embassy; and miscellaneous snacks from everywhere. There were a lot of children’s displays, which was nice. At one of these, R started pointing and screaming “Bu Bu.” I looked and saw what she saw: Brown Bear, her favorite English-language book in Arabic translation, which is now the newest addition to our family library.

I have gotten R some Arabic-language children’s books (which are at my reading level) over the past few years, and her favorite character is Farhana, who has a whole series of books about her. This past week, R has been really enjoying them, so I was disappointed that we were not able to stay late enough to see the author who was doing a children’s program and reading later in the day. I was, however, excited to learn the titles of the next three books in the series: Farhana Loves Egypt, Farhana Loves Tahrir Square, and Farhana Loves Freedom.

The publisher told me they are still at the printer but should be available in the next couple of weeks.