The Cairo Affair

It is summer, it is hot in our TV room (which is in a converted attic), which means that I’m reading up a storm. Long lazy evenings on the porch, sometimes with a glass of wine, and a book. It’s my favorite thing in summer (other than star gazing). This past weekend I read what I like to call brain candy. An easy going, entertaining book, that won’t make me think too hard. Many times these are spy thrillers and this was no different, I hung out in Cairo with The Cairo Affair by Olen Steinhauer.

My only requirement for brain candy reading is that it provide entertainment and I also hope for some twists and turns that surprise me. The Cairo Affair did just that. I found the main character interesting, I didn’t necessarily like her, but she was intriguing. I also enjoyed a lot of the surrounding characters, they moved in and out of her life and you often only learned a bit at a time about any one character, keeping me interested.

I read a digital loan from my library on the kindle, so the few highlights I have are tied to the kindle location.

She’d lived in the diplomatic corps long enough to know that just because people act as if they understand the world, it doesn’t mean they know it any better than you do. (loc 603)

Later, once they had returned to Boston and gained some perspective, she would see that this was part and parcel of extremist thought the world over: the heaping on of selective trivia that only a computer could fact-check in real time, the raw accumulation of unverifiable anecdote that could create a new reality. (loc 3805)