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Too much reality at the Mogadishu Public Library

The Toronto Star reprints a story from the Washington Post about the Mogadishu Public Library, a one-room affair in the middle of Somalia’s perpetually war-torn capital. The library, which is privately funded by its 7,000-odd members, stocks mostly non-fiction titles of a practical bent, books like The Handbook of Metal Treatments and Testing and The Multinational Construction Industry, though there is the odd work of poetry and philosophy.

[Manager Hirsie Mohamed Hirui] said it was slightly easier to find novels during the dictatorship of Mohamed Siad Barre, who was overthrown in 1991, and he recalled a slight craze in the 1980s over two books in particular, Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days and Franz Kafka’s Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared.

“Everyone wanted to learn a little English,” Hirui said.

Of course, just because you are in the middle of a city where random AK-47 fire is the norm doesn’t mean you’re immune to book hype:

Lately, some worn copies of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code have been circulating from house to house.

No word on whether copies of Oprah’s latest book pick, The Measure of a Man by Sidney Poitier, have appeared yet in the Somali capital.

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