Al Jarir Bookstore

Just an ethnographic note on bookstores. While Bloomsbury Publishing is doing a big translation project of classical Qatari poetry, it has not yet reached the popular bookstores. The biggest bookstore in Doha is Al Jarir, and we went to see what it had. Four of the six bestsellers were from Twilight, and Who Moved my Cheese was there along with Dan Brown's newest mystery. Also among the best sellers was The Alchemist. Half the bookstore was devoted to Arabic language books and the other half to English language books. In the Arabic language section were six shelves of Qur'an and related texts. The res of the shelves were dedicated to romance novels, famous biographies, and business texts. In the famous biographies were four that were interesting. Here they are. You can decide whether the contents are positive or negative from the covers.



In the English language section there were cookbooks, interior design books, children's books, lots of trashy fiction, and some cursory books about Qatar, one a little defensively titled "1000 reasons why Qatar". We also found a copy of Arabic language scrabble, and I will get one in Kuwait because I think Sameera Mohammad, my Arabic teacher in Ohio, might like playing it in class.

There was also a large magazine section. Debbie Page wondered in a comment about the body image presented in Arabic language magazines, and I will say it is identical to the one presented in American magazines but with darker eyeliner. Impossibly tall and slim with big pouty lips and dark 'ojos de gato' eye makup. More than half of the Arabic language magazines were wedding fashions and wedding design. The other half were about cars. One was on body building for men, which looked to be a rather ancient publication from the 70's.

In the checkout line, there was a man who bought 500 riyals worth of car magazines. The man after him bought the first volume of Twilight and the Dan Brown novel. A pair of ladies bought several wedding magazines, but one of them had to run back into the store to retrieve her daughter who was still playing the store testing station version of "megafight", an new violent video game. Some one had set the game to "high blood spatter", and the young person in question appeared to be doing quite well at dismembering her video opponent.