I was 12 and quickly growing over books written for girls my age.

That year, during the bi-weekly trips to Jareer Bookstore that my parents always made sure I took, I spotted a book with a purple cover with “Pandora” typed in blackletter.

By that time, thanks to years of reading Christopher Pike, I was very much obsessed with mythology. And I remember looking at the cover and thinking, “Cool! Now I can read about the myth of Pandora’s Box”. Internet was too expensive and too slow to be used for research, at that point.

Thus started a youth heavily influenced by the skillfully written prose of Anne Rice.

At 13, I learned what it meant to be a “virtuouso”, that the Italian master Vivaldi wooed the world with Four Seasons, that Bottecili painted the most beautiful artworks ever seen. I learned about the philosophy of Ovid, the historical significance of the Egyptian goddess Isis, and how a Stradivarius is one of the most precious objects on earth. I have to say – I owe Anne Rice my A’s in art history classes.

I was enraptured by Anne Rice and the characters she created, and I hungrily devoured every book she wrote, up until she found God in the early 2000′s, dumping her characters of 30 years to write about biblical figures (very amusing, as it was also in her books that I was first exposed to the idea of logic versus faith, her early books are loudly atheistic).

That’s a very long intro to a book review, especially when the book review itself will be short. I somehow found one of the few Anne Rice books I had not read as a child at the airport on my way to Beirut. It was not one of the vampire books, but it was written in 1982 so I bought it anyway.

While her plots are not the most exciting, Rice is a brilliant story teller. Weaving words and history so skillfully it can lose you. I wouldn’t recommend you start with this book if you’ve never read Anne Rice, try Blood and Gold or Pandora, but read Anne Rice you must.

Other book reviews on AndFarAway:

The Mists of Avalon 
All My Friends are Superheroes 
The Lord of the Rings
His Dark Materials
Persepolis
Harry Potter
Blood and Gold
1984
Twilight
Maus
Fatal Identities
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Alchemist
Eleven Minutes