The Butterfly Mosque / G. Willow Wilson 304 p.

The fifth and final reading in this spring's Let's Talk about It: Muslim Journeys book discussion series, this is the highly readable memoir of a young American woman who, adrift after college, takes an English teaching post to Cairo where she converts to Islam, meets and marries a Cairene, and begins a writing career while finding her place in a new world.  As a chronicler of her spiritual journey, Wilson writes wonderfully, with that gift of conveying subtle observations with grace and economy that most of us can only envy.

Her interior study is as lovely as her external reportage is grating, though.  Wilson was a mere 21 when she went to Cairo and not vastly older when she wrote the book, and I hope that accounts for much of what I have to call arrogance.  She repeatedly depicts herself as the only western expat in all of Cairo who has anything figured out.  And her description of the city itself - which she professes to love - is almost entirely negative and gives the reader no mental picture except that of noise and dirt. But as one of our readers pointed out, Butterfly Mosque is no travelogue.  And as an attempt to articulate that poorly-understood space between agnosticism and extremism, it is well worth reading.