"Mirror to Damascus" is Colin Thubron's very first travelogue. It finds a very young Thubron exploring Damascus and the surrounding countryside in the mid 1960s. Interestingly, this seems to be Thurbon at his most "Fermoresque." He doesn't make as many assumptions about your knowledge as Fermor does, but you might want to take a quick look at the Wikipedia pages on the histories of Syria and Islam before you get going. And perhaps crack open your copy of the Old Testament while you are at it. This isn't a book for the ignorant.

Like some of Fermor's better-known works, there is precious little actual travel depicted in these pages. Thubron spends a few paragraphs recounting a bicycle ride and then spends thirty pages talking about the history of a town. Again and again this is repeated. At first I felt bad reading the book... I visited Damascus in my early 20s as well, and reading this made me feel bad because I mostly just f--ked around. Perhaps, though, Thubron just mucked about as well. As I said, most of the book is just history. It could have been written at a nice library back home. Don't let that dissuade you, of course. The story told here is still compelling and beautiful.

Most readers will know Thubron from his later accounts of trips across vast geographic areas (the Silk Road, Siberia, etc). This serves as a nice counterpoint (along with some of his other earlier books) all of which are about small patches of land.