Ask me what I'm reading and I'll mention a thriller that's going to be published in May. Also cookbooks, magazine articles, several newspapers, the instructions on pizza cartons, the air bag warning in my car.

I'll read anything, anytime, anywhere. The confirmation number on my hotel reservation. The spines of books sitting on a bookshelf. I'm amazed I dream in images instead of words.

And when, with a happy sigh, I launch into a very good book, like Jonathan Raban's My Holy War, I find myself writing a review even as I read it, an inescapable bad habit I've developed. Whatever I come across will end up, sooner or later, in another thrilling episode of Words on Books.

Jonathan Raban is one of the few authors I can claim to have followed since he first broke into print with a travel memoir titled Coasting: A Private Voyage. In that book Raban described a solo journey circling the British Isles in a small boat.

Along the coast he met cranky Paul Theroux coming the other way, gathering experiences for HIS book, The Kingdom By the Sea. They didn't like each other very much, but spent the night talking, anyway.

Raban is the kind of writer you can enjoy no matter the subject. In My Holy War he's applied a kind of blood pressure cuff to current events. His apprehensions, his insights, his reflections echo what many others on the West Coast have heard and felt during these dark years of the Bush regimes.

Jonathan Raban moved from England to Seattle where he now lives with his teenaged daughter. Seattle, he found "having just breathlessly stepped off the roller coaster of the New Economy... (and) wary about being taken for another ride aboard the New World Order.

"I've been visiting the US for more than thirty years and have lived here for the last fifteen: during the last four of those years, America, in its public and official face, has become more foreign to me by the day -- which wouldn't be worth reporting, except that that sentiment is largely shared by so many Americans."

Raban's essays describe an arc that begins with the World Trade Center destruction and carries on through war and elections to a "Coda" written last summer. I learned more in these pages about the meaning and the soul of Islamic terrorism than I have from years of following the news.

Reading straight through takes the reader deep into the run of current events now etched in the mind like monuments. "The sleeper jerks into full wakefulness in time for the lead headline. This is how mornings begin nowadays, with the vague, routine apprehension of atrocity that almost never happens, but happens just frequently enough..."

In the lead essay Raban writes, "When I was growing up in England, churches were still by far the tallest buildings in the landscape. With their towers and battlements, these domestic fortresses of Christendom, built as much to intimidate as to inspire, were close cousins and coevals of the Crusader castles in Turkey and the Middle East... whose lordly ruins I later saw, always from a distance and always with an unwelcome pang of deja vu."

Raban explores his father's unwavering faith in good works, and his own falling away from it. He underscores the leading players in the September 11 attacks "found their vocations as fanatical holy warriors not in the God-fearing Middle East but in the most profane quarters of big cities in the West."

The much mythologized Sayvid Qutb [SAY-ed KO-teb], whose 1964 book Milestones Raban describes as the "Mein Kampf" of the jihad movement, was lost in the West. "Like many homesick people, living outside their language in an abrasive foreign culture, Qutb [KO-teb] aggrandized his loneliness into heroic solitude.... This is exactly the posture that hard-line Islamists who live in the West today are advised to adopt."

Seeing John Walker (the Californian captured fighting on the side of the Taliban in Afghanistan) Raban says, "...I was sent into a spin of uncomfortable recollection. Instead of prosecuting Walker for conspiring to kill Americans, the US authorities might more usefully install him in a university somewhere and turn him into a research project... (scientists) could sit at his feet and draw him out on the subject of why the call to jihad answers so resonantly the yearnings of clever, unhappy, well-heeled young men, from Mill Valley and Luton as well as from Cairo and Jidda.

"What he says might be more alarming than anything to be found in the caves of Tora Bora, and a lot more difficult to defeat."

Aired Sunday January 29, 2006 at 10:55 am and Monday January 30, 2006 at 8:40 am

Orders/Information:

My Holy War: Dispatches from the Home Front by Jonathan Raban. New York Review of Books hardcover $21.95. ISBN 1590171756.

Coasting: A Private Voyage by Jonathan Raban. Vintage Departures paperback $13. ISBN 0375725938.

I reviewed Jonathan Raban's novel Waxwings here: http://www.gallerybooks.com/bkm/wob031019.html

The Kingdom by the Sea by Paul Theroux. Houghton Mifflin paperback $14.95. ISBN 0618658955.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Sayyid Qutb (9 October 1906 -- 29 August 1966) was an Egyptian intellectual, author, and Islamist associated with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. He is best known for his theoretical work on redefining the role of Islamic fundamentalism in social and political change. His extensive Quranic commentary Fi zilal al-Qur'an has contributed significantly to modern perceptions of Islamic concepts such as jihad, jahiliyyah, and umma.

Alternative spellings of his "first" and "last" names include Syed, Koteb (rather common), Qutub, etc.