Sharjah:Annie Pinoy loves to cook. She says she's not particularly good at it even though she does most of the catering for her seven friends in the apartment they share on the Sharjah Corniche. Between the communal cooking and the lower shared rent, the retail clerk enjoys a good quality of life and can send more money back to her family in Cebu in the Philippines.
"I love reading cookbooks," she says as she scans the smorgasbord of books spread out before her in the halls of the Expo centre here. "I have more than a hundred of them and I find that cooking and cookbooks are a great way to learn about food and culture and bringing people together."
She plans to spend another couple of years in the UAE, and hopes to take the books home when she leaves.
"It's going to be hard to make a decision on what books to leave," she says. "They are all my favourites."
Books are like that, like good friends you never want to leave.
"I am looking to see what new Arabic works there are on politics and the developments that have taken place throughout the Middle East this part year," Mohammad Al Jaffer says, heading to the Arabic titles in halls three and four.He's a communications student and hopes to study in Canada or the US when he's completed his primary degree next summer.
‘Books are knowledge'
"I think that to be truly knowledgeable, you have to read as much as you can, from as many sources as possible, and from as many perspectives. I see many students with me who waste their time on computers and games. But for me, books are knowledge and that is how we will grow."
British crime writer Peter James, a featured speaker and writer at the Sharjah International Book Fair, always wanted to be an author.
"British crime novels were always classic whodunnits, starting off with the murder in the library, with Miss Marple solving the clues and revealing all in the last chapter," he says. "When I was exposed to the great American crime writers, it opened up a whole new perspective for me. It's about plots, storytelling and characters."
As a successful writer, James spends much of his time travelling the world. His latest novel, Perfect People, a thriller about genetic engineering and designer babies, has just been released in the UAE. His Dead series is already available in 34 languages.
"There is still always the pressure to write, no matter how successful you are," he says. "I wrote for about seven hours on the plane to here from Cape Town. I have 10,000 words to finish off my latest novel and I try to write a minimum of a thousand words a day," he says.
"The more successful you are as a writer, the more pressure there is to meet deadlines. If I was starting out, publishers would be more flexible with their deadline. But because I am a commercial success, then there's greater pressure from the publishing house to deliver because they want to be able to capitalise on that success. I'm usually working on about five months lead time from finishing the book to actual publication."