Reading
The list below is by no means exhaustive-these are merely the books I enjoyed reading while traveling through Egypt. You will be able to find most if not all of the titles (and many, many more) in the Diwan English-language bookstore on Zamalek Island (see Day 2).

The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa Al Aswany, is a riveting and at times brutally honest portrait of contemporary Egyptian society as seen through the eyes of the inhabitants and habitués of a single building on one of downtown Cairo's main boulevards. The novel, published to great stir and acclaim in 2002, has now been made into a movie, and the Diwan bookstore sells English-subtitled DVDs (American University in Cairo Press, $23).

Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile, 1849-1850, by Florence Nightingale, is a fascinating and vivid record of her sojourn in Egypt shortly after the treasures of its past were "discovered." The book perfectly captures the magic of Egypt before the era of mass tourism and is beautifully illustrated with paintings and lithographs by David Roberts, Theodore Frere, Edward Lear, and others (out-of-print).

Beer in the Snooker Club, by Waguih Ghali, is a novel about the last generation of Jews, Christians, and Arabs to socialize together in upper-middle-class circles around the time of Gamal Abdel Nasser's revolution of 1952 (New Amsterdam Books, $18).

God Dies by the Nile is a short, evocative, extremely bleak yet nevertheless compelling agitprop novel about life in an Upper Egyptian village by Cairo feminist Nawal El Saadawi (Zed Books, $12).

Palace Walk, by Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, chronicles a family living in an old house on the streets between the Bab Zuweila and the Bab al-Futuh in Islamic Cairo-the area you will traverse in the afternoon of Day 3. Unless you're a fast reader, you might want to save this big book for when you get home, lest it monopolize all your reading time (Anchor Books, $16).

Apricots on the Nile, by Colette Rossant, is a lovely cooking-with-recipes memoir of an upper-crust Egyptian childhood in Cairo's Garden City (Washington Square Press, $12). A similar story, without the recipes, is told in Zamalek: The Changing Life of a Cairo Elite, 1850-1945, by Chafika Soliman Hamamsy (American University in Cairo Press, $30).

Finally, check out thebanmappingproject.com, a terrifically detailed and comprehensive online atlas for the Valley of the Kings and the Theban Necropolis.