I strongly recommend this one. Shadid was on the ground in Iraq befor the war and during the first year or two of the occupation, and his reporting is all about the average Iraq citizen' view of the war and its aftermath.

It will give you a whole new perspective. It's really quite lovely and very much needed.

And then I started Baghdad Burning, by "Riverbend." This purports to be the publication of an anonymous blog by a 24 year old Iraqi woman and I wouldn't have even picked it up except that the introduction is by Adhaf Soueif, whose work I admire tremendously. Soueif thinks that Riverbend is real, but I confess that I don't. I'm maybe a third or so into the book and I just keep thinking, "No way." Maybe it's because most of what I read on line is not well organized or thought out or well phrased, but this does not hold the ring of truth for me, particularly as she's blogging in English. She claims to be bilingual and "average," but there's just a big disconnect between what she writes about and what Shadid saw. Not necessarily even in terms of events and politics. Just in terms of how wealthy her family seems to be, and how unaffected by the sanctions they apparently were, and so forth. I actually suspect that she's an American who has spent a lot of time in the middle east or who is married to someone from the middle east, but I think I'm going to drop this one.