Reddit reviews Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

based on a great book

So... Persepolis: The Video Game?

I wanted to link the Wikipedia article about the comic, but Reddit's linking system fucks up when the link has parentheses in it.

Persepolis and Maus seem to be safe choices, even for people who don't normally read or those who usually skip graphic novels.

Here's a list of my personal favorites:

• Daytripper
  
• Maus
  
• Persepolis
  
• Blacksad
  
• Spaceman
  
• The Conract With God Trilogy

If you're looking for something substantial, I would recommend "A concise History of the Middle East" by Goldschmidt and Davidson. At 500 pages they're clearly trolling by calling it concise, but it's an excellent one-stop reference for Middle Eastern History (starting like I did with Muhammad). I will forewarn you that this isn't light reading., but if you're interested in serious Middle Eastern scholarship this is a great place to start.

Other than that my personal education was from college lectures and primary sources. You shouldn't necessarily avoid all unbiased sources, rather attempt to recognize biases as you come across them, and potentially seek out an alternate opinion.

In middle eastern history the best example of this is the Israeli - Palestinian conflict; its impossible to learn about this and not come out with an opinion. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to learn about it at all, just try to sort out fact from conjecture from opinion from fiction. This is what serious history scholarship is about anyway. History is messy and making sense out of it is what most historians find enjoyable.

Edit - If you would like something to read that's Middle Eastern history related but not nearly as dry as a textbook I would recommend Parsepolis. It's a graphic novel, and it's in the first person so it definitely has bias, but it's an excellent look into Iran through the eyes of an Iranian child, and it's a fun read even if you have no interest in history.