I try to keep track of Pulitzer Prize winners, particularly in fiction and drama, because I like to have my pulse on what is winning awards and what I can teach in future classes. I saw that Lynn Nottage’s Sweat was this year’s drama winner and promptly went to my library. Of course, they don’t have it yet. So I decided the next-best thing would be to read her other Pulitzer Prize winner, Ruined. In short, Ruined is about what happens to women before, during, […]
A wonderful and poignant novel about identity and faith
What I love about books is their ability to pull you in and make you feel empathy and imagination in instances where you don’t seem to have any connection with the situation at hand. And that’s the power in reading diverse books: you start to understand people who may seem “different” from you are actually not that different, and their struggles with faith have some alignment with your own. This was my experience with The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, which, in my opinion, is […]
An interesting, dense, if plot-heavy sci-fi techy novel
I went to my Leaderboard post on CBR to see what my last review was, and it was #57 (as of today, I’ve finished book 66). And I posted it on April 8. That’s like a whole month ago. It’s time to get to work. I think I’ve mentioned before that I work part-time (one of THREE part-time jobs, because being an academic is exhausting, and you can never make enough money for the work that you end up doing) at an Islamic college in […]
A Western that didn’t grab me in the saddle.
The thing I like about being part of two separate book clubs is that you get to read a variety of books that you’d never even heard or consider reading before. The thing I don’t like about belonging to two book clubs is that I spend a chunk of time reading books that I end up having no interest in or disliking. Ultimately, though, it’s not too annoying, because it’s good for me to read books I don’t choose. I’ll be interested in hearing what […]
A heartbreaking work of beautiful writing
Have you ever read a book right after it was published and realized that this book was meant to be read right now, right at this time, and that it speaks powerfully about what is unfolding around the world? I don’t think it’s an accident that Mohsin Hamid is writing about refugees fleeing their native country which has crumbled, or that he speaks to the family ties that we forge and break from this kind of global uncertainty. I was surprised by this short novel, […]
A novel, if predictable science-fiction adventure
For one of my teaching gigs, I’m at an Islamic college in my nearest big city, and it’s been a rewarding and enlightening experience already. My boss has asked if I wanted someday to teach a Muslim-American literature course, and I obviously said yes, I would. That day, when I got home, I did a ton of Googling and Goodreads digging. I’m fairly widely read, but I wanted to see what scholars and publishers counted as Muslim-American, so that I could be fair in my […]
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