50books_poc | Entries tagged with iran

If I Could Write This in Fire by Michelle Cliff
A series of essays and some poetry. Cliff talks about being queer and Jamaican and light-skinned and a writer and living outside and inside of Jamaica as all of those things, and it's all lovely and furious and important.

nîtisânak by Lindsay Nixon
A memoir in essays of the author's experience growing up queer, non-binary, and First Nations (Cree-Métis-Saulteaux) in the Canadian Prairies. Nixon is open about the messiness of life, about being punk and fucking up and the various complexities of their family situation (adopted by a white couple as a baby, now with a complicated relationship with their birth family as well and a furious relationship with the Canadian system that keeps allowing this to happen).

Special Lecture on Korean Paintings by Oh Ju-seok
This is clearly the book I should have read before I read these books on Korean art, but alas that was not the order in which my library holds arrived. This is about how to read Korean paintings on their own terms: the direction in which your eyes are intended to move, various ideals the artist might have been aiming at, that kind of thing. Lots of color plates make the points very clear and it's very engaging. The author is proud of Korean art to the point of being unintentionally humorous (for example, he insists that a particular picture of a tiger is not merely a world-class picture of a tiger but the best tiger picture in the world), but by the end his insistence that his audience recognize Korean art on its own terms becomes endearing and understandable. Highly recommended.

Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran by Fatemeh Keshavarz
As the title suggests, this is in part a response to Reading Lolita in Tehran. Keshavarz writes a clear and lucid critique of RLiT's central premise and approach, but also waxes lyrical about her experiences with literature that she feels are part and parcel of her Iran, from her whole high-school class breaking down over the death of a favorite poet, to discussing literature earnestly with her devout uncle. Her recollections of her family members are rose-tinted and loving, but she isn't interested in painting a picture of a perfect Iran, merely a more complicated one that contains a literature of its own and a reading public to go with it, as well as an interest in international writing. Her writing is eminently readable and this is an excellent source of further readings in Iranian literature, if that sort of thing interests you.

opusculasedfera

Dates by Nawal Nasrallah
This is a short book about the date palm, covering both the biological side of what exactly it is and the cultural side of why it's so very, very important in the Middle East. Slight, but not without interest: one of the things that really made me understand how foundational to many cultures the date palm is was the poetry that's quoted throughout. It's not just that many cultures wrote poetry that refers to the date palm, it's that it becomes clear that there's so much date palm vocabulary that is normal and poetic in Arabic and in English has to be translated with scientific terminology that looks wildly out of place in this type of e.g. love poetry. A good resource on date palms, but you have to really want to read about dates.

Joon: Persian Cooking Made Simple by Najmieh Batmanglij
A perfectly good Persian cookbook featuring a good variety of types of dishes, all selected with the intent of being cookable by the average non-Persian cook in North America without sacrificing taste. I will probably make some of these dishes, though as a readable cookbook, I preferred her Food of Life (reviewed here) which not only lists recipes, but then elaborates on several different possible variants for each one and gives a much bigger picture of the scope of the cuisine.

Passage by Gwen Benaway
I should have read this before I read Benaway's second book of poetry (reviewed here) because she has definitely grown since this book, but the poems are still excellent and heart-rending.

Sick: A Memoir by Porochista Khakpour
Khakpour has Lyme disease, which is both hugely debilitating and sufficiently vague that she has a hard time getting doctors to believe her. She's not sure when she contracted the disease, only that she seems to have always been sick, and the memoir is about both her life as someone coping with a debilitating and mysterious condition and the process of finding adequate medical care for something that some doctors don't even believe in. Khakpour is very honest about the ways in which she is and is not coping well with her disease; even a diagnosis is not necessarily the consolation you might expect it would be, and her resentment at having to have her life restricted is very refreshing.

Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation by Imani Perry
I'm not even sure how to review this except to say that if you're interested in race or history or gender, you should read this book. Perry describes how the liberal project (in the European sense of liberal, not just meaning vaguely leftist) keeps changing, but always maintains categories of non-persons that do not count in the new liberal order, but actually hold it up. She takes the reader through various historical examples to illuminate her argument, alway allowing for the complexity of the many different ways her subjects were oppressed, though I think she does an excellent job of tying them all back to the same strands of Western thought. Again, I am describing this complicated book very badly, but it doesn't feel complicated to read, only very deeply considered, and I recommend it highly.

even this page is white by Vivek Shraya
I have a terrible bias against the sort of poetry chapbook where poetry is confined to one tiny corner of the page, even when this means that a short poem must be split up over three pages for no particular reason and there are acres of blank white space. I suppose it might be a deliberate point in a collection about race and whiteness, but it wasn't to my taste. The poems themselves are somewhat uneven, though I may just be the wrong audience. When they were good, they were quite good; when they were otherwise, they were banal or plodding. On the other hand, I may be missing something: I'm not much of a poetry reader, and I don't have the POC or immigrant experiences that Shraya is exploring here. It did win some awards in Canada. I'd love to hear someone else's thoughts if anyone else here has read it, and I am looking forward to reading Shraya's recent book of essays.

opusculasedfera

I've been terrible about posting these round-ups of my reading so forgive me if I spam a little as I catch up with everything I've read for this challenge this year.

Food of Life: Ancient Persian and Modern Iranian Cooking and Ceremonies by Najmieh Batmanglij and My Bombay Kitchen: Traditional and Modern Parsi Home Cooking Niloufer Ichaporia King
Two very different books about diaspora Parsi cooking. Batmanglij is talking primarily about the American diaspora, and King is living in America, but her food culture is the culture of Parsis who live in India. Reading them within a month or so of each other, I could see where they were coming from the same place filtered through two different foodways, and where they totally differ (King, for example, has a whole section on the food of the 1950s dinner party, Parsis-in-India edition; whereas Batmanglij occasionally offers ways to alter recipes to make them more accurate to medieval originals). Both of them you could easily cook from in North America and I fully intend to. I preferred the Batmanglij for thoroughness and the perspective that I rarely see in books aimed at a North American audience: namely, the bits aimed at Iranians who are interested in their own heritage. For example, she writes about how to create a festival meal assuming that you are attempting to return to celebrations remembered from childhood, not someone from a different culture who doesn't know what the festival in question is, though she does include several short summaries of Persian/Iranian cultural information, including poetry. King's book is more of a memoir, if you prefer that sort of cookbook, and it is a memoir of a very particular Indian sub-culture, which might be of interest. I would recommend both.

We Are Dancing for You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women's Coming-of-Age Ceremonies by Cutcha Risling Baldy
This is a serious and academic work of anthropology that genuinely made me cry. Risling Baldy is a Hupa academic who was personally involved in bringing back the women's coming-of-age ceremonies after the settler government attempted to eradicate them, and she writes about their meaning both metaphysically and what they mean to the people involved (both the women performing the ceremony for the girl coming of age and the girl herself.) I would press this book aggressively on anyone who wants to write anything about ritual and ceremony because it does such an amazing job of explaining not just what people believe, but also why they care. I'd recommend it to anyone: the writing is not academese at all, and the perspective is so important.

High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey from Africa to America by Jessica B. Harris
An excellent book about how African-American foodways are strongly related to African ones, tracing the journey across the Atlantic as well as how they mutated within America. Suffered only from the fact that I had already read Michael Twitty's book on the same subject (The Cooking Gene) which is just a tiny bit more thorough and slightly better. But an enjoyable book all the same and of interest if you're interested in the topic.

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh
Ghosh asks the question of why artists are failing to deal with climate change in their art. For example, very few novels include the happenstance of the extreme weather events that are increasingly common and yet mimetic realistic novels should, even if they're about something else. His concern is that humans won't be able to imagine climate change unless we can see it imagined for us already in art, and if we can't imagine it, we won't do anything about it. Lots of interesting ideas in one short volume, highly recommended.

Food from the Radical Center: Healing Our Land and Communities by Gary Paul Nabhan
Nabhan suggests several methods of community organizing centred around food production, particularly things that can be done at the small scale. Interesting, but I find it difficult to remember months later.

Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet: Race, Gender, and the Work of Personal Style Blogging by Minh-ha T. Pham
Pham is looking at how Asian "Influencers" are both linked and not linked to the ongoing history of Asian involvement in the garment industry, as well as how racism affects these influencers' reception by the fashion industry. I didn't know anything about these style bloggers beforehand (though I believe that they're quite famous to other people), but I love me some labour history and this book does an excellent job of laying out the labour involved in style blogging and internet content creation more generally, and discussing how it is and is not received as labour. This is a more abstruse academic book, but if you're interested in labour history and new forms of work, I'd recommend it.

spiralsheep.livejournal.com

11. Selected Poems by Mimi Khalvati is a selection from three previous books, which I enjoyed cos, although her poetry tends to be allusive (and so I missed some of the meaning), Khalvati's use of language is like listening to music. Two example poems, which I found particularly pleasing for various reasons, at my dw journal.

Disclaimer (also for the tag wranglers): I have no idea whether Mimi Khalvati herself, whose online autobiography is sparse, would identify as non-white and/or Iranian (or how the word "Persian" might or might not be a label of choice for some ex-pat Iranians). She certainly writes about non-Eurocentric concerns.

12. Startling the Flying Fish by Grace Nichols is a sequence of poems about Caribbean life and history. For me every word was powerful. It's outstandingly the best contemporary poetry I've read for years. The blurb perfectly describes this work as "symphonic". I wasn't sure whether to post an example poem or not because, even though all these poems are excellent as stand-alones, they belong in the context of the whole, which is more than the sum of its parts (but I caved anyway and posted two examples on my dw journal). If you're interested in contemporary poetry or the Caribbean then you should read this book. I strongly recommend it. Nichols is an author with plenty of published work too so if you like this then there's plenty more (and she writes for children too).

Tags: women writers, poetry, iran, britain, british-iranian, iranian, guyanese, british, guyanese-british, african-caribbean, british-african-caribbean, black british, caribbean

zeborah

Explores the rapidly changing eras of Iran's recent history through the eyes of one family. I never quite kept up with all the relationships between the characters, but still felt like I knew them. The prose is beautiful and deceptively simple; often much meaning is packed in an allusion and a silence. (As in the beginnings of a love affair where so little was explained in the characters' speech that a previous reader had pencilled in a question about this elision. I love marginalia, so pencilled in an answer: the trick was in applying the poetry under discussion as a metaphor to their relationship.)

A few tropes were a little cliched (skip spoiler - eg the death of the disabled boy by stumbling innocently into a political murder) so less effective than they could have been; but I had tears in my eyes more than once at the various dilemmas and difficulties faced by the main characters. The ending rang of autobiography, but I couldn't figure out whether that detracted from the fiction or added to the realism.

livii.livejournal.com

13/50: Chicken With Plums by Marjane Satrapi
Well, it was beautifully drawn as always - I love the style - and witty and funny and sharp. But the story was just completely uninteresting to me. Nasser Ali was a giant asshole, it seems, and I just couldn't care about his plight with music, and women, and blah, when he had a family to take care of, and his suicide seemed so empty and pointless. Sometimes it's interesting to read about a very unlikeable protagonist; this was not one of those times. On the plus side, it was short.

14/50: Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama
Finally read this one, and mostly really enjoyed it. Obama has a great many interesting and insightful stories to tell; he has led a fascinating life. His observations on race and culture are meaningful, and thought-provoking. I especially enjoyed reading about his trip to Kenya, meeting his family and seeing the land and people there. I do think it was too long, however - easily could have been cut down and made more powerful by not meandering. It took me a while to get through some parts, as they were quite slow. Overall, though, it was awesome to read such a personal, honest, emotional work by the current sitting president of the United States!

15/50: Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
FANTASTIC. Ceremony is the story of Tayo, a half-white, half-Native American young man who has just returned to his reservation from WWII. The novel is perhaps more like a dream; there are myths, chants, side-stories, and diversions scattered throughout, and the story is not strictly linear. Tayo struggles with his identity, with his family's tragedies, with the effects of being a prisoner of war, and with his relationship with the land and the loss of that land. He also learns how to heal himself, about the importance of tradition but also change, and most importantly about the lie that everyone, aboriginal and white, is living (while white colonization and theft is rightly called out in this book, there is a greater theme of witchery causing the whole world to lose its way, and the book does not so much blame as expose). There are fabulous recurring motifs, exceptional descriptive passages, and a variety of interesting, sympathetic characters. This review doesn't really do it justice, honestly. It is a very dense read, however; there are no chapters, and the spacing and such is done deliberately. It took me a while to read this, but in part, that was because I felt I had to really consider and absorb each piece of it. I was taken aback, somewhat, by the brutal violence at the end, but really, that was my own fault - I forgot that the book was, inherently, centered around the history of violence and loss. Two thumbs up, three if I had another one.

alankria.livejournal.com

I'm way behind on posting here and, for various reasons, all but one of the following books are currently not in my possession - so these are pretty short reviews.

4. Bahiyyih Nakhjavani, Paper

The back made it sound wonderful: a scribe in central Asia searching for the perfect paper, while his town's location at a crossroads of travel and politics impacts upon his life. While it is about that, the execution is not as good as I'd hoped. A lot of time is given over to the Scribe's unhappy musings about his life and how he's just not capable of writing the perfect book. Events unfold sometimes slowly, sometimes offstage, with the overall effect of not particularly gripping me. Bahiyyih Nakhjavani's language is lovely in places and some of the characters are interesting, but I felt like the novel isn't quite as focused as it could have been: it muses, it tells, but it doesn't quite work. Certainly interesting, though, and I intend to re-read it sometime because I suspect there are layers to be found. Also there's a chronology of paper-related history at the back which is marvellous.

5. Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo & Erlinda Enriquez Panlilio, eds. Why I Travel and other essays by fourteen women

Now this was a find! It's a collection of travel essays by Filipina, with a section focusing on local destinations and another on international ones. A small section at the back considers the how of travel in particular; one my favourite essays is here, concerning how a wheelchair-bound woman has discovered that she shouldn't feel too limited by her situation, and she tells all about her adventures in a Moroccan souk on donkey-back and other experiences around the world, where the help of a few people has resulted in her having a fantastic time. The essays sometimes describe the places visited, sometimes dwell on personal history in that places (especially in the local section), and are almost all engaging and interesting.

6. Rattawut Lapcharoensap, Sightseeing

A collection of short stories by a Thai author. This means, crucially, that you're getting stories about Thailand as a complex and real place, not the magical land of golden temples and hookers often described by farang writers. Rattawut is concerned with the regular Thai person, not particularly wealthy, often in a perpetual balancing act just above poverty. He writes about a young boy's relationship with a Cambodian refugee whose now-dead father put all their wealth in her gold teeth; he writes about a young man whose mother is on the verge of going blind; he writes about a teenaged girl whose poor father is losing his cockfights to a rich bully, and the various consequences this has on their family; he writes about a wealthy teenaged boy dodging the draft while his poorer friend cannot; and so on. In some stories, the plot itself is not particularly innovative. The entire emotional arc of the draft-dodging story was predictable, for instance. But the way Rattawut writes allows you to really get into his characters' heads and understand their various decisions, so they are not distant or simple stories, and the Thailand he writes about is a difficult, interesting, complicated place. Definitely recommended, especially for readers of realist fiction or those interested in Thailand/SE Asia as depicted by a local.

7. Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

Oh, My Name is Red, I did want to adore you. Those long beautiful passages on the nature of art and miniaturism and history are, in my opinion, worth the price of admission alone. (Especially if you, uh, got it for cheaps at an Indian pavement book stall.) Yet the characters are almost all un-captivating and parts of the plot progress strangely. A character is tortured and, within pages of the torture ending, decides that the man who gave the order is going to be his new mentor and father figure, and Pamuk spends the rest of the book telling us that they have a deep and meaningful bond. We're told a lot about characterisation in this book. I enjoyed reading about historic Istanbul (and I can't imagine the city under snow!) and, as I said, his tangents were divine, and parts of the murder plot were pretty interesting. Overall, though, a bit of a flawed package.

8. Githa Hariharan, When Dreams Travel

A novel about storytelling and storytellers, especially female, typically powerless ones. Hariharan takes the myth of Shahrzad and begins after it ended, with her sister Dunyazad returning to Shahrzad's palace to help her husband construct her tomb. Echoes of the Taj Mahal in its vast splendour and the Sultan's obsession and the consequences. Dunyazad and a scheming maidservant with a peculiarly hairy mole meet and share stories, including many of a hair-covered woman who was eventually ostracised by her community -- revolving around the possibility that Shahrzad escaped and they can too, from the entrapments of the old 1001 Night story and the present concerns of their lives. When Dreams Travel is a curious, meandering book, beautifully written.

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

40. Reza Aslan, How to Win a Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the End of the War on Terror

A non-fiction pop book dealing with a wide range of subjects, from the history of the state of Israel, to the difference between Islamist groups like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Jihadist groups like al-Qa'ida (as well as the inaccuracy of referring to al-Qa'ida as any kind of unified group), to historical examples of other 'cosmic wars' such as the Crusades or the Zealot rebellions of the Roman Empire, to the history of Fundamentalist Christianity in the United States, to others. He doesn't always tie these many, many topics together as tightly as one might wish, but if you look at the book as a smorgasbord of various information about the "war on terror", it's a pretty awesome book.

One of my favorite things about Aslan is that he's a much more lyrical, thoughtful writer than I tend to expect from pop non-fiction. Let me quote a paragraph at you: "When I close my eyes, I see white. Strange how synesthetic memory can be. I am certain the insular town of Enid, Oklahoma, where my family alighted three decades ago, was chockablock with buildings, homes, churches, parks. And surely other seasons came and went in the stretch of time we lived there, months when the city's empty streets were not blanketed in snow and the sky did not rumble with dark and silvery clouds. But I remember none of that. Only the clean, all-encompassing whiteness of Enid, Oklahoma, snow as it heaped on the sidewalks, perched on the trees, and settled evenly over the glassy lake." See? How can you not be willing to spend a couple of hundred pages with the man, even if he wasn't telling you fascinating, important things.

Overall, I think I prefer Aslan's other book, No God But God, to this one, but for a broad summary of many things relating to modern Middle Eastern politics and the American response, this book is great.

Current Mood: cheerful

wordsofastory.livejournal.com

30. Reza Aslan, No God But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam

I adored this book. It's a non-fiction book detailing Islam as a religion; about half of it is devoted to an incredibly detailed description of life and culture in the Arabian peninsula immediately before and during Mohammad's life. The second half of the book lays out some of the most prominent evolutions of Islam since then, from the basic branches of Sunni, Shia, and Sufism, to more recent developments like Iran's Khomeinism to Saudi Arabia's Wahhabism.

This book was fantastic. It's perfect both for the reader who knows nothing about Islam and the educated reader. It contains so many details and interesting perspectives that I think there's something new for everyone to learn*, and yet it lays things out so clearly that it's also a great introduction. Aslan is a wonderful writer; despite it being a non-fiction book, it has a very conversational tone, which is totally engaging and enthralling. I have not read many non-fiction books that have sucked me in like this one.

Very, very highly recommended, and I'll be checking out Aslan's other book.

In particular, I spent a lot of time shrieking "Oh my God! Did you know this?!" during the section about Britain's role in the formation of Saudi Arabia.

Current Mood: sleepy

rootedinsong.livejournal.com

29. Ten Things I Hate About Me, by Randa Abdel-Fattah

I liked this a lot more than Does My Head Look Big In This? Real, honest examination of passing, dual consciousness, and holding on to one's cultural identity.

One thing that got on my nerves about it was the protagonist's older sister, who is one of these "smart kids" and uses (or is portrayed as using) strings of big words that actually don't make much sense. That's a particular pet peeve of mine...

30. Persepolis (complete edition), by Marjane Satrapi

I really liked this. Comparing this to a lot of other books that portray authoritarian regimes, real or fictional, really illustrates for me one of the main things that

50books_poc is about: the viewpoint matters.

So many books depict the horrors of a regime and the devastation it wreaks on the citizens, emphasizing how resistance is crushed and the people's spirits are broken. This shows oppression, but not the breaking of spirits; it shows the little everyday resistances, the extent to which the regime does not control the people, the fact that the people are emphatically still human and life is still life.

And the book is not about that. It's about the author's own story.

31. No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, by Reza Aslan

I read this on

sheafrotherdon's recommendation. I agree with her assessment: it's really beautifully written, really clear, and really engaging. (And I find most books of history to be excruciatingly boring.)

The author starts with a depiction of the society in which the Prophet Muhammad lived and goes on to explain the social and religious reforms that he championed, the reception of his message, and the evolution of Islamic thought, practice, and politics from then until the present day. I kept thinking, "Oh, that makes so much sense now!" or "Now I understand what people mean when they say..." (It shed a lot of light on books on Islam that I've previously reviewed here.)

At the end, he argues for a reformation within Islam - new ways of understanding the religion, formulations of an indigenous Islamic conception of democracy. (It actually reminded me a lot of what I said in my review of The Whale Rider - he doesn't think of it in terms of a conflict between Western conceptions of human rights and the traditions of Islam, but in terms of Islam evolving, reforming itself from within.)

Recommended.

osprey-archer.livejournal.com

Hooman Majd’s The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran is a exploration Iran's political system and society. The book aims to answer the questions “Do Iranians support the Islamic Republic? And if so, why?”, a task that it completes handily.

Majd answers the question: “Most of them support the Islamic Republic (in the sense of not wanting to overthrow it) because they see it as their legitimate government.” This doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of Iranians that would like some reform of the government, but their starting position is not “Let’s overthrow the Islamic Republic!” but “Let’s elect someone new.”

Since the Ahmadinejad’s fiercely contested and possibly fraudulent reelection earlier this year it’s possible that this attitude has changed. This is the problem with current affairs books: they get outdated so quickly.

But whether or not the book is a bit outdated, it’s totally fascinating. The information is good – Majd’s family has ties to the ruling elite, and his access is clearly excellent – and Majd is an engaging writer. He does have an unfortunate fondness for labyrinthine sentences, and occasionally his point gets lost under the weight of all the dependent clauses, but the book is still eminently readable.

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

After Satrapi leaves Iran at the end of Persepolis 1, she begins a new life in Vienna as an immigrant alone in a foreign land. This is a more familiar story, at least to me, than that of growing up during and after a revolution. But not only is it just as witty and well-observed and poignant as the first book, this one too is full of the sort of surprising turns that a real life takes, even without a revolution.

I don’t want to give away too much of the story. But I have to mention the moment when punk teenage Satrapi is huddled nervously on a couch at a party when she hears sex moans from another room: “Ah! Ah! Ah!” Freaking out, she grabs a book to distract herself, but she can read nothing on its pages but “Ah! Ah! Ah!”

Satrapi’s very solid relationship with her family is even more central to this book, where they are largely separated, than in the last one where they lived together. Despite her encounters with racism, loneliness, political oppression, and, eventually, a complete emotional breakdown, that gives this coming of age story a reassuring overlay: with a family like that, she’s sure to find herself eventually.

Recommended.

See it on Amazon: Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

Both parts together: The Complete Persepolis

rachelmanija.livejournal.com

A memoir in graphic novel form about growing up in Iran during the revolution.

I avoided reading this for a long time because I had the impression that it was one of those worthy, educational, depressing books which are read more for their medicinal benefit than for enjoyment. (Perhaps because reviews often began "This is a very important book.") Those are certainly valuable and necessary, but not often to my personal taste.

I had somehow missed any mention of the fact that Persepolis is extremely funny as well as dark, and not earnestly improving at all. It’s actually in a completely different tradition, that of the memoir of two brutal experiences – war and the less-than-happy childhood – which often inspire black comedy. The other thing I didn’t expect was an odd bit of personal resonance: both Satrapi and I come from Communist families. I only wish that, like her, I had been given comic books on dialectical materialism.

The deceptively simple art meshes with the deceptively simple writing to create a perfect recreation of her child’s eye view, to which she and we bring our own adult perspective. Very funny, very dark, precisely observed, poignant, and witty. I couldn’t stop reading this, and I highly recommend it.

violent-rabbit.livejournal.com

3rd book: Persepolis by Maejane Satrapi

Everyone has read it and if you haven't you should. A wonderful, exquisitely wrought piece on growing up Iranian. It has beautiful evocative illustrations without the uncanny valley of realism.

4th book: Walking the Boundaries by Jackie French, illustrated by Bronwyn Bancroft

I'm being a little cheeky here as Jackie French is a white lady, albeit grown up in the bush. However the illustrator, Bronwyn Bancroft is a descendant of the Bunjalung people of New South Wales. If this book doesn't fit into the criteria of this challenge (as it is a POC authors challenge) I will be happy to delete it.

It is a beautiful book, time and space. It has that lovely clarity that young adult books sometimes possess and is wonderful moving in an understated way. I do recommend it if only for your own and young person of your acquaintance.

5th Book: Emily Kame Kngwarreye: Utopia: the Genius of Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Exhibition Catalouge. Details of the exhibition can be found here:http://www.nma.gov.au/exhibitions/utopia_the_genius_of_emily_kame_kngwarreye/catalogue/

This catalogue was an inclusive look at her history as well as insightful essay that do not get too bogged down in art speak. Also includes a biography, history time line, and pictures of Utopia. Margo Neale's essay is featured here and as I had the very good fortune to hear her speak on this exhibition it is well worth the read. great for anyone interested in Indigenous Australian art, contemporary or no as it provides a certain sort of Rosetta stone for anyone uninitiated in a kind of indigenous world view.

mllesays.livejournal.com

Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel/memoir Persepolis tells the story of her childhood in Iran, and her experiences during the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the Iran/Iraq war. I know it gets recommended a lot, but with good reason. Satrapi deftly handles complicated politics and emotional tales from her family and neighbors, filtering them all through the eyes of child. That childish viewpoint (and I use that word to signify that she is young, not unintelligent) was what stood out to me most while reading. She understands mostly only what her parents tell her, especially at the start of the story, and this can change from page to page; she has flights of fancy; she dresses up as a revolutionary and then later a punk (exchanging identities quickly as children do); and as she gets older, she begins to see more of the horror of what's going on around her. It's fascinating to see the events from this perspective.

You can read an excerpt of Persepolis here.

There is also a second volume, Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, and a film that I believe is based on both volumes together. Satrapi co-wrote and co-directed the film, and the animation style exactly replicates her illustration style in the books. (I'm really looking forward to reading the second volume and seeing the film.)

kouredios.livejournal.com

I found this community by way of the RaceFail posts, and I'm inordinately happy to be able to contribute something positive other than listening, which I've been doing since January.

These first four books aren't new to me--they are books that I'm currently teaching in the 11th/12th grade English class I teach at a local charter school, the first two of which I have taught many times before as a graduate student TA at UMass Amherst. As such, I'm not sure I'm going to count them towards my 50, but I wanted to post them for others' benefit.

( Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart )

( Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories )

( Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis )

( Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner )
That's it, from me, for now.