The Screwtape Letters, by CS Lewis
Jesus Land, by Julia Scheeres
Taliban, by Ahmed Rashid
When You Are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris
Race, by Marc Aronson
Does My Head Look Big in This? by Randa Abel Fattah
Flight, by Sherman Alexie
The White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga

Ahhh, my religious reading binge is all well and fine, but it means that very little goal-wise reading gets done. -_-

West of Kabul, East of New York, by Tamim Ansary

RATING:  7

WHY I PICKED IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE: Oh, Leilaresearch! 

REFLECTIONS: I usually can't stand "adventure" memoirs--you know, the ones where people travel. West follows Ansary on a quest to find his Islamic routes by traveling through North Africa, all the way to Turkey and nearly to Iran. But it's well-written, and it's exciting, leaving all these little insights into the culture interwoven with the story.

And it's a great picture of Afghanistan to have for reference when people sling around plans for its destruction on TV. You learn something new every day, right? 

Life of Pi, by Yann Martel

RATING: 8

WHY I PICKED IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE: My grandmother loves it, and she is ususally right about these sorts of things.

REFLECTIONS: This book is just a great story. It's about a boy called Piscine--Pi for short--who is a Christian, a Hindu, and a Muslim at the same time. His father is a zookeeper in India, and when they decide to relocate to Canada, they take the animals with them across the Pacific. Unfortunately, the boat goes down, leaving Pi and the tiger, Richard Parker, castaways.

I really loved Pi for a lot of reasons, especially the religion stuff. When a pandit, a priest, and an imam ask him why he thinks he can belong to three different faiths, he protests, "But I just want to love God!" It's such a wonderful and perfect response, and something that describes me really well. I'm not caught up in the ritual or anything; at the base of everything there is love, no matter what sort of ceremony you layer on top.

Emails from Scheherazad, by Mohja Kahf

RATING: 7

WHY I PICKED IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE: I think Kahf is going to be my author for a huge project in American Lit--her stuff is interesting and I get to ramble about Syria.

REFLECTIONS: I don't read poetry enough. I should. Though "Emails from Scheherazad" sometimes got into Biblical earth-mother territory that doesn't particularly resonate with me, Kahf does a really good job of meshing traditional language and slang, as well as timeless poetic conventions with a twist all her own. The angle is interesting, too. She skips all over the Middle East and into the United States, and depending on the dates at the end of the poems, you can kind of see where various news events influenced her.

Whispers on the Color Line, by Gary Alan Fine and Patricia A. Turner

RATING: 6

WHY I PICKED IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE: My school library has an amazing nonfiction display where I pick up lots of yummy things.

REFLECTIONS: This book is dry, but it's really interesting--and it shows you how extremely paranoid people are. Some of it's just ridiculous--white people shrinking in fear from tiny black kids, HIV-positive black men refusing to take AZT because they think it is a government plot to kill them, etc.--but most of it is things that you hear from "legitimate" sources.

Fine and Turner attempt to explain how black/white relations are strained by the spreading of rumors, from the most innocent to the most offensive and profane. The study of modern folklore is one that I wasn't aware existed, and one that I now want to read more about--there's a lot more to playground cootie rumors than you might think.

This book, sort of in the way gay-activist books are, makes me tired, mainly because you can trace the roots of all the problems described to my parents' and grandparents' generations. My generation doesn't care about race anymore, but it's a primary concern for those older than us. If everyone would be willing to take a tip from the kids, life would be a lot easier for all racial groups.

Lipstick Jihad, by Azadeh Moaveni

RATING: 8

WHY I PICKED IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE: NaNo reasearch! Hurrah!

REFLECTIONS: This was sort of like a hipper, younger version of The Bookseller of Kabul. I adored this book--it was just enough factual information, and just enough storyline to make it much less dry than other memoirs. Plus, it has like eight million Persian words in it, which makes me happy.

Immigrant stories are always interesting to me, just because the views of motherland and new-found land differ greatly, and are often skewed, depending on whom you're talking to. The Iranian Diaspora, in particular, is an interesting one because of the hostility felt between the two countries.

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

RATING: 4

REFLECTIONS: Not so grate akshully.

I'm not particularly fond of forced reading for school. -_-

The Russian Debutante's Handbook,  by Gary Shteyngart

RATING: 6

WHY I PICKED IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE: It was a recommendation on my Amazon cart, and I love Russians, so I figured I would check it out.

REFLECTIONS: It's...really long. It seemed to take me less time to get through Karamazov, but that's probably because this book always has something exciting going on. It's about the Russian-American immigrant, Vladimir Girshkin, who, when a plan to make a fellow countryman a citizen goes awry, moves to the the made-up European country of Stolovaya to become a mafioso. There, he becomes entangled with the American expatriate community, and learns to extort them--and eventually, escape them.

The writing style is a lot of fun, but it does drag a little. It's funny, but not "rollicking" as I think it says on the back cover. Overall, it's just a good light read if you like action or Europe and the like, but overall it's not one of my favorite books ever.

p 476

Stop in the Name of Pants! by Louise Rennison

RATING: 7

WHY I PICKED IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE: Eee, new Georgia! She always cracks me up.

REFLECTIONS: I love these books so much. They're so fluffy, and yet at the same time hysterically funny in a shamelessly immature way. Yum. In this one, much angst is spent over Masimo, the Italian Stallion, who is due to return from Pizza-a-gogo--but in the meantime, Dave the Laugh attempts to work his manly charms and wins. Maybe.

And Angus returns from the dead! Hurrah! They always frustrate me because they end on such an ambiguous note, but for the few hours I spent reading this, I was cheered considerably.

RANT, by Chuck Palahniuk

RATING: 8

WHY I PICKED IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE: I was told to read something by Palahniuk, so I did.

REFLECTIONS: At the beginning, I thought of putting this book down as "not my cup of tea", but quickly thought against it. After awhile, it became absolutely brilliant--the format, set up as an "oral history" of Rant Casey, rabies super-spreader, takes a few minutes to get used to, but really moves the story along and keeps the whole thing fresh and interesting.

I learned so many random things, too--like the word "bogeyman" was derived from "boneyman", which was derived from "Napoleon Bonaparte". And that the Persians have a special monster, Lulu-Khorkhore, who comes to eat small children if they don't eat their dinners.

A lot of people describe Palahniuk as being "rollicking" or "hilarious", and this was more unsettling and clever. I could see the definite link between himself and Vonnegut, however, though Palahniuk is a little more gritty. Overall, it was a great book.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee

RATING: 7

WHY I PICKED IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE: It's one of those things that you're supposed to read. And absurdism usually bothers me, but I thought I'd give it a second shot.

REFLECTIONS: Oh, my goodness, I love this play. Why couldn't we have read it for English, in lieu of The Bald Soprano? It was just the right mix of the real and the ridiculous--it had an actual plot, or movement of events, and was darkly funny to boot.

And, of course, the (reverse) Of Montreal reference: "The mousy girl screams 'Violence! Violence!'" Oh, yum. I need to find some more Albee stuff.

The Virgin Suicides, by Jeffrey Eugenides

RATING: 9

WHY I PICKED IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE: I enjoyed the style of Middlesex, but couldn't quite sit through it, so I decided to pick up something shorter of his first.

REFLECTIONS: ...wow. Despite its grim content, this book is absolutely beautiful. It follows the short lives of five sisters, cooped up in their house by a strict mother and a doormat father. After the youngest, Cecilia, leaps off the roof and impales herself on a fence post, the other girls follow suit,  seeking an end of their own devices.

The whole thing is told in "we" voice, from the perspective of a group of ogling boys. Despite this, it's poetic and human--more beautiful than intrusive. It's personal, but detached at the same time, and has a lilting, songlike quality that carries the story along, even though you know right from the start how it's going to end.

In short? It's wonderful.

A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, by Ken Kalfus

RATING: 7

WHY I PICKED IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE: The cover is yellow! Come on!

REFLECTIONS: I picked the PERFECT time to read this book--just after finishing The Terror Dream. It basically chronicles (fictitiously) the changes in domestic America after 9/11. Marshall and Joyce are going through an ugly divorce on 9/11, when both of them should have died. Instead, both escape, and are dismayed to discover that the other is still alive and well.

Through an anthrax scare, an attempted suicide bombing, and the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kalfus manages to blend sociology with wit, making not so much light as interesting the events of recent years. At first, the style was a bit too simplistic, but then it slowly gained in insight and complexity, and was downright delicious by the end.

My Forbidden Face, by Latifa

RATING: 6

WHY I PICKED IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE: I still have an insane amount to learn before I even begin to think about my NaNo.

REFLECTIONS: This book follows the story of Latifa, a girl who was sixteen when the Taliban took over her home city of Kabul. She runs an underground school for children, in order to combat the "intellectual desert" caused by the invasive regime. In 2001, Elle magazine persuades her and her mother to leave Kabul and go to Paris, where she wrote this book in order to raise awareness of women's issues in Afghanistan.

Frankly, it's not the most artistic or best-written book out there, but the fact that this book actually managed to be written at all is a testament to human compassion. Though wooden, it's really eye-opening--though you might want to read up on a little background on Afghan history before attempting to dive in. The book is good about getting into the political nitty-gritty, but not so good at explaining it.

But...I learned some more yummy Pashto! And that's always a good thing.

When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro

RATING: 9

WHY I PICKED IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE: Recommendation by Mistykins, my Right Hand Mannn.

REFLECTIONS: In Orphans, Christopher Banks is an orphaned English boy from the Shanghai International Settlement. Though he moves to London to go to school and become a detective, he never quite gives up his search to find his parents.

At first, when I started reading this book, my first impression was, "This is really boring." It's definitely a fairly gentle book, at the beginning--but it's not boring. There's a softness, an elegance to the writing style that buoys you from the very beginning and carries you through the rest of the book, even when the going gets tough for Christopher and Akira. If it were boring, I wouldn't have finished it.

That being said, it's not something that I'm going to read over and over and over again, but it's a very good book that is going to stay with me for awhile. I'm trying to sort out exactly how I feel about it--I read it in a sitting, six hours straight, through all of its understated charm and beauty. Some of it was absolutely appalling--the treatment of the native Chinese citizens, for one. And under this curtain of gentleness, it made the true situation in Shanghai very difficult to sit down and swallow.

I did enjoy a novel from a Japanese perspective that wasn't translated, however--I love Murakami, but I always feel like there's something "missing" when I read his work. This novel, though know where near in style or content to Rushdie, felt sort of the same way. It's a view of another culture from a person who knows it well, but also knows the English language better than most of the people who have been speaking it since birth.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater OR Pearls Before Swine, by Kurt Vonnegut

RATING: 8

WHY I PICKED IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE: I adore Vonnegut. It's just one of those things.

REFLECTIONS: It's Vonnegut as usual--brilliant and witty and best viewed as a giant non-sequitur. I'm always impressed with his ability to take the most random and far-fetched storylines and mix them all together into one big tangle of details.

In Mr. Rosewater, Eliot Rosewater is an insane man with too much money, and Norman Mushari is the Lebanese lawyer intent on bringing him down. Mr. Rosewater cares personally for the people of the decrepit town of Rosewater, Indiana, and signs checks off to many of them out of his vast fortune. Overall, it's a hysterical parody of the wealth divide among corporations--and deeper, the motives behind human greed and begging.

One for the Money, by Janet Evanovich

RATING: 5

WHY I PICKED IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE: Amy's recommendation! That silly goon.

REFLECTIONS: I absolutely love the snarky, movie-style dialogue in this--it's highly stylized, but it snaps back and forth really well. Overall, it's not the most realistic work of fiction, but it's a fun, easy-to-read adventure chronicling the life of a female bounty hunter desperate for money.

Plus, it's set in New Jersey--that automatically sets it up for hilarity.

The Terror Dream, by Susan Faludi

RATING: 7

REASON I PICKED IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE: I'm eternally on the lookout for information/analysis on 9/11 that I haven't seen before.

REFLECTIONS: In The Terror Dream, Susan Faludi chronicles the change in American society after 9/11, and, in the second part, looks for examples of a similar reversion in America's past. Her main commentary is on the transformation of the "all-American woman", and the so-called death of the feminist movement, defined by a change in sex role and expectation.

Normally, feminists bug me a lot--but Faludi brings up many good points in this book and delivers them in a fairly reader-friendly way. It's not so much an accusation as an analysis, which is refreshing to see in books like these. Usually, the author gets overly annoying with their point of view, and are constantly victimized. This book is actually anti-victim--it's saying that women aren't victims, and don't need protection.

Her point about the return of the "fifties family" after the terrorist attacks is completely true, in my memory--everything in the Midwest was all about staying at home, going to ball games, etc (because clearly, the main deterrant to terrorist activity was a fierce Cubs game). It's a little hard to get through, but if you need something different from this point of view, this is definitely a good book to check out.

[more for my benefit than anyone else's]

The Lazarus Project, by Aleksandar Hemon

A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Muhammad Hanif

When We Were Orphans, Kazuo Ishiguro

The Terror Dream, Susan Faludi

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut

My Forbidden Face, Latifa

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov

Ward No. 6, Anton Chekhov

Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

Snow Falling on Cedars, David Guterson

AUTHORS:

Chuck Palahniuk

THE WIND-UP BIRD CHRONICLE, by Haruki Murakami

RATING: 9 1/2 (not ten because it's a translation, so the depth and ease of the language isn't a PERFECT ten)

WHY I PICKED IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE: I loved Kafka beyond all reason.

REFLECTIONS: As eloquently as possible: DJJAIEALKCFNLAEC!~ DAJ

Seriously. This took me about a week to read (really, really long for me), but I loved every second of it. Why can't I write plots like that? Oh, right. Because I'm not a GENIUS. Murakami is amazing. It's surreal and lovely and wonderful.

Also, he is amazing with female characters. May Kasahara was, without a doubt, one of my favorite characters of all time.

SYNOPSIS: Okada's wife, Kumiko, disappears one day without a trace, and Okada goes on a quest through forty-years of Japanese history and several dimensions to find her.