The Woman from Tantoura by Radwa Ashour My rating: 5 of 5 stars This narrative opens with a gloriously ambiguous, searingly romantic image that heralds a lyrical portrait of life in the narrator’s idyllic home town on the Palestinian coast. The seeds of a story are sown and I joyfully anticipate a woman-centred tale of… Continue reading Carrying the Keys
Black Style by Carol Tulloch My rating: 5 of 5 stars I ordered this online and I wasn’t expecting the content to be so great (fashion books can be so much marshmallow). My only complaint is that it’s such a slim volume, though its lack of heft did make it easier to read in bed… Continue reading arts & spirits of cloth
No Place to Call Home: Gypsies, Travellers, and the Road Beyond Dale Farm by Katharine Quarmby My rating: 4 of 5 stars Quarmby discusses the history of GRT* persecution drawing heavily on the work of Romani academic Ian Hancock and other historians. British legal history includes waves of hostility towards ‘vagrants’ and ‘itinerants’ and Gypsies… Continue reading A really important book
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler My rating: 5 of 5 stars This was a compulsive page-turner for me. Compared with at least one contemporary USian perspective, say, that of the low waged service worker, Lauren lives in one version of utopia: a close-knit community, like a village, shaped by an ethics of… Continue reading Dreaming from a dark place
The Granta Book of the African Short Story by Helon Habila My rating: 4 of 5 stars Helon Habila has done a damn fine job of selecting a diverse and striking stories for this in my opinion, but he has made one editorial decision that didn’t suit me: putting the pieces in reverse chronological order.… Continue reading Short Strong Stalks
From the Ruins of Empire by Pankaj Mishra My rating: 4 of 5 stars Mishra’s approach here can’t be faulted; it would be preposterous to offer the sweeping statements and crisp conclusions of the sixth chaper Asia Remade without carefully laying the foundations in the previous five, painstakingly excavating the neglected work and histories of… Continue reading Writing Back Historically
Bento’s Sketchbook by John Berger My rating: 4 of 5 stars From book to book my progress is haphazard. Occasionally I look for a link, more often a contrast: fiction after feminist theory, poetry after history. Yet links unanticipated are made. After reading The Lesbian Postmodern I moved on to this, and Elizabeth’s Grosz’s lovely… Continue reading Visions of Desire
One Day I Will Write about This Place by Binyavanga Wainaina My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is the memoir of a book addict, and Wainaina’s savour for language glows from the first. His descriptions dance, they sing, they jump, syncopated, a lively, twisting flow like swift water, throwing rainbows of unexpected images into… Continue reading Not your images, not your words
Hopes and Prospects by Noam Chomsky My rating: 5 of 5 stars When I read Chomsky, I always wonder, fearfully, who I will turn to for the truth when he retires. When I read Manufacturing Consent when I was about 18, I was utterly astonished. This isn’t the story I’ve been told, I thought. This… Continue reading Looking back and forward
The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I know what will happen,” he said. “You tell the story, and then it’s retold as they wish, written in words you do not understand, in a language that is theirs, and not yours.” This is a story carried out of a… Continue reading Survival by love
(I am because you are) 