#recommend read

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

Babel by R F Kuang

kuangrf has done it again. Reached into my chest, ripped out my heart, and stomped on it, beating it into a pulp. And I’d let her do it again.

Babel is such a brilliant piece of work. It’s devastating, but it is also revealing. As a brown person, participating in the academic world in the United Kingdom, it has forced me to look deeper into the culture I am a part of, a culture I am promoting, and how important ot is to challenge and push boundaries. Not only of the institution I am a part of, but of my own.

This novel dismantled and reimagined the dark academia genre masterfully, and I will be forever in awe of how well crafted it all was.

I will also be incredibly grateful for the representation it offered. For me, to see Muslims represented in in genre, in this way, I can’t express how important that was.

🌸Book recommendation 🌸

Title: Laura Dean keeps breaking up with me.

Authors: Mariko Tamaki & Rosemary Valero-O'connell

About : Laura Dean, the most popular girl in high school, was Frederica Riley's dream girl, but Freddy is learning she is not the best girlfriend, so she seeks help from a mysterious medium and advice columnists to help her through being a teenager in love.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/9592010/chapters/21681635

“I don’t want to have [children]. I want to meet them. My child.”

What a book… just… beautiful

I love the way in which it approaches taking about women’s experiences. Their pain. Their needs. Their desires.

The way it talks about motherhood, about wanting to have/ not have kids, and how society seems to have this ownership over womens bodies and their decisions.

..the constant shifting of power had done its damage. I didn't know then, but it was the beginning of an apathy for my own self that would last for a long time. Our lives were controlled from elsewhere and the dreams that we dreamt were always at the mercy of someone else, someone occupying us, ruling us.

The next book we voted for for our next book club meeting is Farah Bashir’s Rumors of Spring. It is sometimes difficult to articulate to my friends about the life in Kashmir under curfews and lockdowns, growing up in the shadow of militancy and the trauma and turmoil that my parents and grandparents were surrounded by in their youth. This there is quite an important pick, and I am looking forward to sharing and discussing the book and it’s themes with my friends this Sunday.

The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

I finally read Piranesi! I first started reading this book in 2021, but I just could not get into it. It just felt like I was forcing myself to get past the first few pages, and so I decided to leave it to one side for a bit.

I recently re-visited it again, after being encouraged by my friend to do so, and I am so glad I did, because this time, I loved it! I took my time with the story, letting Piranesi guide me through the house, as he discovers more about its inhabitants, and how they came to be there. It is truly a strange but fascinating tale of one man and his relationship with the place he inhabits.

The prose is charming, and while I initially found it to meander quite a bit, as I got comfortable with the writing style, I did find that it suited the story it was a part of. It reminded me a bit of Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun both in terms of the way the writing flowed, and in the way Klara and Piranesi viewed the world around them. There is a marriage of joy and melencoly to both their stories, which I found to be quite beautifully done.

I finally got around to reading The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak, and it did not disappoint! By now I know that Shafak’s writing style is something I really enjoy, so it was easy to slip back into her prose and let it carry me away on a journey through London and Cyprus.

This story really moved me in ways I didn’t quite expect it to. Tales of forbidden love are available in abundance, but the way it was written, in the backdrop of so much pain and unrest, I was not expecting it to hit me like it did.