recently read: Lyrics Alley, Leila Aboulela. 

I read Aboulela’s stunning novel The Translator earlier this summer and while I didn’t love this novel quite as much, I can absolutely count it as one of the best books I’ve read this summer. Lyrics Alley is about a Muslim family in 1950s Sudan during a time of both new economic growth for the Sudanese and increasing agitation with the British imperialists occupying the region. The family is headed by an extraordinarily wealthy patriarch and his most promising son, Nur, is betrothed to his cousin Soraya until he has a devastating accident while vacationing in Egypt. Nur’s accident reshapes the whole family. 

One of my favorite things about Aboulela, who I am fast considering a favorite author, is how whole her characters are. They are all flawed and all feel real. The complexity of her characters makes reading about a culture with which I am not familiar a real joy. The exploration of a traditional Muslim population working alongside a more secular population which yet still working and living alongside English Christians is fascinating. 

I’m also so excited by the fresh beauty of Aboulela’s writing. There would very often be a line or two that took me by complete surprise because of how beautifully it described something or how tactile it could make a feeling. 

Aboulela’s writing is a joy to read.

recently read: Keep Holding On, Susane Colasanti. 

This is the newest novel by Susane Colasanti, a teen novelist who I recently heard describing her writing process as pumping out a novel yearly, writing it quickly because “she knows the formula.”  

I have a problem with this. A big problem. Most teen literature overly relies on formulas, and while some others can actually write well (read: many of Sarah Dessen’s books), it’s dangerous to assume that because one follows a formula that a book will be good. 

This book is culturally relevant: it deals with a lot of pertinent, and admittedly important, issues that teens face. Unfortunately, Colasanti attempts to deal with all of these problems at once, and without providing interesting, fully-fledged characters. All of her characters are cliches and they can never rise above them. 

There is simply too much going on and her loose characters and overly colloquial writing really can’t hold it up. There are plotlines involving bullying, wanting to fit in, suicidal thoughts, rape, first boyfriends, deciding to have sex for the first time, parental abuse, and financial woe. 

The main character feels isolated and alone; she feels hurt by her mother’s inattentiveness and how little she is cared for. She only starts to feel better when the most popular boy at school starts to pay attention to her. There is the opportunity for something interesting, à la Speak, when the main character explains how she feels freed by the opportunity to do art, but this is never fully explored. This book explores aspects of teenage life that are relevant to teens and the things that they are going through, and while the author is admirably aware of this, the book does not, to my mind, adequately address them.

recently read: The Tuesday Club Murders, Agatha Christie. 

I’m a huge Agatha Christie fan, but this was actually one of my least favorite Aggie novles. In this book, Miss Marple is invited to a number of parties and she solves a number of small crimes to the agitation and surprise of the other guests. 

As always, Miss Marple is funny, quick-witted, and amusing, but I wasn’t completely impressed by the set-up of the book. Christie, to me, is at her best when she constructs a larger mystery that is harder to work oneself out of. These were essentially five-minute “whodunits” and I didn’t find it entirely interesting. There wasn’t anything wrong, with this book, but I prefer other Christie mysteries. 

recently read: The Translator, Leila Aboulela

This is the first book by Aboulela that I’ve read and after finishing this book, I very quickly picked up another of her novels. The Translator is about a Muslim Sudanese woman living in Scotland after her husband’s death. Her whole life is destroyed: she can no longer care for her son and she lives in this amorphous state of flux. The woman, Sammar, takes a job as a translator for an Islamic scholar who is not himself Muslim. The two fall in love and The Translator is the story of how they grapple with forming a relationship when they have such different worldviews. 

I’ve read in other reviews that nothing really happens in Aboulela’s novel, and while this is true—the novel is rather slow-moving—I think this offers the reader a truly beautiful picture of a struggling, confused woman’s interior life. Sammar goes through the motions of her life; it is her thoughts that are what make Aboulela’s book interesting. She is confused and sad and strong and eager to the right thing. 

The characters are complex enough that they feel real, that their struggles seem true. Aboulela’s writing, aside from ending lots of sentences with prepositions, is gorgeous and lush. 

I absolutely loved this book. 

recently read: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick

I’m not really the world’s biggest fan of science fiction (Doctor Who aside), but I actually really enjoyed this book. I feel like it’s something that a lot of people have read and I’ve heard a lot about it, so it was one of those books that felt important to read and when I finished, I was able to say, “So that’s what everyone’s been talking about.”

DADoES? is about Rick Deckert, a man who in 2021 San Francisco is a bounty hunter engaged to kill escaped androids from Mars. Some people get really excited by dystopian worlds, but, and I think this goes without saying for this book, the most important part is how Rick comes to terms with killing (or ‘retiring’ as he euphemizes) things that are so close to humans that it is difficult to detect any differences.

A large part of the book is dedicated to Rick’s (and the whole society’s) obsession with animals. The reigning religion of the age, Mercerism, calls for people to care for animals as a way of developing empathy. This, though, created a huge market for animals, including electronic ones. How can Rick, a man who kills electronic humans, harbor affection for an equally electronic animal? 

Rick tries to keep his ideals straight, but throughout the novel, he is tested and his faith in what he has done and what he must do is shaken. 

The class I’m reading this for is a literary theory class that I work for, so I really enjoyed reading Dick’s novel in terms of the idea of humanness v. the unhuman. The novel is the basis for the movie Bladerunner, which I haven’t seen, but the professor said that much (or all) of the discussion about electronic/real animals is removed from the movie, so I read the book wondering how that could be done in a movie, especially because the animals are so integral. 

The science fiction elements weren’t overly distracting—sometimes “new worlds” are so convoluted you lose sight of the plot in trying to figure out how everything works. I would certainly recommend reading it: it’s a great summer read- not too difficult, but not meritless. 

recently read: Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë. 

We finished reading this book a few weeks ago in my Women and Literature class. Although we didn’t do a lot of analysis, it was really good to read this book again; I hadn’t read it in a few years, so it was nice to be reminded just how fantastic it is. It was especially exciting because I went to the Brontë house in England in October; it was cool to read about Jane being on the moors that Brontë modelled after the ones behind her home. 

Jane is a masterfully written character; whenever someone tries to define her, she refuses to let them and she defines herself. I love nearly everything about this book—Brontë is such an incredible writer with a remarkable style; the reader has complete access to Jane’s imperfect mind. 

For anyone that hasn’t read it, Jane Eyre is spectacular, and you should certainly read it, preferably soon.