Books I Read in May (#11-13)

Picnic at the Iron Curtain by Canadian journalist Susan Viets is a first hand account of Viets' experience living behind the Iron Curtain (in Budapest, Bishkek, Chornobyl and Chechnya) as a journalist during the years of 1988-1998. I really wanted to like this book, but I think I was looking for something more. Her experiences were interesting, to be sure, but I felt like her telling of said experiences left me wanting to know more. I gave the book 3 out of 5 stars on Goodreads.

Sparkly Green Earrings is a look into motherhood by blogger Melanie Shankle. I thought this book was decent bedtime reading with the typical anecdotes about parenthood, but nothing amazing. I gave the book 3 out of 5 stars on Goodreads.

I try to read at least a couple of classic books every year and this month I read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. This is probably my third reading and it didn't disappoint. I love all of Jane Austen's books and enjoy thinking about them in context of the time period and culture they were written in. I gave the book 5 out of 5 stars on Goodreads.

I am still reading The Story in conjunction with the congregation I worship with as well as The Explicit Gospel in conjunction with the Life Group we meet with.

52 Books: Book 7

I just completed the book, Reading Lolita in Tehran – a Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi. This memoir is a look at revolution, censorship, the affects of an extremely religious regime, women's rights and the Iraq-Iran war. 

Nafisi writes of her experience growing up in a time of freedom, becoming a professor at a university and subsequently having to give up many of her rights because of a revolution. She eventually starts a small reading group in the privacy of her own home that allows a handful of women to study and share their opinions without the heavy hand of censorship.

I found this story to be inspiring, but was also saddened for the women who lost their rights as well as those who grew up without rights.

Nafisi separates her memoir into four parts that focus on different books and authors. Part I is a discussion of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. She uses the story of Lolita as a framework to discuss how the villain can never truly possesses his victim: "no matter how they may be broken, the victims will never be forced into submission." Likewise though a government may enforce strict laws, it can never truly own its people.

Part II centers on The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This is probably my favorite part of the book. Nafisi shares an experience while teaching at the University in which one of her radical Islamic student's questions her morality in teaching this particular book. She chooses to "put the book on trial." One student is assigned the task of judge, the radical Islamic student is the prosecutor, a female student is assigned the defense. Nafisi plays the part of the defendent and the students are the jury. I found this entire section to be fascinating.

Part III focuses on the author Henry James with more emphasis on the Iraq-Iran war. And finally Part IV circles back to the secret book club and focuses on Jane Austen.

Excerpts from the book:

Does she compare her own situation with her mother's when she was the same age? Is she angry that women of her mother's generation could walk the streets freely, enjoy the company of the opposite sex, join the police force, become pilots, live under laws that were among the most progressive in the world regarding women? Does she feel humiliated by the new laws, by the fact that after the revolution, the age of marriage was lowered from eighteen to nine, that stoning became once more the punishment for adultery and prostitution?

"curiosity is insubordination in its purest form." – Vladimir Nabokov

These students... were different from mine in one fundamental aspect. My generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that we created when our past was stolen from us, making us exiles in our own country. Yet we had a past to compare to the present; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past...

We in ancient countries have our past – we obsess over the past. They, the Americans have a dream: they feel nostalgia about the promise of the future.

The novel was its own defense. Perhaps we had a few things to learn from it, from Mr. Fitzgerald. She had not learned from reading it that adultery was good or that we should become shysters. Did people all go on strike or head west after reading Steinbeck? Did they go whaling after reading Melville? Are people not a little more complex than that? ...This is an amazing book, she said quietly. It teaches you to value your dreams but to be wary of them also; to look for integrity in unusual places. Anyway, she enjoyed reading it, and that counts too, can't you see? {Zarrin defending Gatsby during the in-class trial}.

In retrospect, when historical events are gathered up, analyzed and categorized into articles and books, their messiness disappears and they gain a certain logic and clarity that one never feels at the time. For me, as for millions of ordinary Iranians, the war came out of nowhere one mild fall morning: unexpected, unwelcome and utterly senseless.

When I think of how their talents were wasted, my resentment grows for a system that either physically eliminated the brightest and most dedicated or forced them to lay waste to the best in themselves...

"Feel, feel, I say – feel for all you[re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live." – Henry James

Lack of empathy was to my mind the central sin of the regime, from which all the others flowed.

I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination. I have come to believe that genuine democracy cannot exist without the freedom to imagine and the right to use imaginative works without any restrictions.

52 Books in 52 Weeks: Book 36

I just finished Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. This was Austen's first novel though it was not published until after her death {as was Persuasion}.

Austen uses this novel to poke fun at the Gothic romance novels that were popular at the time. 

The heroine of this story is the naive Catherine Morland who has the opportunity to vacation in Bath {and then also at Northanger Abbey}. During this time she finds herself in a series of {comical} predicaments that are fueled by the novels she reads and her own imagination. Through the course of the book she finds love but also meets with betrayal.

A few passages that I liked from the book:

What a strange and unaccountable character! – for with all these symptoms of profligacy at ten years old, she had neither a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever quarrelsome, and very kind to little ones, with few interruptions of tyranny; she was moreover noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house.

"Everybody allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is particularly female. Nature may have done something, but I am sure it must be essentially assisted by the practice of keeping a journal." – Henry 

Catherine listened with astonishment; she knew not how to reconcile two such very different accounts of the same thing; for she had not been brought up to understand the propensities of a rattle, nor to know how many idle assertions and falsehoods the excess of vanity will lead. Her own family were plain, matter-of-fact people who seldom aimed at wit of any kind; her father, at utmost, being contented with a pun, and her mother with a proverb; they were not in the habit of telling lies to increase their importance, or of asserting at one moment what they would contradict the next.

It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire; how little it is biased by the texture of their muslin... Woman is fine for her satisfaction alone. No man will admire her more, no woman will like her the better for it.

Wherever you are you should always be contented, but especially at home, because there you must spend the most of your time.

52 Books in 52 Weeks: Book 32

This seems to be the summer to read classics. I finished Persuasion by Jane Austen a couple of weeks ago. Persuasion is the story of Anne Elliot, a 27-year-old woman, who had turned down an offer of marriage seven years earlier because those closest to her persuaded her that it would be a mistake. The book commences seven years later and Captain Wentworth is inadvertently back in her life. She realizes her mistake and a more grown up Anne begins to hope in second a chance at happiness. 

Some of my favorite passages from the book:

Husbands and wives generally understand when opposition is in vain.

Anne could not be be amused at the idea of her coming to Lyme to preach patience and resignation to a young man whom she had never seen before; nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a pint in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.

Anne wondered if it ever occurred to him, now, to question the justness of his own previous opinion as to the universal feeling and advantage of firmness of character; and whether it might strike him, that, like all other qualities of the mind, it should have its proportions and limitations.

One man's way is as good as another's, but we all like our own best.

"My idea of good company, Mr. Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company." – Anne

"One does not love a place less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering." – Anne

"I was very young, and associated only with the young and we were a thoughtless, gay set, without any strict rules of conduct. We lived for enjoyment. I think differently now; time and sickness, and sorrow, have given me other notions..." – Mrs. Smith