What I’m Reading
Recommended for savouring love
The love churning through this novel is the size the Niagara Falls. There is a beautiful quality of the writing and the storyline here (noting I am up to page 225 of 408), which I’ll call “slow”. It’s a savoury slow, like the “slow” in “slow food movement” and when we admonish ourselves to “slow down and appreciate life.” In other words, the relationship between the hero and his friends and lovers, the narrator and his addressee, the author and her muse, feel genuine and genuinely wholesome.
Myers’ writing is smooth and delicious throughout and I enjoy spending time with these quirky, avante garde characters who are artists, spiritual adventurers and genuine comrades. The famous engraver William Blake and his wife Catherine Boucher are minor characters in the novel, which takes place in the early 19th century. The author’s note records that the novel was inspired by another actual person, one Francis Abbott, a “repressed Quaker” who was an educated, well-travelled polymath that “finished as a mystical hermit dangling repeatedly over the brink of the Horseshoe Falls at Niagara.” This project to make sense of Abbott’s life is unique, it seems to me. Love, albeit a universal striving, is always experienced as a sui generis explanation.
Recommended for critical thinking
A ground-breaking, impactful work that lays out the archival facts of the 1948 theft and ethnic cleansing of Palestine in meticulous detail. This work is a treasure trove of what might have been lost, erased, covered up, spun, twisted or denied.
Pappe is an esteemed scholar who grew up as a Jew in Israel then spent his career as a historian explaining the Zionist state’s existence. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how and why the ongoing Gaza Holocaust is being waged in partnership with Western colonial powers.
Pappe’s work is what Foucault would have called an effective history—history written in the service of a denaturalization and destabilization of the status quo. Pappe is indefatigable and inspiring, and he makes the enormous amount of research and reportage look easy.
Recommended for perspective
I don’t normally choose audiobook format, but this time I listened to Ansary reading his own words, a rich experience. His prose is fluid and casual, as if he’s chit chatting with you as you share a pot of strong Afghani coffee, yet he is laser focussed and rigorous about each idea he presents.
This work is a marvel of efficiency. Ansary is so impressive in the way he can cut to the chase, in plain language, summarizing entire empires and eras while maintaining textured nuance and complexity. A trustworthy narrator who comes across as fair and balanced, who has one foot in the Middle World and one in the West, and brings his readers the opportunity to see the world anew, from a fresh perspective.
It is of course a marvel that the view from “Islamic eyes” should still seem fresh and new to anglophones in 2026, and that this book is sorely needed. We need to learn how and why the Western version of history erased the Islamic perspective so thoroughly and deliberately, but that is a different project. For Destiny Disrupted, it is more than good enough to bring the epic events and actors of Islamic historians to life, and with that, new purchase on global history.
Recommended for grappling with aging
I mean, Barnes is a maestro. This slim book somehow manages to conjure up what it feels like to be human and to experience the passage of time—with its great changes and its constant and recurring elements.
Like the main character, Jean, each of has her family peculiarities, the little stories and mysteries that begin in childhood and become touchstones and memories.
We can see and feel how limiting it is to live one life. Even when you make the most of where you happen to find yourself, and even when you are privileged to cross all the Wonders of the World off your bucket list.
Recommended for courage and clarity
In the face of almost surreal mass cruelty, matched only by the unbelievable inaction and moral failure of the world, what is a writer to do?
If the Palestinian poet—and now Pulitzer prize winner—Mosab Abu Toha can write poems even as his family is being bombed, as occupation soldiers take him hostage, as the dreams of his childhood friends and his colleagues are crushed, then I have no excuse for not feeling up to it. A writer must write, no matter how futile writing may feel.
Published as it was, in the midst of a genocide, the poems in this collection are like snapshots that test the limits of art. What is beauty worth, when it is made out of death and deprivation? What is the value of a work of art? What kind of power does poetry hold?
These questions may be misleading, in the end. Maybe all that matters is that a writer writes, no matter what. Like a doctor heals or a chef cooks or a lover loves. The imperative to write is a moral imperative but also something like a spiritual instinct—to witness and hold up to the light whatever one can grasp a hold of.