Getting ready for take off at Hobby Airport in Houston!
I wasn’t even in Houston for a full month, and I’m off again on another adventure. Alabama has been trying to kill me for a year every time I drove through it, so I decided to fly. Plus flying is faster and more convenient. I just can’t take my dog on the plane! So I’m a free mama this go around. Here are the books I’m going to try to read my way through over the next ten days. Wish me luck!
Read Yes Length 224 Quick Review As a little girl, her father wanted her to be a doctor, but she grew up to heal what doctor’s cannot: a healer of souls. A tragedy that began in love lead Khalida Brohi down a road that would help her change her family, change her country, change the world, and bring her love.
I Should Have Honoris Khalida Brohi’s memoir. Through her story, she also tells the story of her people. Before the age of 30, she has already accomplished so much good in her community and the world at large. She is the creator of the Sughar Foundation. With her husband, they founded the Chai Spot. Her life, from a very young age, has been dedicated to lifting women up and bringing an end to honor killings. Through her work, she has faced adversity, hostility, threats, and survived a bombing. Her resiliency allowed her to look passed these people’s actions, which stemmed from fear and ignorance, to continue her work helping women across Pakistan and the world.
Brohi grew up in tribal Pakistan. Her father had been lucky to have an education and believed his daughters should have one too. This was not common; it was hardly condoned. The combination of a progressive father, an education, a strong will, and a caring heart launched her on a mission to end honor killings in Pakistan and everywhere else. Her cousin was murdered in the name of honor at a very young age because she fell in love with someone she had not been betrothed to. This revelation rocked Brohi’s world setting her on the trajectory that led to her activism and social entrepreneurism.
This book came into my life as I renamed my blog. In my teen years, my life was irreversibly changed by a man taking what he thought he deserved. Brohi fights against honor killings in Pakistan. I have been speaking out against sexual and domestic violence in the United States for several years now. I don’t have the stage she does, but I want to start using my platform to advocate for women in my country struggling against a different kind of adversity. I found a kindred spirit in Khalida Brohi and I Should Have Honor.
Pakistan is drastically different than the United States and the Western world in many ways. I have had an interest in Southwestern Asia for several years now, so many things were not new to me. For those that have not read extensively about the region, Brohi does an incredible job providing background information on the politics, culture, religion, history, and even the clothes to help the reader understand and empathize with her people.
On of the things I admire so much about I Should Have Honoris her honesty in her early faults. In the beginning, she believed happiness and freedom looked a certain way for women. Through meeting and talking with and being challenged by women she was close to, she learned to accept women’s choices, and there is no one path to happiness or even equality. Change can be made through many routes. When she first began her advocacy journey, Brohi didn’t realize the need to change women’s minds about traditional practices as much if not more than she needed to change the men’s.
I Should Have Honoris not a very long book. The chapters are short, which makes it perfect for anyone who wants to read it, but can’t sit down for long sittings. There are so many personal touches and stories; it’s not a book you’ll want to speed read. I took my time with this one. Enjoying every word because this book, Khalida Brohi’s origin story, matters. It will continue to matter for many, many years to come.
Memorable Quotes “Two children, two stories, were becoming one.” “I slowly learned that “honor” killings – a custom not ordained by religion, caste, or tradition but done solely to restore men’s egos – weren’t just my tribe’s issue but took place all across Pakistan and all over the world.” “They couldn’t see the wrongs in the cultural restrictions that I was trying to describe, or the physical and emotional harm some traditional inflicted on women.” “Women’s mind-sets were also part of the problem.”
Title: I Should Have Honor; A Memoir of Hope and Pride in Pakistan Author: Khalida Brohi Publisher: Random House Copyright: 2018 ISBN: 9780399588013
I started the blog Bookish Liaisons on December 24, 2016. I love the title. In the year and half since, I have grown so much!!! What started as a passion project is now a job. Woah. How, oh how, did that happen? Well, a lot of work and late nights.
I began Bookish Liaisons with the intention of being a bookish-lifestyle blog. The name Bookish (me) Liaisons (my adventures). Over the past few months as I have traveled more, soul searched, experimented, and thought about it, I decided to change the name of my blog. I love books, and I am still just as bookish as ever. However, there are things I want to touch on more than I do. I was feeling a little hemmed in by the title Bookish Liaisons because people only saw me as a book blogger. Books come first on this site’s menu, and it’s what I’ll write about most consistently. I just don’t want to feel the need to constantly post pictures with books or write solely about books or relating to books because the word ‘book’ is in the title. My life is a lot more complex than being a bookworm. I want to start exploring that.
As I was searching for new names for my blog, I wanted to keep or, at least, incorporate Bookish Liaisons somehow. I came up with …on the B.L.
Why?
B.L. = Bookish Liaisons. Get it! I am …on the B(ookish).L(iaisons). of life, if you will.
Also it’s a play on the idiom “on the DL” short for “on the down-low” meaning “keep it hush-hush.” I liked this word play for a lot of reasons. 1) It’s word play. I am a nerd, you know. 2) So much of what I read is not necessarily mainstream. I like to read female authors, minority authors, and unlikely stories. 3) I also want to start talking more about my past of sexual abuse because I have an audience. I would be remiss not to speak about such important things when I have people paying attention to what I say. I used to lecture at Iowa State University, written blogs, talked, and advocated for change regarding sexual and domestic violence. This is not new for me in any way, shape, or form; it is just new here. I have a history, which has not been gone into on this platform, and I want that to change. 4) I also want to advocate and educate myself and others on issues of intolerance, racism, and more because these things need to change, and unfortunately they’re all still kept pretty hush-hush – along with point three. 5) The fun stuff: food, clothes, restaurants, vacations, etc. I don’t necessarily do, wear, see, eat, or go to popular places. I like to find the new and different. I like supporting small, local, independently owned, and/female business.
Mostly, …on the B.L. is meant to use my platform to help affect change, encourage others to use their voices, or support people and business who haven’t found theirs yet. That being said, I can’t always live that way. Target is pretty great. (Not sponsored, but I’d be happy to chat!)
Yuval Noah Harari is the #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Sapiens, he returns with his latest work 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. The future is an unknown, but Harari uses his knowledge of history to look into the possibilities of tomorrow.
I am a person who is always on the brink of an existential crisis. This was a hard book to read because so much of it ran along the lines of humans may become irrelevant. Among all the other topics Harari discusses, there was a lot of pausing of the reading to collect my thoughts, have a cup of tea, and remind myself anarchy would be worse… probably.
21 Lessons for the 21st Century is a really interesting read. I can’t speak on the accuracy of everything because, well, I was battling my existential tendencies too much to research the things I don’t know. Technology, biotech, and the foundations of our society are the main concepts the book revolves around. Through these, Harari explores the meaning of how we as a civilization functions today, and how that will change as technology evolves and becomes ever more important in our daily lives, careers, medicine, government, and more.
Harari discusses everything from the job crisis to the algorithm taking over free will to the importance of AI and so much more. He uses historical references from many different cultures and times to support his opinion. Irrelevance and inequality kept cropping up throughout the text. The writing is very engaging and interesting. He writes clearly. Many books by scholars can get muddled with complicated text and references. Harari doesn’t fall into that trap. His writing appeals to the masses with a strong voice, clear message, and enough backstory to his references that they make sense.
There is a sense of humor to Harari’s writing. It usually has a dark twist, which I personally appreciate. The book is split into five parts with several chapters each. The chapters have several sections. I really enjoyed the names of these sections; they were quippy like “Germans and Gorillas” and “Artificial Intelligence and Natural Stupidity.”
I have a feeling this is going to be another highly talked about book, when 21 Lessons for the 21st Century comes out on September 4, 2018. You should definitely check it out, unless you’re hyper prone to existential crisis, then limit yourself to a few pages a day.
The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh was loaned to me by my friend, Amanda of Amanda Bee’s Florals. It’s a great easy read combining a few things I love: language, flowers, and books. I needed something light to interrupt the maelstrom of books I’m reading to catch up after vacation.
Victoria Jones is newly emancipated from the foster system. She had always been a problem child and felt no reason to change. Homeless, she found a job in the one place she could: a flower shop. Her only good foster home taught her about the Victorian meanings for flowers. Her years of challenging everyone and everything combined with the foster system and constant changes, she lacked social skills. Flowers were her only means of feeling whole and communicating with the world.
Diffenbaugh demonstrates a deep understanding for the struggles foster kids endure in the system. She and her husband adopted a son out of the foster system, and the co-founder of the Camellia Network. It is an endemic close to her heart. The Language of Flowers is deeply touching and heartbreaking. Victoria yearns for the universal human desires of connection, acceptance, forgiveness, and love. Flowers help her find everything she is looking for from within and the outside world.
The meanings of flowers have always intrigued me, so this was fun to read. At the end of the novel, there is a short dictionary of flowers and their meanings. The writing is well-done and compelling. The plot is well thought out and supports the underlying theme that the foster system repeatedly and continually lets children down every step of the way. It wraps all the loose ends up nicely into a happy ending. The foreshadowing throughout the book is subtle, but still obvious enough the plot lays itself out in the first 87 pages.
I enjoyed reading The Language of Flowers in an afternoon. It was a pleasant surprise from what I thought it would be: a sappy love story. It has much deeper themes with an underlying call to action.
Memorable Quotes “Mothers must all secretly despise their children for the inexcusable pain of childbirth.”
Title: The Language of Flowers Author: Vanessa Diffenbaugh Publisher: Ballantine Books Copyright: 2011 ISBN: 9780345525550
Read Yes Length 288 Quick Review A novel about the desire to understand people and situations. The desire is rarely satisfied, but you don’t have to understand to connect and care.
The Caregiver by Samuel Park was published posthumously. He passed away from stomach cancer at the age of 41. It is hard to read this novel without seeing it as being written out of a place of hope and sadness.
Mara Alencar is a young woman living in the United States sans documents after a childhood watching atrocities in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She is the caretaker to a woman dying from cancer. She reminisces about her childhood home and her mother, Ana. Mara is both caretaker and child to her mother. Like most children there is a duality to her. She understands more than the adults around her realize, but she also is only able to accept the world as it appears to her without perceiving the nuance, complexity, and difficulty that is being human.
The writing style is very beautiful. Park allows Mara to witness situations as a child she cannot understand, but the reader, with adult experiences, sees what she cannot. Lacing the present with the past, brings a fullness to Mara’s adulthood that would otherwise result in a flat character. Park uses lexical foreshadowing to create emotional space between characters without giving away any events to come. The use of Portuguese words brings the reader closer to Mara’s cultural heritage.
Park captures the experience of trying to understand a situation from the outside. There is a yearning for understanding in Mara, which comes to fruition through her connecting with those around her.
Title: The Caregiver Author: Samuel Park Publisher: Simon & Schuster Copyright: 2018 ISBN: 9781501182426
