I haven’t read a book in four months!
Tonight, when I came home from work I was craving to hold a book, smell it’s page, curl up and runaway to another world… a fictious world. Oh how I miss being sucked into a story.
I went to Virgin to check out the books there. I think their book variety has improved. There were so many books I was interested in but I only came out with four books. I don’t even know which book to start with!
The books are:
Resistance: My Life For Lebanon by Soha Bechara
This scathing memoir of a Christian and communist Lebanese woman is devoted not only to the author’s as-yet short but eventful life, but also to a fierce indictment of Israeli military involvement in Lebanon and beyond. Bechara relates the childhood experience of war that formed her later persona as a strong and fearless crusader against Israeli occupation, her 1988 attempt to kill a militia leader in Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon, and her capture and brutal incarceration. She reiterates throughout her memoir her abhorrence of violence and her view that her action was nevertheless acceptable and necessary. “After thirteen years of civil war and all kinds of horror, I realized that I was still just as resistant to brutality and force, still just as disturbed by violence, even the fictional violence shown on television…And I knew that I would have to overcome this repulsion.” Her relentless denunciations of Israeli actions in Lebanon may lead some readers to question her objectivity regarding exceedingly complicated and painful events, but her story is a riveting and impassioned one that will keep the reader fascinated.
The Accidental by Ali Smith
The character at the center of The Accidental is called Amber, although she may not be a character at all. A family is taking a holiday in Norfolk when she arrives on their doorstep. Michael is an adulterous English lecturer, and he assumes Amber is his wife’s friend. Eve, his wife, assumes she’s one of Michael’s students. The two children, Astrid, who is 12, and Magnus, who is 17, are just happy for the company. Each member of the family tells their story about their interactions with Amber, who befriends Astrid, seduces Magnus and saves him from suicide, bewitches Michael, and understands Eve’s aloofness from the rest of them. Amber, conceived in a movie theatre, never comes into focus for any of them, perhaps only being some sort of spirit that visits them all, and changing their lives in the process. Ali Smith’s novel has received high praise with the Sunday Times saying, “Smith has written a proper novel with a beginning, a middle and an end, but turned it into an exuberantly inventive series of variations. At her beginning, each character is facing some kind of dead end. By the end, everything, including the story of the stranger on the doorstep, is ready to begin again. And in the middle is a fable as beautifully formed and as astringently intelligent as her barefoot delinquent angel.”
The Sea by John Banville
The sea is where Max Morden, a middle-aged art historian, retreats after his wife dies of cancer. Max goes to the Irish seaside village of Ballyless where he once spent a holiday as a boy. While there, he alternately remembers his life with his wife and that summer holiday where he became infatuated with the wealthy and sophisticated Grace family, first with the mother, and then with the daughter. These relationships with these three women were the uneasy mess of life that helped define who he has come to be. Even now in retrospect, Max must remember even the most difficult truths if he is to find solace in them. John Banville’s novel has received mostly positive reviews with The Scotsman saying, “This is a novel in which all Banville’s remarkable gifts come together to produce a real work of art, disquieting, disturbing, beautiful, intelligent, and in the end, surprisingly, offering consolation.”
A Promise to Nadia by Zana Muhsen
Ten years ago Zana Muhsen escaped from the life of slavery in the Yemen into which her father had sold her as a child bride, leaving behind her baby son, her sister Nadia, and Nadia’s two small children. As she described so powerfully in her book “Sold”, Zana made a solemn vow to Nadia that she would do everything she possibly could obtain their freedom as well. This book tells the story of those ten years; of the family’s lone campaign against the Yemeni authorities; of the refusal of their own government in London to help; and of the despair that forced them into a desperate deal with an unofficial military-style organization specializing in the recovery of abducted children.
