Currently Reading...

I'll tell you one of the biggest perks of being done with undergrad life is that I can finally get some time to read a novel or two without feeling even a wee-bit guilty. I set out to read a book a week for the summer and managed to get as far as week five before finally Obama's "The Audacity of Hope" and Saima Wahib's "In My Father's Country" slowed me down.

The first one is President Obama's recollection of his years in Congress and as an Illinois senator. I was a little fooled that the book would be a light autobiography. It has plenty of that, but it is also filled with discussions of the US constitution (he was a constitutional law professor after all) and policy recommendations for congress and so on. It's not the kind of book that I wanted to (or even could) breeze past in a week. Three weeks in, after only managing a third of the book, I put it aside for lighter reads. I've edited my originally ambitious plan for this book, I'll try a chapter a week so that I can unpack it.

The second I found in the book-giveaway shelf (yes, free books up for grabs) of another department of the place I interned for over the summer. It caught my eye because it is set in Afghanistan and I am generally curious about the Middle East -- in a "I'm probably never going to experience this for myself" kind of way. But it was really hard to read. I must say, I loved that the author painted a very vivid picture of the US Military efforts in post-9/11 Afghanistan. I benefited from reading about more than the casualties and the atrocities. Instead of a general US-Army good/Suicide bomber bad view, the account provides a more humanized complexity of the mistakes that the US troops make and the intentions behind them, as well as explaining from an Afghani and a Pashtun's perspective why these attempts of good-will are actually insults.

And finally, a friend of mine recommended (and later gave me) these next series of books after I talked about Saima Wahib's "In My Father's Country" and Khaled Hosseini's books. It's a mystery/whoddunit by an American author, Zoe Ferraris, set in Saudi Arabia. The book offers a different view of the region. Ferraris was married to a Saudi Arabian and lived in the country for a significant number of years and thus, I would like to trust she knows about what she's writing about -- but a few instances made me pause and have to remind myself that an American wrote the book. All the same, I rushed through the book I was reading between part 1 and part 2 of the series so that I could get to part 2 and be absorbed in the world of Katya and Nayir -- I'm trying not to give spoilers.

This is my attempt to get back to blogging about my life because I am awesome! Please, bear with me!