I AM MALALA The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by Christina Lamb and Malala Yousafzai

*This book review is part of my “Reading Around the World” Project which you can read about here

Most people have probably heard of Malala Yousafzia, who was shot by members of the Taliban when she was 15 years old. She had gained a fair amount of attention internationally for standing up for women’s rights and education, which is why she ended up being targeted by the Taliban. She has since won a Nobel Peace Prize for her continued activism and bravery. I Am Malala is a story of Malala’s education and the beginning of her activism, leading up to the moment of the attack and its immediate aftermath. v

I am sure that this will be an unpopular opinion but I thought this book was boring and not particularly well written. No disrespect to Malala and Christina, I think her story is interesting but as a book, it was not particularly gripping. I am sure she is an amazing young person and I know that she was only 16 when she co-wrote this book but I still thought that overall, it wasn’t that great. Malala unintentionally comes off as slightly pompous in the way she talks about herself in comparison to her other schoolmates and her siblings. Perhaps some of my views on this stem from the internalized misogyny I have that tells me women are supposed to be humble. Confident and proud, but still humble.

Moreso I think it comes from the fact that the way she is centered in the book leaves all the other characters (aside from, occasionally, her father) in the background, even though they seem to be pretty important players in the story. I want to know more about her mother, who seems only to be mentioned a few times. I get the sense that Malala looks down on her mother for not being educated and I found myself getting strangely defensive of her mother and little brothers. The way the book discussed her relationship with her father made it feel like she was the favorite and that everyone else fell by the wayside.

The focus of the book is  mostly Malala’s educational experience leading up to her being shot by the Taliban, and less about her relationships with friends and family. Her father was one of her teachers and helped to found the school she attended, which would explain why he was featured in the book more prominently than the other people in her life. In any case, I found myself wanting more from the book than what it gave me. I totally understand that she was only 16 when the book was written and that her and her family may have wanted to keep her personal life and relationships private, but as a story it fell flat for me without more details about her relationships.

Don’t get me wrong, I am glad this book exists and that Malala has been able to use it to promote her activism. I think she is a badass and I don’t mean to sell her experience short by saying I didn’t love this book. The contrarian in me always struggles when someone is put on a pedestal, not so much because of jealousy but out of a deep belief that we need to acknowledge the wholeness of a person, which includes their less than desirable attributes. How inspiring and influential can someone be when we do not see our own flaws reflected in them? I wanted Malala and her family and her story to feel more rounded, to have more depth but it felt a little flat. I think that you can get the gist of her story and her impressive activism by reading about her, without reading the whole book.

Chernobyl: A History of Nuclear Catastrophe by Serhii Plokhy

*This book review is part of my “Reading Around the World” Project which you can read about here

Being the hypocrite I am, I of course read about the Chernobyl catastrophe for my “Ukraine” book, after just complaining about how we tend to focus on disasters when we read books about other places. My reasoning was mostly that I knew next to nothing about Chernobyl and it was an historic event with global repercussions, so it felt like I should learn about it. When I take my second literary trip around the world, I will read something entirely different from Ukraine to make up for it.

As for the book itself, it was very dense and specific. It was stuffed with detail and facts, but at times the language was too technical and I had trouble deciphering what was actually happening. If I were smarter and more attentive, I would know the exact timeline of events and understand the myriad of pressures, bad decisions, and misinformation that led to the Chernobyl explosion and its subsequent disasters. The book also argued that the incident at the Chernobyl plant was the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. 

 I feel as though Plokhy could have summarized some of the events to make the book more approachable, but then again, maybe I was not the intended audience. Some people love books that cause them to pause and research after every paragraph, but my eyes tend to glaze over when a book is too detailed or dense.

When reading, I usually prefer personal stories to engross me and while Plokhy did talk a lot about the different characters at play, even that information felt sort of dry. In his defense, he was trying to give a well-rounded and fully-informed history of the Chernobyl disaster and how it came to be, which I think he did a splendid job at. It just felt very academic overall, and I have never been good at strictly academic endeavors. I learn best by absorbing stories and anecdotes and the anecdotes in this book were very rigid and did not draw me into the story.

All of that being said, I learned a lot from this book. I knew almost nothing about Chernobyl and I honestly know very little about Soviet history, so this gave me some background for that as well. I still have a lot more to learn, but we will save that for another book. While a very different catastrophe, the way that the Soviet government handled the Chernobyl explosion was somewhat reminiscent of how the Trump administration handled COVID-19. There was a lot of downplaying of the danger of the disaster and allowing people to continue to be put at risk to save face. I know they are very very different scenarios, but they did seem to bear similarities. 

Anyways, I did not love this book, but I don’t think it was the fault of the book or the writing. It just wasn’t in my wheelhouse. If you want to know all the particulars of the events leading up to the Chernobyl explosion and the fallout that proceeded, I would definitely recommend checking this one out.

After hearing someone mention their goal of reading a book from every country on my most recent favorite podcast The Stacks, I was inspired to do the same. Not out of a need to have bragging rights or set a ridiculous goal for myself, but because the more I thought about it the more I realized how homogenous my reading history has been. Even when I read books about other countries, they are generally written by US or European authors. 

There are so many countries I know next to nothing about, and the best way I learn is through stories. Now I know reading ONE book from each country is not going to give me all-encompassing knowledge, but I figure it’s a good start. Once I finish I intend to continue being more aware and intentional about diversifying my reading. I want to reiterate that one book can not be representative of a country as a whole, but it is always beneficial to read about stories that are different from your own AND also to read stories where you see yourself reflected. You may be surprised to find yourself in stories that seem so far from your own experience. 

I have opted to do this “project” for the pure and simple reason that I want to. Because I love books and I love absorbing information and stories. My favorite thing about this new reading goal is that it has allowed me to discover so many books I would not have normally stumbled across. The joy I get from books is only matched by the joy I get from snacking, both things make me salivate with anticipation. I am so excited to read all of the books and to tell you about them.

(I credit my beautiful, messy, angry, strong, gentle inspiration of Fiona Apple for helping me put these feelings into words, you can find me wandering the streets, staying 6 feet away from all passerbys mouthing the words to all of the Fetch the Bolt Cutters album with tears welling up in my eyes)

I celebrate my 30th birthday in quarantine, whilst other bigger things are happening and mourn the loss of the one day a year I allow myself pure unadulterated love and confidence. My best friend quietly knocks on my door, comes in, kisses me on the forehead, and says ” I love you, I want you to love yourself too”.

And that’s been the work, and my goodness it’s slow, the work of loving yourself. It’s hard to explain. I don’t harbor self hatred. I actually think I am relatively great (though I’ve been told it’s not humble to say so). Some of it is this concern that other people don’t see my greatness. Some if it is always needing a list of adjectives to prove my greatness. I don’t trust that my existence is quite enough evidence.

I would love to not want that validation. I am working on it. But also, we all want validation, even if we don’t need it. In quarantine people keep talking about the need to feel productive. I read things that say “it’s ok to not be productive, take this time to just enjoy the quietness… and maybe take this time to explore a new hobby or crafting or bla bla bla”. Things that all sound to me like a different form of productivity. Everyone is posting their art and their music and their projects and I try to fight off the feeling that I am lesser because I am not creating. Truth be told, I am not a creator. I like to sing, sometimes I write, but those things do not drive me. I wish the things I was good at were external, tangible, shareable. They are not. I often wonder if the few tangible things I make/do are done just so I can get that brief surge of validation I am so desperately, shamefully thirty for.

Ultimately, it comes down to trying to trust in my intrinsic self worth, which I so easily believe in for other people but seem to struggle with when it comes to myself. I tell my cousin “I think we have quiet assets“. They aren’t skills that produce anything you can see or hear or read or consume. Which is not to say that people who have tangible skills don’t also have quiet assets. Which is not to say it is not just as dangerous to rely on external validation even when it’s “easy” to come by.

Here are my personal quiet assets: I’m an observer/absorber. I read, I watch, I listen, I constantly recalculate my world view based on the information I take in. I find people’s value beneath whatever external value they present (you could say I seek out their quiet assets). I put so much effort into fostering the energy needed in the spaces I enter. I meet people where they are at and try to never ask them to be anywhere other than where they are. I am easily amused, easily contented. While some would certainly argue otherwise, I would say I am generally good at communicating and translating various miscommunications between others.

The thing about quiet assets, is that we’re taught we aren’t supposed to be celebrated for them. We’re supposed to show humility. We can show of our artwork and our music  and our writing and our food but these other things we’re supposed to leave uncelebrated. That’s part of it, a strange martyrdom to be good without ever being recognized as such. And sure, validation should probably not be our main motivation for being good, but that doesn’t mean we can’t recognize it.

And I know. I know I know I know, I should just have this strong inner confidence. I should not need the external validation. And sure, I agree. I do intrinsically believe in my own worth. I know I’m a magical fucking unicorn. But sometimes I feel worthless anyways. And when I feel that way, I’m scared to ask for validation, because I’ve been taught to think one of my best quiet assets is always knowing what everyone else needs and never asking for anything else in return. I can’t share something tangible for a boost.

Yes, I am working on building my inner fire. Working on a fire so strong that it can’t be put out. But here is my plea to you. Recognize your quiet assets and the quiet assets you see in others and celebrate them. Remember it is OK to “just” be good and kind. You don’t need to prove more than that. Remember that I see you and all your quiet, yet large strengths. To be honest, I don’t give a shit about what you make aside from the fact that you, a person I love, has created it and I love the work you put into it and the time you put into it and I love that you exist to create it. I love that it is another way I get to experience you, but I would love you just as much if you did not create it.

I do not have a lot of skills. I don’t mean that as an insult, it’s just sort of a fact. But if there is one thing I am good at, it is loving people. I really love the SHIT out of people. Sometimes to the extent that it looks like I am loving them to the detriment of myself. And I appreciate this observation from people, I know that it is them wanting to protect me. What they don’t always realize, is that I have probably, at one point, loved them to my own detriment as well.

I am not a saint or a martyr. I love people with the hopes that the love will be reciprocated. And with the constant frustration that it is not. Which is not to say that I am not loved. In fact, I would say that people tend to love me just as much as I love them. Love is not particularly quantifiable, though you try telling my brain that. But not everyone expresses their love in a way that I understand or can see. And this has always been hard for me. It will probably always be hard for me. I am easily jealous, which is annoying because I love friendship and love. But I guess I hate when I feel left out of it. But individual relationships are important. My jealousy is at war with my general ideals.

There’s been a lot of shit going on in my personal life. To put it mildly. And I have been chugging along because I have my grandma’s resilience engrained in me. And I know that everyone is worried about me, or I sense it, and I am so grateful for the protection. But here is the thing about me. Loving people is the only thing I really give a shit about. And in a way, the rest of the garbage doesn’t matter. I don’t mean to belittle my own feelings, because they are valid and vast, but in the end the only thing I want to focus on is love. And I have what I believe to be an endless supply. So don’t worry about me wasting it. I will always have more. And I am learning, always learning, to be a little more selfless. To learn about giving love with the understanding that the people I give it to will not always be able to return it with the same force. (Taking care of many children is a good practice in this). But that does not mean it was ever a waste.

My therapist has reminded me before that we do not deserve anything. Good or bad. And I try to remember that. When I feel concerned that all the love I dole out is not being reciprocated. I think I have loved people just so that they would love me back. Or I used to be worried that was the only reason I loved people at all. But maybe that is not true. Maybe it is just what feels natural to me. Maybe it is just what makes me feel full. And yes, sometimes or often loving people hurts a little bit. But I just have to believe that I am strong enough to love and keep loving through the heart break. I have never regretted loving someone.  And I suspect I never will. (I would also like to note I’ve never been in an abusive relationship, I don’t ever want to downplay or dismiss the trauma of that experience).

Sometimes I wonder what Grandma would think. If she would feel protective over my heart, if she would tell me to give a little bit less. But you know what, I think she would agree, that loving someone is never a waste. And she already knows I will always be OK. She never seemed worried about me (except that one time she gave me a talk about how I sat). She seemed to have this faith that I had (we all have) a resilience in me that will always get me through. So I don’t know what the moral of the story is. I guess that life is hard and it will shake you. That it will make you doubt yourself over and over again. And that largely, interpersonal relationships are messy and hard and communication is so much more difficult than it seems like it should be and that people’s feelings are messy and confusing. But loving is easy. If you just shake away all those other things and focus on that warm glow. So fuck it. I think I’m doing the right thing by just moving through the world loving people. And I don’t think I will regret it. And I’m not so worried about the things I am not accomplishing (though perhaps sometimes worried about the people I am not loving). And I don’t expect other people to find the same solace in loving people. It is not for everyone. But it is for me. Forgiveness, love, compassion, kindness. Forever and ever.

Heavily reminiscent of Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings, but not as good. Now, I’ve only read two books like this but I sense this trend in literature where younger people (early-mid 30’s) write stories about the reality of middle age, and I wonder how accurate they are. But I guess they ARE fiction, so they aren’t necessarily claiming accuracy.

This book was… fine, it attempted to tackle the complexities of all the different types of relationships we have in life: spouse, friendship, parent-child etc etc. But it felt like she tried to cram and address too many things into one story and it maybe fell a little short. The book was entertaining enough but I did not find myself loving any of the characters and I sort of left wondering what the “point” was. What was the overall message? Maybe something along the lines of “growing up is hard no matter how old you are”?

I have spent a lot of my time around “adults” (supposedly, I am one now) so maybe I am less intrigued by stories of middle age. I think they are not so different from other stories. Humans are humans, they have complex feelings and these complex feelings lead to complicated interactions and that is just sort of true no matter what age you are.  It just felt a like a forced story to me that maybe didn’t really end up getting to the heart of anything. It didn’t destroy me, and I think I want my books to destroy me, either by being so full of love that my heart breaks or so full of unlove that my heart breaks.

You know what book followed the path of multiple friends as they grew up and navigated life? A Little Life By Hanya Yanagihara  . The characters in that book were complicated and did not ever feel like caricatures, they felt like real people. Something about the characters in Modern Lovers felt like Straub went through a check list to build the characters, it made them feel two dimensional. I want the characters in books to be real, not to feel like the idea of a person. I just felt like there wasn’t enough heart put into each character for me to believe in them. A truly good book builds a world for you and then brings you inside of it. I don’t feel like this book did that for me. It felt like the outline of a story, with all the components but just not quite enough detail.

So, it was fine. I read it and it took my mind off of other things and it entertained me. I can’t say that I would recommend it nor can I say that I would not recommend it. But also I am still in the market for books that will floor me, and I haven’t read one in a while. I suspect that some of this is that I get older I have learned to compartmentalize and to not let each and everything destroy  me. And I wonder if the makes me less susceptible or receptive to things. I wonder if in becoming a little more sturdy and and resilient I have lost a little of my ability to be in awe. Or maybe, maybe I just haven’t read the right thing in a while.

 

 

I am perplexed, because when I went to read about this book there was a lot of somewhat negative reviews. That, in itself, is fine but confusing when I seemed hard pressed to find a single negative things about My Absolute Darling, which was terrible. Perhaps because people were comparing Future Home of the Living God to Louise Erdrich’s other books? And also she is a woman?

I have only read one other Louise Erdrich book, I believe it was Love Medicine but I truly remember nothing about it, even after reading a description of the novel. So maybe I’m not that good of a reader after all (that is actually half of why I started this blog, so that I could document what I have read and remember it better). Anyways, my point is, unlike many other people I know, I am not yet an avid Louise fanatic, so I didn’t have a lot to compare this book to, which may have made it easier for me to enjoy it.

I still haven’t read a book that just walloped me with it’s amazingness, but honestly I feel like those books are few and far between and have just as much to do with when you read them as with how well they are written. But I did enjoy this book. It felt like a combination of The Handmaid’s Tale and Flight Behavior. 

The story is of adoptee Cedar Hawk Songmaker, whose birth parents are Native American and adoptive parents are liberal hippies. Cedar discovers she is pregnant just as America is morphing into a new dystopian civilization where children are rare and the government is rounding up all the pregnant women and housing them, presumably to take their children as soon as they are born (but under the “guise” of offering care for the pregnant women during these rough times). As the world begin to unravel Cedar reaches out to her birth mother, to try to learn more about her genetic history and about her roots as she prepares for her new baby to come. And so the story goes from there. (Maybe I shouldn’t call these book reviews, as I never actual describe the plot of the books, but I figure you have the internet and you can find a description if you’re really interested. Chances are the only people who read book reviews are the people who already read the book, and they don’t really need a play by play of the plot).

It was definitely a dystopian future type book, but it felt lighter and almost comedic. I think some readers felt that the book was lacking dimension, but I felt like that might have been what she was going for. Taking a thing that is very serious, and showing us the ways in which, as humans, we adapt to the new normal and finding some amount of humor in what is objectively a dark and troubling scenario. Perhaps that was not at all her intention, but I enjoyed that the book felt strangely uneventful in the midst of the whole world falling about and Cedar being in nearly constant danger. After having read so many books about dystopian futures this one felt oddly refreshing, as though it just wasn’t taking itself too seriously. It was still gripping and I wanted to know what was going to happen next, but it was muted and softly comedic, which offered a lightness to the book that I enjoyed.

 

Wowowowoww I hated this book. It made me feel gross. Essentially, the book is about Turtle, a 14 year old girl who is growing up in a strange and precarious environment. I suspect that we are supposed to see Turtle as this amazingly fierce independent girl, fighting against impossible odds. But honestly all I could think was “WHO THE FUCK WROTE THIS?” and probable a quarter of the way through I thought “huh, I bet this was written by a man” and then I looked it up and sure enough.

Turtle is, theoretically, a super bad ass young lady. But something felt off. There are so many horrendous things that happen through out the book, but the horrendous things were not in themselves off putting. It was more so that a person has put so much time and energy into imagining and painting these horrendous scenarios. As I have not experienced abuse, I feel like it is maybe unfair for me to say, but I felt a little insulted for abuse survivors when reading this book. It felt like if a white man tried to write an in depth story about the struggle of being a woman of color. The author is a man and while it is possible he has experienced abuse, he certainly has never endured the type of abuse Turtle is subject to in the book. It felt gross. It was overly detailed in certain realms (I felt like I was reading an NRA magazine with all the in depth descriptions of guns) and yet seemed to delve very little into what the characters were actually feeling.

To be fair, I think he was trying to show the ways in which young people experiencing abuse whose world is built around their abusers perhaps do not have the tools to process what is happening to them. But I just didn’t believe it. It doesn’t seem ok to take all these terrible things that happen to real people to use them to write an entertaining story. I didn’t feel like there was a deeper message to the story. I don’t feel like I learned something. I don’t feel like I was entertained. Granted, I did read the book all the way through and I did read it rapidly. But less because it was a page turner and more because I just wanted to get it over with.

I have read plenty of upsetting memoirs and yes, they are hard to read but I find that there is heart to them. Usually my take away is, for better or worse, people are amazingly adaptable and everyone’s experience is “normal” to them. It is not a story being told to present all the gory details of their life, it is just a means of explaining who they are and what they have learned by being who they are. A “here are the illuminated cities at the center of me” (Richard Siken). This book did not feel like that, maybe partially because it was fiction and felt so obviously fictional to me. It felt like it was gruesome for the sake of being gruesome, and gruesomeness in itself is not interesting.

Anyways, honestly skip it, don’t read it, and don’t get accidentally confuse it for one of the other thousand books that came out in the last few years with a similar “floral/plant wallpaper” book cover, which seems to be the trend these days.

I got a little side tracked by change and I’ve been trying to just experience things instead of analyze them and mourn them and honestly, writing isn’t always conducive to that. So I may have missed a few books along the way, but I’ll be the first to admit these aren’t ground breaking book reviews, so I think we will all survive.

Here is why you should read the books that are sitting in your house: they’re probably good! This is what I discovered about Flight Behavior, which has been sitting in my room for 4 years. Poisonwood Bible was the first Kingsolver I ever read and quite honestly one of the things that sparked my interest in Africa and the long history of colonization of that giant continent that we tend to know so little about. I also read The Bean Trees which I oddly remember so little of. I have settled on the opinion that I am a Barbara Kingsolver fan.

Flight Behavior is a story about Dellorabia, a 28 year old mother of two from a small impoverished farming town with few prospects of escape and how her life is changed when some monarch butterflies get lost in migration and end up settling on Dellorabia’s land. And I loved it. It shows the ways in which small changes cause slow, long ripples, perhaps a metaphor for global warming, which is a big theme of the story as well.

I mostly read books for characters and if I can’t like a character then I often have trouble liking the book. But this one was chock full of wonderful characters. Kingsolver has a way of making her characters feel real, and of making you love them in thew way you can only when you see the whole of someone.

To be honest, I’m no good at book reviews in the sense of giving a rough outline of the story the book tells. The story of butterflies was much less intriguing to me than the story of Dellorabia, but what can I say, I’m a people person. Dellorabia came across as a hero, in my mind. A woman who was not given many opportunities and ended up following the path of least resistance, because that is just what we do sometimes, even when it is not in our own best interest. Dellorabia is kind and open minded but ultimately willful. Some part of her is always fighting against complacency, and I admired that. It was a joy to watch her character grow into her agency. I hope to learn something from her myself.

The book serves as a reminder that we tend to live in our own bubbles and usually fail to look outside the comfort of them. That we can all be a little too self-righteous and unforgiving. It shows us the growing pains of being humans and the ways in which our growth is never-ending, whether or not we like it. Me, I hate that. The people who have known me my whole life know the extent of my resistance to change. I don’t like it. I process it too slowly. I find that it hurts too much. And yet. It is constant and inevitable and maybe there is some benefit in learning to let it wash over you and maybe even creating change for yourself (she admits begrudgingly), despite the aches and pains involved. Perhaps this is easier than digging your heals in and fighting against it. I suspect this will be the lesson I have to learn and relearn, my whole life.

Anyways, read it!

 

I read this book over a brief weekend getaway and it was the perfect easy and engaging book for a weekend of reading by the stove. It was not, by any means, the greatest book I have ever read, but it kept me interested. The story focuses on the Butler sisters, and follows them as they try to figure out how to take care of their nieces after the oldest sister, Althea and her husband are arrested. It is an interesting study in family dynamics and while I certainly enjoyed the story and wanted to know what happened next, I felt like the book lacked a little depth. There were so many story lines and I felt outside of the story but wanted to be fully submerged.

I am starting to wonder if there is something wrong with me because I haven’t read a book that I have loved in a while. Maybe my empathy is broken. I just want to read one that cracks my heart wide open. In any case, this book did not offer me that, but it did keep me interested. I read it in two days and did not put it down. But already the characters are blurry to me and I feel like that is because the author, Anissa Gray, just lightly delved into each character. They never felt totally real to me. The story is told through the three sisters, each chapter alternating between characters so that you get a story that is pieced together from multiple points of view. The only thing is, each character felt reserved. Even though it was told through first person narration I felt like each character was keeping me at arm’s length. Maybe there was a reason for it, but I didn’t find it effective.

I do think I often read books less for the stories they tell and more for the characters, if that makes sense. I like a book to have a plot and maybe the faintest glimmer of an obtuse message, but mostly I read books as a study in humans. So books that focus on the story more than the characters involved in the story usually fail to wow me. I keep thinking and comparing everything to my #1 book of all time The Brothers K by David James Duncan. The characters in that book are everything. The story is also important, but the characters are so real and complicated and consistent. I love the way you get to watch the characters grow up in the book, and how they always seem to true to themselves, even when it is to their own detriment.

I didn’t get that from this book. I felt like there was something missing. I also didn’t hate this book, by any means. I enjoyed it and would probably tell people to read it as it was quick and enjoyable. But I am ready for a book that makes me laugh and cry and feel all the feelings. So if anyone has any recommendations for me, get at me!