Some thoughts on Books

What is an anti-blurb, teaching an online class and the my current favorite children's book

Last weekend I traveled to Bradford to speak about The Hour of the Wolf with Alexandra Pringle at their wonderful literature festival . I’ve been to Bradford before but never seen it in sunlight. It felt like visiting a new city. I met so many lovely people - men who had marched with my father Murtaza against General Zia ul Haq’s dictatorship in the late 1970s, a father who brought his daughter to a book talk to show her that girls could and should always speak their minds, and many women who had similar stories to mine - too many women. We hugged and traded stories of shame and defiance. A very sweet young woman named Bushra gave me a bookmark as a gift and I tried to convince Alexandra to adopt a dog with no luck…yet.

Sometimes we find ourselves in reading ruts and I'm no different. I’ve always loved reading and have read voraciously ever since I first could. But covid really damaged my reading and then work and life and children have meant that I don’t have the time to read that I used to.

I take my books incredibly seriously. When I love a book, I make sure everyone on earth knows about it and will go on and on for years to make sure as many readers as possible get it into their hands. When I have been asked to review books and have not liked the book, I’ve often gone back to the magazine or newspaper and told the editor that I practice the ‘first do no harm’ principle when it comes to reviews. I don’t want to hurt a book’s chance out in the world. I always prefer give it the chance to find a reviewer who will see something in it that I missed. But if I’m offended by a book - if it is lazy, racist, Islamophobic, misogynistic, spurious, untruthful - then I don’t pull any punches. I have a system for my bookshelf that only I understand - organized in rows according to how much I like the book + fiction or non-fiction and though I’m generous with my things and have no issue with friends borrowing clothes or shoes or furniture I absolutely hate it when people touch my books and worse ask to borrow them. It makes my skin crawl with discomfort.

I could go on about this and my many other rules, traditions and systems but I wanted to share some recent thoughts:

1. Children’s books are so crucial. They have to be fun. If you want your little ones to be readers, you’ve got to find them quality stuff. I have a lot of favorites in this category - let me know if you want a separate piece on this - but this is my latest discovery and it is an absolute scream:

   

2. I will absolutely never read a book that has this man’s blurb on the cover. Just a glance at his views on Israel tell you everything you need to know - but in Bradford I had this funny experience of picking up a couple of books and seeing SSM’s blurbs on the covers. I put them back without hesitation. No thanks! I don’t read anything written by Zionists but now putting their blurbs on the covers of books has turned me off what are probably fine books too. No to Zionists everywhere.

   

3. I think one of the worst books I ever subjected my eyes to was Bernard Henri Levy’s book on Daniel Pearl. I read it because it was written about Karachi, my city, and I wanted to know what was said. Of course, I knew BHL is a pompous nitwit whose raging Islamophobia is almost as hard to disguise as his narcissism, but even going into the book with remarkably low standards I was amazed at how bad and fraudulent it was. I mention this only to say that William Dalrymple wrote the greatest book review in history about it. BHL is a famous Zionist and a laughable one if ever there was one. I will forever see him as Inspecteur Clouseau thanks to Dalrymple.

   

4. This is something that really affected me: in Bradford, half an hour before my event, I sat up and decided that I didn’t know enough about Algeria’s fight for freedom from French rule. I pattered off to Waterstones to pick up a few books hoping that I wouldn’t find any blurbed by Simon Sebag Montifiore. Worse still, I didn’t find any at all. I scoured the European history section, row after row after row after row of World War II and books on Nazis, but nothing on one of the bloodiest and cruelest colonial rules in history. I found the French section laden with tomes on Charles de Gaulle, more World War II (hello Vichy collaborators) but absolutely nothing on their bloody, monstrous rape and pillage of Algeria. The violence they enacted in Algeria over 132 years just erased, poof, like that. As though it never happened. It’s not only that they were vanishing their thievery and colonialism but more so that they were also erasing the glorious liberation of the Algerian people. This is the history they don’t want us to know, to study, to memorize and aspire to. And this is absolutely the history we must chase and find and memorialize.

5. This is why the Anti-Imperialist Book Club is so important. I hope you are getting on with our July read, A Mask The Colour of the Sky, written in an Israeli torture camp. Stay tuned for more on a conversation around the novel.

   

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Lastly, I’m teaching an online class about memoir writing based on The Hour of the Wolf.

You can sign up here. I always have full scholarships for all my classes as well as partial ones. We will have time to do Q&A as we always do and I can’t wait to see you all on October 14th.

Let me know if you want more thoughts on books, bookstores and more and until then, happy reading.