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sawdahjaulim's reviews
95 reviews
How We Met: A Memoir of Love and Other Misadventures by Huma Qureshi
adventurous
funny
hopeful
inspiring
fast-paced
5.0
Book4of2022. Story of my life. Omg 😂😂😂
I couldn't stop laughing at how relatable that is.
I'm a Sawdah who married a Stephane. 😂
Full review coming up soon.
I couldn't stop laughing at how relatable that is.
I'm a Sawdah who married a Stephane. 😂
Full review coming up soon.
Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad
challenging
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
5.0
A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
5.0
Living Out Islam: Voices of Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims by Scott Siraj al-Haqq Kugle
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
Against the Loveless World by Susan Abulhawa
adventurous
hopeful
inspiring
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
5.0
OK. I don't know what to do with my life anymore.
As much as I slowed my reading and picked up 3 other books to read simultaneously, I couldn't but sit my ass down and finish this one.
.
I'm not the novel type, I mostly read non fiction. Because, I tell myself real life stories are enough to deal with already. But, but. Then I fell upon Susan Abulhawa work. Which is fact fiction! Aye.
.
Now let me explain, I'm reading i$r&l1 Apartheid by Ben white and 10 Myths about i$r&le by Ilan Pappe and Noam Chomsky. All 3 gave me timelines, road maps, numbers, dates, statistics. But in Susan Abulhawa's Against The Loveless World, it showed me P%lestin!an as human beings, with as much dreams, desires, faith, hope, anger, sadness and love as any other. Instead of knowing and understanding the war, you now feel the war and can empathize better with the people. My heart will no longer be the same.
.
The title Against The Loveless World is known to be inspired by James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time.
Quote: It was a letter to his nephew, Big James. “Go back. Can you please read the last line again?” I asked.
“Here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.... if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived.”
“Do you think that’s how we’ve survived?” I asked.
He put the book down, thought for a moment, and looked at me. “I don’t see how else anyone can survive colonialism. Understanding our own condition, I think in saying ‘loved each other,’ Baldwin doesn’t just mean the living. To survive by loving each other means to love our ancestors too. To know their pain, struggles, and joys. It means to love our collective memory, who we are, where we come from,”
Do you think Baldwin would say we should love Israelis?”
“I don’t think that’s necessarily what Baldwin is saying. I think he just means that we should fortify ourselves with love when we approach them. It’s more about our own state of grace, of protecting our spirits from their denigration of us; about knowing that our struggle is rooted in morality, and that the struggle itself is not against them as a people, but against what infects them—the idea that they are a better form of human, that God prefers them, that they are inherently a superior race, and we are disposable.”
Israel’s occupation is pretty much what you see on the news. But they don’t show our weddings, cafés, nightlife, shopping, art and music scenes, universities, landscape, farming, harvests. It’s not what I imagined. At the same time, it is everything I imagined.”
“Television makes it look like an endless war zone,”
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
As much as I slowed my reading and picked up 3 other books to read simultaneously, I couldn't but sit my ass down and finish this one.
.
I'm not the novel type, I mostly read non fiction. Because, I tell myself real life stories are enough to deal with already. But, but. Then I fell upon Susan Abulhawa work. Which is fact fiction! Aye.
.
Now let me explain, I'm reading i$r&l1 Apartheid by Ben white and 10 Myths about i$r&le by Ilan Pappe and Noam Chomsky. All 3 gave me timelines, road maps, numbers, dates, statistics. But in Susan Abulhawa's Against The Loveless World, it showed me P%lestin!an as human beings, with as much dreams, desires, faith, hope, anger, sadness and love as any other. Instead of knowing and understanding the war, you now feel the war and can empathize better with the people. My heart will no longer be the same.
.
The title Against The Loveless World is known to be inspired by James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time.
Quote: It was a letter to his nephew, Big James. “Go back. Can you please read the last line again?” I asked.
“Here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world.... if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived.”
“Do you think that’s how we’ve survived?” I asked.
He put the book down, thought for a moment, and looked at me. “I don’t see how else anyone can survive colonialism. Understanding our own condition, I think in saying ‘loved each other,’ Baldwin doesn’t just mean the living. To survive by loving each other means to love our ancestors too. To know their pain, struggles, and joys. It means to love our collective memory, who we are, where we come from,”
Do you think Baldwin would say we should love Israelis?”
“I don’t think that’s necessarily what Baldwin is saying. I think he just means that we should fortify ourselves with love when we approach them. It’s more about our own state of grace, of protecting our spirits from their denigration of us; about knowing that our struggle is rooted in morality, and that the struggle itself is not against them as a people, but against what infects them—the idea that they are a better form of human, that God prefers them, that they are inherently a superior race, and we are disposable.”
Israel’s occupation is pretty much what you see on the news. But they don’t show our weddings, cafés, nightlife, shopping, art and music scenes, universities, landscape, farming, harvests. It’s not what I imagined. At the same time, it is everything I imagined.”
“Television makes it look like an endless war zone,”
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐