CBR17 Book 61: "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi

Page count: 384 pages

Rating: 3 stars

Nowhere Book Bingo 25: A Bookish Memoir/biography

CBR17 Pie Chart: Education

CBR17 Bingo: Citizen (Nafisi lived and taught in Iran during increasingly more dictatorial strictures against its citizens)

Official summary:

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi's living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.

I got this in an e-book sale during the summer of 2018, because it sounded interesting and like something I should own. It fit in a number of my reading challenges this year, so I decided to read it this summer. Unfortunately, while some of the stories Nafisi told about the increasing totalitarianism that was introduced in her country were really interesting, the actual literary analysis was rather boring, and even the historical events got a bit dry after a while.

This book is a mix between a biography, writing about Nafisi’s life in Iran as it became subject to an increasingly more authoritarian government. One of the reasons I had trouble sticking with it was that, sadly, the news cycle was so depressing and so much in the real world America was mirroring things I was reading about that it was distressing to read. With the world being the way it is at the moment, escapist reading is becoming more and more essential for my mental health. 

So I have to confess that while I didn't DNF this book, I also didn't manage to read all of it. I ended up skipping probably about half, reading the first few sections, then skipping to the last one, to see how everything ended. I also think it’s important to mention that while this book wasn’t really for me, it may be a better fit for someone else. It does feature a lot of literary analysis, though, mostly of books I have neither read nor have any interest in ever reading, so I should possibly have researched it more closely before I started it. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR15 Book 61: "Class Act" by Jerry Craft

Page count: 249 pages

Rating: 4 stars

Drew Ellis goes to the prestigious Riverdale Academy Day School, but unlike a lot of his more privileged classmates, he feels like he has to work way harder and he still might not get the same opportunities that they do. While a lot of his fellow students live in enormous mansions, Drew lives alone with his grandmother (who has to work almost constantly to provide for him). He also knows that no matter how good his grades are or which school he attends, most people are only going to see the colour of his skin. Of course, his friends Jordan and Liam have their own problems to deal with.

This is a companion novel to New Kid, which I haven't read. The good news is that you don't need to have read that book to enjoy this one, but I suspect I would have gotten even more out of this if I'd also read the first book in the series.

For our Cannonball Book Club in October, we continued last year's success of banned books, this time focusing on graphic novels. I had already read the other two we selected, This One Summer by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki and Gender Queer by Maia Kokabe, so this was the only one left for me to read. Thankfully the Oslo public library had a copy, so I was able to read it before our online discussion and Zoom meeting.

This is very highly rated on Goodreads, and I liked it a lot. I'm very much not the intended target audience, and had I been younger, I might have rated it even higher. As always when we read banned books, I am utterly baffled as to why anyone would think this was a bad thing for young people to read. This shows a very nuanced portrayal of several young individuals from very different family backgrounds and how they all, even when they might seem to have no worries, might not have perfect lives. What a terrible thing for tweens to read, apparently.

Judging a book by its cover: Craft is an excellent artist, and shows inside the comic that he's capable of drawing in a number of styles. I really like the playful cover, with some of the characters being juggled, along with the demands and responsibilities Drew faces daily. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR15 Book 51: "All Boys Aren't Blue" by George M. Johnson

Page count: 320 pages

Rating: 4 stars

CBR15 Bingo: Queer Lives

In July, the Forever Young Adult Reading Challenge prompt was Banned Books. Since All Boys Aren't Blue was the second most banned book in America during the 2021-2022 school year, only beaten by Gender Queer, and I'd had the book on my digital bookshelf for a while, it felt like a suitable book to choose. This book was also one of the book club selections last year for the Cannonball book club, when we did banned books (this year we did banned graphic novels) and I never got round to reading it back then. But now I have.

All Books Aren't Blue is a memoir aimed at young adult readers, written by queer activist George M. Johnson (they/them). The book is about growing up Black and queer, and always feeling different but not having the words to express it. Johnson wanted to give black and queer youths growing up now more of a vocabulary to talk about their own experiences. Johnson said in an interview with NPR that although the book has been banned or challenged by more than 26 school districts, it still has more defenders than detractors, and he doesn't regret writing the book. They say that "students have publicly said on record that works like mine have saved their lives, works like mine have helped them name their abusers, works like mine have helped them come to terms with who they are and feel validated in the fact that there is somebody else that exists in the world like them,"

I am a white, middle-aged, cis-gendered woman, so the experiences Johnson writes about in this memoir were entirely different from anything I experienced growing up in a privileged middle-class family in Norway. I am deeply grateful that books like this exist, so youths in similar situations to Johnson, black and/or queer, can see that they are not alone out there. I am grateful that I can learn and expand my own understanding of the lives of others because it's only through being open and interested that we continue to grow and improve as people. I am glad that there are still a lot more parents,  educators, and/or librarians out there working to get this book out to young people than there are trying to repress and ban this book. 

Judging a book by its cover: The beautiful flower crown that Johnson is wearing on the illustrated cover of this book feels very joyful, and it certainly caught my eye and made me read more about it the first time I saw it. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR15 Book 35: "Gender Queer" by Maia Kokabe

Page count: 240 pages

Rating: 5 stars

CBR15 Bingo: Picture This (can also be used for Queer Lives)

Official book description:

In 2014, Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns, thought that a comic of reading statistics would be the last autobiographical comic e would ever write. At the time, it was the only thing e felt comfortable with strangers knowing about em. Now, Gender Queer is here. Maia's intensely cathartic autobiography charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma of pap smears. Started as a way to explain to eir family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer is more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity—what it means and how to think about it—for advocates, friends, and humans everywhere.

Despite this being a pretty obvious pick to read during Pride month, I actually finished Gender Queer in May. I got it from the library and was going to save it for June. I was just curious and started reading a few pages. After about four pages, I didn't put the book down until I was finished. I am cis-gendered and straight, so for me, a lot of this was just learning to understand about someone else's experiences. I'm also asexual, though, and know how long it took me to discover that this was an actual thing and not just that I was some sort of aberration, so I can understand both why this was a difficult book for Kokabe to write and illustrate, but also why it felt important for em to share eir experiences, so that others in eir situation (or similar ones) could see that they are not alone out there. 

The internet tells me that in 2023, this book has been banned from shelves in more American states than any other book, because of its subject matter, and illustrations. The book deals with Kokabe's journey exploring eir gender and sexuality, and because the memoir is graphic, there are also pictures. I didn't think anything was particularly graphic or shocking, and some of the topics explored, like body dysphoria and discomfort with periods or gynecological exams, I suspect would be just as applicable to a lot of cis-gendered people as trans-gendered or non-binary individuals. 

The deeply puritanical and backward thinking of people who ban or challenge books never fails to surprise and depress me. I'm assuming that the justification for wanting this removed from shelves is that it might turn kids gay, or non-binary or something? I'm in my early forties and it wasn't until my mid-thirties that I even knew that asexuality was something that existed. I know how uncomfortable I felt until I realised that this was an actual orientation, and not just me being weird. Questioning one's gender identity and not feeling comfortable in one's body must be a million times worse. Books like this, which can show teens and adults that there are others out there that feel the same are hugely important and can change and even save lives. So this book should not be banned. It should probably be taught in schools, at least for older teens and college students. Only a day or two after finishing the library copy I had borrowed, I went out and bought a copy for myself, so I can lend it to friends. That's how important I think this book is. 

I applaud Kokabe's bravery, and reading about eir intense discomfort of being referred to as a 'young lady' or having people use the wrong pronouns has made me try to be better about using more neutral pronouns with the students I teach because you never know which of them might not be comfortable being lumped in with other cis-gendered, binary classmates. I am sorry to say that I still need to work on remembering not to misgender my non-binary and/or trans-gendered friends on occasion, but I am trying to be more sensitive to these issues. 

Judging a book by its cover: I really like both covers of this book, the one on the original edition and the one on the hardback special edition. Both covers feature two versions of Kokabe, one a more youthful and innocent depiction, the other an older, more reflective one. E is a very good artist, and subsequently, the cover illustrations are evocative and tell a story in their own right. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR2 Book 88: "Eat Pray Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert

Publisher: Bloomsbury
Page count: 384 pages
Ratin: 2 stars
Date begun: October 2nd, 2010
Date finished: October 5th, 2010

WARNING! CONTAINS SPOILERS!

Everywhere I turn recently, there seems to be some mention of Eat Pray Love. Elizabeth Gilbert has been on the Oprah show, it's been turned into a big movie with Julia Roberts and Javier Bardem. It's an international bestseller. One of my friends bought it to read on her very long plane ride to Peru this summer, thinking that it would be an easily disposable book - but ended up loving it, carrying it around with her on her three week trip, and took it back home with her. Having thought it was just the tale of one woman's trip round the world, I was curious, and decided I needed to read it for my blog.

I wanted to hate this book. Having seen the trailer for the movie, the whole thing seems so smug. To begin with, I really did hate the book, or at least Elizabeth Gilbert herself. She complains about being trapped in her perfect marriage with her understanding husband and their two homes in New York and I did not really see why I should be sympathetic to a person who leaves her husband to live with a younger actor, gets divorced, depressed and ends up ruining her relationship to both men. Needing to find herself and properly define herself as a person, Elizabeth Gilbert wanted to go to Italy to explore the art of pleasure, to India to explore spiritual devotion and to Bali to explore the balance between pleasure and devotion. Luckily, unlike lots of other women who suffer through gruelling divorces, her publisher paid her an advance, so she had the money to go off for a year and visit all these countries and do all these things.

She decides to spend four months in each place, and she wants to be celibate for the whole year, because sex messes things up and interferes with things. In the Eat part, she moves to Italy to learn Italian, and meets lots of nice people and eats and eats and eats and in the beginning pissed me off with her stories of how she loves travelling the world, but never uses guide books and seems proud to sort of stumble through things unprepared. She goes to a language school and does indeed learn quite a lot of Italian in four months, and manages to stop using anti-depressants because she has conversations with herself in a notebook.

Then, for the Pray part, she goes to India and lives in an Ashram and tries to find closeness with God. At first, she has trouble meditating and hates chanting and is unable to get into the whole spiritual release thing. She meets some straight talking man from Texas who refuses to listen to her self-pitying bullshit, and she eats vegetarian food and scrubs temple floors and in the end, obviously masters all the things she came there to do, and hugs trees and feels at one with the universe just in time for her to leave for Bali.

In Bali, she goes to find an old medicine man she met there years before. He read her palm and said she should come live with him, and he would teach her everything he knows. When she returns, he doesn't recognize her, because she's all happy now. He teaches her more meditation techniques and she sees how he heals people, and also befriends a lovely Balinese divorcee doctor, who has to move from place to place and struggles to take care of her precocious daughter and two adopted orphans. The lady becomes Liz' new best friend, and she manages to get all her friends and acquaintances to donate enough money that she can buy a house for the lovely doctor, and her endearing kids. She also breaks her vow of celibacy when she meets and falls in love with a Brazilian man 17 years older than her, and completes the Love part of the book.

I actually liked bits of the book a lot, but overall, this is the story of a smug middle class American woman who got to travel the world for a year on someone else's dime, and because she had to spend a lot of time alone and thinking about herself and her life, got over her divorce just fine. Some of the stories told in the book are very funny, and wryly and interestingly narrated. She describes things well and I really did find myself wanting to go to Italy and Bali, although the Ashram part didn't really grab me too much. Reading about someone else's spiritual enlightenment just isn't that interesting. The travelogue bits are much better. I am not sure why this book has become so very popular, but I suspect Oprah Winfrey's recommendation has something to do with it. It's not a bad book, by all means, but it's not a very good book either.