Mattiel - "Count your blessings"

Bit of a 60's vibe.

Paul Bowles - “their heads are green and their hands are blue”

Interesting read but his observations, though often interesting because of their characters and culture, lack any contemplation.  And it’s a bit hard to read about “those Negroes” and the “uneducated Indians”.  Yes, 1958 was a different year.  Still. 

During these voyages, the wives of the absent men remained faithful to their hsubands, the strict Targui moral code recommending death as a punishment for infidelity. However, a married woman whose husband was away was free to go at night to the graveyeard dressed in her finest apparel, lie on the tombstone of one of her ancestors, and invoke a certain spirit called Idebni, who always appeared in the guise of one of the young men of the community. If she could win Idebni's favor, he gave her news of her husband; if not, he strangled her. The Touareg women, being very clever, always managed to bring back news of their husbands from the cemetary.


Perhaps the logical question to ask at this point is: Why go? The answer is that when a man has been there and undergone the baptism of solitude he can't help himself. Once he has been under the spell of the vast, luminous, silent country, no other place is quite strong enough for him, no other surrounds can provide the supremely satisfying sensation of existing in the midst of something that is absolute. He will go back, whatevr the cost in comfort and money, for the absolute has no price.

Laila Lalami - “the Moor’s Account“

Amazing retelling from the moor’s perspective (a slave) of the Narvaéz expedition to the Americas in 1528 where all but four men died.  Poetic language without getting overly lyrical and a beautiful mix of Moroccan past with New World explorations during which they are enslaved by various indigenous peoples and finally learn to adapt to the local customs before the inevitable clash with their old cultures. 

Keep her in mind!

How strange, I remember thinking, how utterly strange were the ways of the Castilians - just by saying that something was so, they believed that it was. I know now that these conquerors, like many others before them and no doubt like others after, gave speeches not to voice the truth, but to create it.

Ali Marzouki - "Fighting Shadows"

a fictional account of a young man trying to fight the DSG (secret police) after he has been beaten when participating in the 20th of Feb 2011, Morocco’s Arab Spring.  Interesting to read as a modern snapshot of Morocco, its people and habits, though story-wise so-so; not much tension and characters were not fleshed out well.

Ann Leckie - "ancillary justice"

Meh. Space opera.  Ship with ancillaries (human bodies, all one mind, borg like). Interesting idea but unconvincing characters and not written well. Repetition.

One of three. Won’t read the rest.

Anthony Marra - "Tsar of love and techno"

Great. Grows on you. Russia, from Stalin to now. Corrector.  Paintings.  Family. Not exactly mise en abyme but closely connected stories.  Wonderful language and quotes.



The dancer's left hand still dangles in the air. My decision isn't decided so much as felt. I set down the airbrush as one might set down a fork when nauseous. I will leave the disgraced dancer's ahdn where it is, where it should be, right there, a single hand waving for help, waving good-bye, applauding no one, a single hand that may have once held my neck while a voice in my ear asked for help.



Who could have imagined a beast as strange and melancholy as a giraffe?



"The work of socialism doesn't pause for secretaries of any eye color," I say. Poor Maxim. His misery is among the few indulgences I allow myself.



We traded old ryobra - rib records, bone music, skeleton songs - banned fifties and sixties rock and roll inscribed by phonograph onto exposes X-rays that could be played on gramophones at hushed volumes.



She still looked at Kolya as if back through time, which of course is the only way to look at a photograph, and we've done so with photographs of our teenage boyfriends killed in Chechnya or at home. [...] Their deaths have aged us, as if their unlived years have been added to our lived years and we bear the disapointments of both the lives we have and haven't lived, so that even when we are alone, brushing our teeth in our quiet bathrooms, lying awake in our empty beds, even when our little ones are tucked in, when our friends are brushing their teeth in their quiet bathrooms, lying awake in their empty beds, even when the door is shut and no one can see or hear us, we are not alone, we still think in the plural voice.



The dance floor awash in steel-tipped heels, leather boots gripping sweat-slick calves, skirts small enough to seal inside an envelope. Fake lashes, nails, and breasts that collectively enlarged reality to normalize their obscene dimensions. Coin-thick cosmetics. Flesh coruscating in strobe light when the depilated iridescence of deep-sea invertebrates. Our flat-faced Virgil led us through the swelling sea of bodies, but I wanted to drown, die, live forever, there is no difference, within the sequined sound.



They pressed together with a need that is never satisfied because we can't trade atoms no matter how hard we thrust. Our hearts may skip but our substance remains fixed.



The calcium in the collarbones I have kissed. The iron in the blood flushing those cheeks. We imprint our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space. A shimmer of photons bears the memory across the long, dark amnesia. We will be carried too, mysterious particles that we are.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - "We Should All Be Feminists"

Great book about feminism, how we should all - men most of all - change our thinking and internalization.