Reading Envy 079: Deliberately Silenced and Preferably Unheard

Rima Abunasser is a late-night guest to the Reading Envy pub. Jenny and Rima have traded book recommendations for years in social media, and it was nice to have a longer conversation about international literature, revolution, female voices, and how students respond to first-time exposure to some of these topics in her classes.

Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 079: Deliberately Silenced and Preferably Unheard.

The title to this episode comes from the following quote from Arundhati Roy, from The 2004 Sydney Peace Prize Lecture:

"We know of course there's really no such thing as the 'voiceless.' There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard." 

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Books featured:



The Dewbreaker by Edwidge Danticat
Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Y. Davis
Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga
When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice by Terry Tempest Williams
The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz

Other mentions:

Stanford prison experiment
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Hamitic myth
The Uncondemned (film)
"The Clan of One-Breasted Women" by Terry Tempest Williams
Arabic Literature in English (blog)
Please Look After Mom by Kyung-Sook Shin
10 Books by Arab Women Writers That Should Be Translated (LitHub)

Related Episodes:
Episode 053 - The Pool I Rarely Swim In with Luke Christie

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Reading Envy 053: The Pool I Rarely Swim In

Jenny meets up with Luke Christie, a recent graduate of the university where she works, and avid reader. We compete with the squirrels in the ceiling to talk about the books we have been reading. The file is a little distorted, for which I apologize - I'm having some issues in somehow adding distortion when I export to MP3 in Audacity.

Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 053: The Pool I Rarely Swim In.

Subscribe to the podcast via this link: Feedburner
 
Or subscribe via iTunes by clicking: Subscribe

Or listen through TuneIn


Books discussed:

 

My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (Norton Critical Editions)
The Sunlight Dialogues by John Gardner
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff 
Speak by Louisa Hall

Other mentions:
Furman University Communication Studies
M. Judson Books - Lauren Groff Sit-Down Supper
Ron Rash
George Singleton
Wiley Cash
Lee Smith
Louise Erdrich
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Ursula K. Le Guin
Olive Kittredge by Elizabeth Strout
Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout
Abide with Me by Elizabeth Strout
We Wish to Inform You... by Philip Gourevitch
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Joni Tevis
The Moby-Dick Marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Pioneers by James Fenimore Cooper
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Les Misérables (the musical)
Hope Leslie by Catharina Maria Sedgwick
Grendel by John Gardner
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace (miniseries)
How to be Both by Ali Smith
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Fortune Smiles:Stories by Adam Johnson
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee
The Met Live in HD
Elena Ferrante
Best of 2015 New York times lists
Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
10:04 by Ben Lerner

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Luke on Twitter

Jenny's Books Added May 2014

It's time for another edition of the books that followed me home!  I have to say this month is a vibrant pile of books I hope I read someday. 

These books fit pretty nicely into distinct categories.  And all of them have ties to reading communities in the state of South Carolina! 

Category #1 - The SC Book Festival
I went to the SC Book Festival this month, and prior to that had finally read Serena by Ron Rash.  I bought another book of his so I could stand in line for him to sign it (The Cove) and tracked another book down through Paperbackswap (Saints at the River).

Category #2 - International Book Club of the Upstate
I have this wonderful book club; I'm sure I've mentioned it.  In May we had our annual potluck dinner at one of the member's houses, where we swap books we no longer want and discuss potential books for the next year.  Our list had over 60, so it was a long night!  I picked up Lie Down in Darkness and We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families through the swap, and ended up finding copies of Death Comes to Pemberley, La Cucina, City of Thieves, and The Geography of Bliss because they sounded so good during our discussion.  It doesn't matter if they don't end up on the official list for next year, but I will wait to read them in case they do.  I'll find that out at our last meeting of the year, on Monday.  (We break for summer but have a book we're supposed to read during those three months.)

Oh yeah and I've owned The Geography of Bliss three times now.  I enjoyed it the first time but kept giving my copy away.  It is his chapter on Iceland that started my obsession with going there!

Category #3 -  The Open Book Series at the University of South Carolina
I so enjoyed meeting David Mitchell and hearing him speak this past spring that I am clearing my schedule for the five authors coming in the fall for this series.  I have to drive two hours to get there, but I was impressed by the attendance and avid readers showing up for this series!  I've seen a list of the authors coming in the fall although I notice it isn't updated on their website.  David Bajo and Kate Christensen will be two of them, so I decided I should find copies of their books. 

Perhaps Jeff VanderMeer's book Authority doesn't have an immediate connection to South Carolina.  But he spends several weeks every summer at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, to run the Shared Worlds writing program for teens.  That's why I've met him, and that's where I first heard him read from the first book in this Southern Reach Trilogy, pre-publication.  However I bought this book in North Carolina.  I was at Malaprop's and couldn't leave empty-handed!  He'll be doing a reading there July 9, but I think I will miss him this year since I may be in Oregon at that time. 

Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan

Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Why I read it: One of the January selections for the Great African Reads Group, and because it included several countries I hadn't yet covered in my Around the World reading - Niger, Gabon, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Benin

This book brought me to tears, multiple times. I actually had to put a little bit of distance in between finishing it and reviewing it. The author, Uwem Akpan, wrote these stories to draw attention to the children of Africa and the struggles they face. It is tempting to dismiss it as merely fiction, to reassure myself that people surely do not live this way, but I know too much of the reality to be able to do so. The stories themselves are fiction of course, but pull from very real events.

I wouldn't recommend it to everyone. Be prepared; these are heavy.

Story by story, may contain spoilers:

The Ex-Mas Feast - This takes place in a Nairobi shantytown, where a family tries to plan for holidays when they don't have money for food. Chemicals for sniffing are given as gifts instead. My younger sister went to Nairobi to visit with missionary friends of the family a few years back, and I was reminded of her photos.


Fattening for Gabon - A story of two children, who already lost their parents to AIDS (they don't seem to understand this), being prepared to be sold into slavery by their uncle. The way it is told, heavy on dialect and food description, almost serves to mask the horror. But then I would stop to realize what was going on, ugh. I kept thinking maybe they are going to be adopted! But no. This story is very long, more of a novella.

What Language is That? - Highlighting the turmoil created in communities by religious groups encouraging violence. Could you explain to a 6 year old why she can no longer see her best friend?

Luxurious Hearses - Another very long story, more of a novella, about people fleeing a violent city on a bus. The main character is trying to hide that he is Muslim because of tensions. I liked how everyone on the bus had to have an opinion about everything, it gave a good sense of the cultures involved and what was valued. It gets more and more violent as the story progresses, and yet I was still hoping for a better end!

My Parents' Bedroom - This is the story I wish I hadn't read. Horribly violent, horrifying, I just can't even recall it enough to summarize it. Ethnic cleansing is something I will never understand.

View all my reviews