Book Club

Book recommendations for boys in middle school please, thanks!

Powerful passage

The Painted Veil by Somerset Maugham. This book, with its plain language and lucidity, glides like a soft flow of a river. It holds your attention, yet at times it jolts you.

The central character Kitty craves the textbook prototype of love, the kind that brings excitement, thrills, and a deep sense of being wanted. Her craving is ordinary, not grand, born out of boredom and a life of stagnation. Yet Maugham dresses this small ache in the vocabulary of pilgrims and addicts, putting her boredom and a search for God in the same bracket.

Marriage was the sole aim left available to Kitty. She was twenty-six, past the marriageable age by the prevailing norms of her society. Walter was undemanding and emotionally stable, not the intense, passionate kind of man Kitty had imagined for herself. Devoted to her, yet met with no spark in return, they married under social obligation.

Her heart beat heavily when she saw Charles Townsend, who made her feel desired and stirred passions she didn’t know she had. She saw a promising future with him, the only escape, she believed, from the banality of life with Walter.

Her hopes, pinned on Charles for a promising future, were punctured when he refused to divorce his wife. Charles was diplomatic in his refusal, careful with his words, and it was that very calm that left her confused, only now seeing him clearly for the first time.

We all look for something more than the day-to-day banality of existence, a heightened form of being, whether through opium, alcohol, or infidelity. It is, as Maugham writes, “all the same Way,” though one that “leads nowhither.” Yet it is also a case study in how the complexity and fragility of humans are shaped by what they are fed on, and the atmosphere they are a product of.

What Kitty suffers is the consequence of her own choices. It is her hamartia, in Aristotle’s sense, the human flaw that undoes her. Kitty is perhaps all of us, who always pine for what is not available to us, and in this constant craving for more, we lose and get undone

I can’t move on……
I just finished this book and honestly
it just got me speechless

Beware: learning more is a smart person’s favorite form of procrastination.

Books have taught me that the most beautiful people aren’t the most perfect,
they’re the ones who make others feel seen, understood, and valued.

I guess I’ll listen to this at work tonight 🎧

During my Umrah, I was studying two Qur’an translations one was published in two different countries.

One had me thinking why was I born as a woman. The translations felt misogynic like the ones we hear, more number of women in hell etc etc and had hadiths in the bottom to get deeper into the topic. As a woman, it felt so uncomfortable to read that.

However in the other translation and commentary it seemed to address both men and women. Even explained why a single pronoun usage is not sufficient to address Allah as He has no gender. There was no gender biases in that book. Felt refreshing to study that.

So now I am wondering how even the Holy Book is being translated in a way to undermine a woman’s value or control them. Felt so bad.

So from now on, I am studying translations from several publishers, letting my nafs to understand and follow the right thing. Ya Allah guide us 🤲

Roll up your sleeves and dive into knowledge. 📔

This is a good book. I was hating the case studies. As they erck me. But we movin along somewhere. Good read.