Béhen Bhai Book Club

Maryam

Osama

Women Holding Things       
Such a lovely book.



Ducks

It's hard to explain being a woman in a men’s world but Kate Beaton did a great job expressing the feeling of helplessness.



Pictures of You

Read it in a day thanks to all the twist and turns!



This Woman’s Work

Delporte’s drawings and handwriting captures some heavy feelings beautifully.



Mirror Mirror

I only started painting self portraits last year. Coming across this book was inspiring.




Four Weekends and a Funeral

Did I watch the show Four Weddings and a Funeral just because of its name? Yes! Did I pick up this book because of its name? Also yes!



Shield of Sparrows

Odessa is the worst spy ever but it’s okay.



Loneliness & Company

The exploration of technology, loneliness, and what the future might look like was interesting and thought-provoking. However, it took me forever to finish it.



Airplance Mode

Osama kept mentioning it while he was reading it so I read it too.




I Hope This Finds You Well

Found a copy on Kent St while coming back from dinner. Good story about how everyone has stuff going on in their life so we should be good humans. Entertaining to follow a lonely protagonist stuck behind a screen reading the entire department’s private emails and DMs.



I Hope This Doesn’t Find You

After reading I Hope This Finds You Well, an office drama novel, it was only fitting to read I Hope This Doesn’t Find You, a high school drama novel. Described as To All the Boys, if Lara Jean wrote hate emails instead of love letters.



Feelings

I wish I had the talent Manjit Thapp has to create art that captures complex emotions with such simple yet beautiful illustrations.




Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

You’ve probably seen this book everywhere but my favorite part is the mention of Harvest Moon. I spent many hours (probably thousands) as a kid playing Harvest Moon on my gameboy.




Whereabouts

Some good paragraphs here and there.



Conversations on Love

Conversations on love… and friendship and loss and being alone.



Free Food for Millionaires

Gripping novel with complex characters but Pachinko is better.



One Woman Show

This book is told through museum wall labels which, as an artist, I found interesting and the execution clever.



Our Mutual Friend

Not gonna lie, this was a difficult read but I persevered and found out that Dickens was the genius behind: “Is it better to have had a good thing and lost it, or never have had it?”



I Who Have Never Known Men

I never pick up dystopian stories but I picked up this 1995 novel by French author, Jacqueline Harpman, after reading the introduction by Sophie Mackintosh, I was invested and couldn’t wait to read this book.



Talking at Night

I came across a post stating Love, Rosie + Normal People = Talking at Night. As a teenager, Love, Rosie by Cecelia Ahren was a favorite, so this was enough to get me to pick this up. 



American Fever

This novel gives words to many of my experiences and thoughts as an international student during freshman year.



Divine Rivals

Tiktok influenced me to read this book. I am only human.



Western Lane

Read it on Osama’s recommendation and it features an evil chachi.



Stay True

I went into this book without knowing what it was about and wasn’t ready for the emotions.



Hello Stranger

Hello Stranger is a story of a portrait artist getting face blindness and the plot had me captivated all throughout 320 pages!



This Time Tomorrow

Didn’t think I’d like a time travel book but this was well done. Based on a father-daughter relationship and questions what we consider a successful life.



Yours Truly

This book made me happy, sad, and laugh out loud which is why it is my favorite of 2023!



The Ballad of Never After

Read all three books of this trilogy this year. The first had a lot of world building, the last was a little disappointing but the middle one was my favorite.



As Long As the Lemon Trees Grow

The plot twist in this book was such that I had a lump in my throat with emotions.



Lessons in Chemistry

I didn’t read this book for the longest time because I didn’t like the US or UK cover, but eventually did pick it up after Osama recommended it. Great book about female struggles and ambitions, and powerful characters and dialogue. Lesson: don’t judge a book by its cover.



Chemistry

Great writing around topics of home and parents.



Girls That Never Die

Safia Elhillo poetry + Hassan Hajjaj cover = 🔥





Longbourn

This book takes place alongside Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, imagining the belowstairs. I thought it was an interesting take on the lives of the servants as they move about the Bennet family.



They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us

A powerful and brave memoir.



Who We Are Now

Story about four friends graduating college, moving into adult life and navigating through their twenties and thirties. Each year is told from one of the character’s pov over fifteen years.





Three Holidays and a Wedding

Do I pick up books because the protagonist has the same name as me? Yes.

This is my third Uzma Jalaluddin book, however this one is co-authored by Marissa Stapley. Both authors bring their unique perspective on female friendship in the alternating chapters for the two protagonists. 






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My Friends       
Such an incredible novel! The protagonist, Khaled, has an Uncle Osama who appears only briefly but is described as “useless in the kitchen except, everyone agreed, he made an outstanding omelette, and whenever he did you had to go after him to clean up the mess and check that he had switched off the burner.” I loved this line—it completely won me over. Uncle Osama steals every scene he's in. I wonder what other novels have characters named Osama—if you know of any, please tell me! And consider My Friends a recommendation from your own Uncle Osama.



Our Paris        
I hadn’t read Edmund White before, but after reading Yiyun Li’s essay following his recent passing away, I went to the library and borrowed this book—the only one available without a wait. In some ways, it mirrors Li’s essay: it is a tribute to a friend. It is a final project White did with a lover, Hubert Sorin, who was dying of AIDS – White wrote in the intro, which he wrote two hours after Sorin’s passing, that he didn’t want to finish it, because the project felt like the only thing keeping Sorin alive. They made it together: White wrote, Sorin illustrated–  a tender goodbye.



The Anthropologists        
Whenever our mother meets a couple she likes, she always says afterwards, “They’re a good unit!” This novel is about a similarly good unit: Asya and Manu.



Last Summer in the City        
I love reading slacker novels, and this one is incredibly stylish. I watched La Chimera while reading it, and afterwards could only picture the protagonist as Josh O’Connor in a crumpled linen suit.



Airplane Mode        
Our father is just like Shahnaz Habib’s father and hates to travel. He is happiest at home in Karachi! Once you read these essays, you realize why that isn’t surprising for someone with a Pakistani passport – visas and redtapes are used to keep us at bay because as someone said to Habib once on her travels, “people from third world do not travel, they immigrate.”



Still Pictures        
I really liked the structure of this memoir—each chapter begins with a photo tied to someone from Malcolm’s life. How do you tell the story of your life? One way is through moments spent with friends and family.



Treatise on Elegant Living        
According to Balzac, you can tell a lot about a man by how he carries his walking stick. What would the modern-day equivalent of that be? Maybe how we carry our umbrellas? 



Undercurrents        
A memoir about a two-hundred-year-old house on Landwehr Canal in Berlin. Bell tells the story of Berlin through the history of this one home—which, in a beautiful coincidence, I realized I had walked past every day when I was in Berlin. Maybe that’s why I loved it so much? I gave it as a gift to all my friends who ran the Berlin marathon—unfortunately, none of them seem to have read it. 



Kairos        
A romance between an older man and a younger woman in 1980s East Berlin – an insight into what was once East Germany and my goal now is to read everything Jenny Erpenbeck has ever written.



Crime and Punishment        
I reread this Oliver Ready translation and it is so funny – even though people say Dostoevsky isn’t supposed to be funny.



Ghachar Ghochar        
Short but mighty. 



Howards End        
Best opening chapter of all time! Forster is so funny!



What Napoleon Could Not Do        
Heard the audiobook while cooking. One detail that stuck with me: MI5’s criteria for recruiting spies:  good eyesight, great hearing, and average height. 



Pride and Prejudice        
Another audiobook I listened to while cooking. Uncle Osama has been cooking a lot lately—more than just omelettes—and Indira Varma’s reading is incredible. 



The Loot        
Abbas builds an automaton for Tipu Sultan, which gets looted by the British during their annexation of Mysore. The topic of western museums returning loot has been written about in detail to no avail – so James uses fiction to have Abbas travel to Europe to get his automaton back.



What Napoleon Could Not Do        
Nnuro writes a compelling narrative around a topic that I’ve always struggled to weave into a plot: visa issues. The cover is an incredible portrait by Amoako Boafo, whose show, what could possibly go wrong, if we tell it like it is, I saw at Gagosian a few weeks after finishing the novel. 



Inside Story        
This book is a biryani. Three layers of rice: Larkin, Bellow, Hitchens. The masala is Amis’s swaggering prose and the aloo is the interspersed writing advice.



Newlyweds        
“These family values have been since thousands of years,” Sima Aunty said in an interview to prove there is a method to the madness. The method is carefully curated caste, socio-economic, religious, and horoscope aligned marriages. But what happens if someone — especially from lower or lower middle class in rising India— dares go against this ancient arrangement? Mansi Choksi details with gripping narration the lives of four such couples and their love marriages, which are equal parts inspiring and equal parts deeply disheartening, over a period of six years. “If its worth having, it’s worth fighting for,” Cheryl Cole preached in her hit 2009 song Fight for this Love. That’s the question that haunts these eloped couples: is it worth it? In one heartbreaking scene, a defeated lover sends out this regret-filled text: “Love marriage = destroy life of everyone who belong to you”



Golden Age        
Wang Xiaobo wrote under authoritarian rule about unchecked authority in a funny and urgent manner. His writing – both fiction and essays –  offer us a blueprint for our times. 



Home Fire       
Maryam recommended this novel to me many times over the past years. I downloaded the audiobook before my flight from New York to Karachi and was hooked after listening to the first few scenes of Isma and Eamonn meeting for their daily coffees. The suspenseful ending was — spoiler alert! — set in Karachi and I heard it at 3x to make sure I finished by the time I landed in Karachi myself.



Pnin         
“It sounds like an explosion,” Gary Shteyngart notes in a video on how to pronounce Pnin. The novel starts with an immigrant professor on a train, not knowing that he is on the wrong train. I started reading this book (my first Nabokov) on a train and was suddenly worried that I might also be on the wrong train.



Forbidden Notebook        
I enjoy reading novels that are structured like a diary and Valeria Cossati’s secret journal is the best of all time.



Fathers and Children        
After reading an essay on how Turgenev managed to piss off “almost everyone he cared about'' with this book, I picked it up. I found the dialogues/debates/quarrels had incredible energy and built the momentum to propel the characters and story forward.



Hysterical         
I took Elissa’s humor writing class many years ago and have always recommended it to everyone – now I also recommend her memoir and substack.



Falling Walls        
I came across the English translation of Girti Deewarein when the translator, Daisy Rockwell, won the Booker for her translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand. A story of a struggling writer from Jalandhar (where my Grandmother was born), who crisscrosses an undivided Punjabi freely to go from Lahore to Jalandar to Shimla and back, in the 1930s, as he aspires to write and make a living. I recently saw this piece about the last remaining Koreans who remember an un-divided Korea and was reminded of the sadness that I felt when reading this century old novel: we might never get to experience what pre-partition Punjab was like.



American Fever         
I had read Dure’s essay and had admired how she wove Urdu poetry into English prose. Maryam, when visiting me, picked out the unread novel from my shelf and devoured it in a day and then was so eager to discuss it that I also read it in a single sitting the next day. We both discussed the many scenes where Hira dealt with so many of the same anxieties that we had when we first moved to America. 



All My Rage        
I always enjoy a multi-perspective novel. In her review of A Burning, which also has multiple narrators, Parul Sehgal noted that: “The director Akira Kurosawa famously used three cameras to shoot each scene. The A camera he placed in the most conventional position. The B camera provided swift, impressionistic shots. The C camera, he described as a “guerrilla unit.” Rolling simultaneously, the three-camera system ensured that no detail would go missing.” I heard this novel on an audiobook, after Maryam recommended it, and the voice of Misbah gave me goosebumps.



Western Lane        
No athlete ever dominated a sport like Jehangir Khan dominated squash in the 90s: winning a world record five hundred and fifty five consecutive matches. This novel weaves in that fact, and the careers of the great Pakistani squash players, into a quietly contemplative novel about grief.



Best of Friends
       
When Maryam read the first draft of my novel in December 2022, she told me that the novel felt disjointed. She liked the Karachi sections of my novel but found the New York ones lacking. She told me she had felt similarly when reading Shamsie’s Best of Friends, like this review, and asked me to read it. I also loved the Karachi half of Shamsie’s novel, and felt disappointed by the London half, and started revising my draft.



The Gray Notebook
       
In my past trips to Karachi, I have come home with many books, aspiring to catch up on my reading list, and have gone back with all of them unread. This time I wanted to keep just one book. I ended up picking one in which the author is also visiting his hometown and journals daily— a practice that I’ve always aspired to keep but have never had the discipline to do so. 




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