Celebrating 2014 with Books

The perfect accompaniment to a great read

I love to share what I read. What I’m reading becomes the subject of my social media posts, my dinner time discussions with my family, my conversations with colleagues, and every so often, a conversation icebreaker with other fellow commuters. And though not every book makes its way to the blog, every so often, I write about the book I’m reading. At home, a good book and a cup of tea from my favourite teapot is the way I destress.

As we enter a new year, I’m curious to hear from you. What books have been important for you over the last twelve months, and what do you recommend reading in 2014?

Leave a comment on the blog, or if you’re in Toronto over the new year, tell us in person on December 31st. If you can make it, let us know on the Facebook event here.

Below: the ten books that we discussed this year on the blog.

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (January)
The Footsteps of the Prophet by Tariq Ramadan (January)
Green Deen by Ibrahim Abdul Matin (February)
Islam and the Destiny of Man by Gai Eaton (March)
Muhammad: A Prophet for our Time by Karen Armstrong (April)
Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture (May)
The Smart One by Jennifer Close (August)
Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell (August)
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri (December)
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (December)

On Reading North and South & travelling to 1850s England

I read Elizabeth Gaskell’s book North and South this week, and between the richly detailed, sensitive characters, the dry wit, and the beauty of the novel, it was a read that was well worth the investment in time. But the book is also a testament to the social and economic structure of the world in the 1850s. Above, my audio reflections on the read.

Would love to have a broader conversation about the book, and so for those who have read it, please do share your thoughts!

Accidental Speech

“I was quite sorry when Miss Thornton came to take me to the other end of the room, saying she was sure I should be uncomfortable at being the only lady among so many gentlemen. I had never thought about it, I was so busy listening; and the ladies were so dull, papa – oh so dull! Yet I think it was clever too. It reminded me of our old game of having each so many nouns to introduce into a sentence.’

‘What do you mean, child?’ asked Mr Hale.

‘Why, they took nouns that were signs of things which gave evidence of wealth – housekeepers, under-gardeners, extent of glass, valuable lace, diamonds, and all such things; and each one formed her speech so as to bring them all in, in the prettiest accidental manner possible.’

~ North and South, p.202 (published 1854)

On Reading “The Lowland” by Jhumpa Lahiri

Deer Lake, Burnaby, BC

“I don’t think of my books as being forms of entertainment. I don’t read books for entertainment. I read books to deepen my understanding of the human condition, and I think that condition is a very complex thing, and that people are very complex creatures…” ~Jhumpa Lahiri on The Lowland

Sixty – six years separate today from Pakistan and India’s independence. It is hard sometimes to process that fact – to understand that within the last hundred years India was a colony. That it is still reeling from centuries of colonial presence, and that for both countries, the decades since 1947 have been complicated, violent, difficult ones. Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel “The Lowland” tells the story of two brothers Udayan and Subhash who grow up in the early days of Independence. They live near a British colonial club where they are not allowed entry, and see how for so many people, colonial power was replaced by different forms of exploitation and oppression. They are two scientists who observe what is going on, and make different assessments about how social change can occur. The novel is about family, about the relationship between siblings, parents and children, spouses, and about how one event can shape the life arc of so many people. It’s a fascinating, ambitious book, and one that is well worth the read. Once I started I couldn’t stop reading until I finished a day later, but it’s a novel that imprints itself on you. Without giving any plot spoilers (I read the book without any idea of what it was about), a few thoughts from the read.

The book is an exploration of how one event can shape the arc of so many people. Every person experiences their own trauma from injury. For some the injury is life threatening, for other characters, they manage to continue living. The wars, rebellions, deaths, protests of a nation are often described in a sentence to explain how we got to the present day, but the impact of these events is best understood by zooming up close. This novel looks at postcolonial India and the Naxalite movement by zooming up to one family.

The book is also about globalization, immigration and cultural transition. We see how ideas in one place migrate to other places without the advantage of hindsight, analysis and assessing local context, and from our own vantage point of history, we can see the consequences of this travel. We also observe how destinies and possibilities alter depending on where we live. We can become different versions of ourselves.

Unlike classic literature, this book is ambiguous. It is not staking a moral claim about which character is ‘right’, it is simply describing what happens to a set of characters over decades. The story is a reaction unfolding. The two brothers, Udayan and Subhash study physics and oceanography respectively, and this story is an exploration of how the choices Udayan makes impact those around him. We see how his actions have equal and opposite reactions, and unintended consequences. Subhash, an oceanographer, cultivates and studies life. He creates roots. He is careful, measured, slower moving. There are no tidy endings in this book, there are simply flawed, human characters maturing, failing, striving again, failing, continuing to exist. There are contradictions and ironies explored.

“Certain creatures laid eggs that were able to endure the dry season. Others survived by burying themselves in mud, simulating death, waiting for the return of rain.” ~The Lowland, page 1.

Like the creatures of the lowland that titles the book, the book explores how we can become fixed in certain parts of our lives. Like Subhash and Udayan’s mother, we can become struck reviewing and reliving certain moments that come to define us. Growth and survival is only possible from acceptance, moving forward and sharing, We stifle each other and suffocate when we isolate ourselves in our personal grief. This is true collectively as well, and reading this book made me think about all the different histories that exist in our countries and cities, and that our different histories are the backdrop to how we understands other conversations – conversations about assimilation and the ‘rights’ of immigrants, conversations about the tolerance and accommodation of benevolent nations. In a multicultural nation, there is no dominant shared narrative. To understand, you need to be aware of the world.

Please Join #RainyReads November

2013 Vancouver International Writers Festival

November in Vancouver is a time of cold, grey skies and unceasing rain. It is the perfect season for reading. Last week at the Vancouver International Writers Festival however, I learnt that we’re not reading as much as we could be. 45% of Canadians do not meet the minimum literary standards. 42% of university graduates in Canada never read another book after graduation, and the average young person spends 60 hours a month in front of a screen and texts 20,000 words each month. In fact, 80% of families don’t buy books. (For most people, the speaker pointed out, Chapters/Indigo is a place to buy a yoga mat).

In a small way, I’d like to change that and read with others this November. And so, in the spirit of keeping cheery through the rainy season, I’ll be using the hashtag #rainyreads to share what I’m reading through social media and the blog. Please join me! I’d love to hear about your favourite books, books you’re reading right now, and books you turn to on days when going outside holds no appeal at all. And if you haven’t found time to read for a while now, for the month of November, try reading something you’ve been meaning to try for 15 minutes a day. Tag your tweets with the hashtag #rainyreads (or @shaguftapasta), write on the Seriously Planning Facebook Page, and if you have reflections you’d like to share, do email seriously.planning@gmail.com. If you’re in Vancouver, we’ll have a #rainyreads meetup over coffee at the end of the month.

Happy reading!

The Love Between Cities and People

What a joy it is to come across beautiful writing. Everything about Instructions for a Heatwave is exquisite. The sentence structure, the lack of superfluous words, the stunning detailed descriptions, it is all part of a beauty that leaves your heart hurting and your eyes a bit teary without quite knowing why. Below, a description from the book about the love that can exist between a person and a city.

She misses London. She misses it the way she missed Joe. A strange, cramped pain that leaves her almost unable to speak. She has never lived anywhere else until now. She hadn’t really known that people lived anywhere else, or would want to. There are days when she can hardly bear it, when she walks across the landing of the house, again and again, her arms crossed over her middle, her mind overfilled with images of descending an escalator into the Piccadily Line on a wet, darkened evening, everyone’s umbrellas slicked with rain, of the ten-minute walk between her old flat and her mother’s house, of Highbury Fields on a misty day, of the view over the city from Primrose Hill. Homesick: she’s found that it really does make you feel sick, ill, maddened by longing.

Maggie O’Farrell, Instructions for a Heatwave, p.116-117.

She Cannot Read

Words Matter (London 2010)

She cannot read. This is her own private truth. Because of it, she must lead a double life: the fact of it saturates every molecule of her being, defines her to herself, always and forever, but nobody else knows. Not her friends, not her colleagues, not her family – certainly not her family. She has kept it from all of them, felt herself brimming with the secret of it her whole life. (p.76)

She cannot read. She cannot do that thing that other people find so artlessly easy: to see the arrangements of inked shapes on a page and alchemize them into meaning. She can create letters, she can form them with the nib of a pen or the lead of a pencil, but she cannot get them to line up in the right order, in a sequence that anyone else could understand. She can hold words in her head – she hoards them there – she can spin sentences, paragraphs, whole books in her mind; she can stack up words inside herself but she cannot get these words down her arm, through her fingers and out onto a page. She suspects that, as a baby, she crossed paths with a sorcerer who was in a bad mood that day and, on seeing her, on passing her pram, decided to suck this magical ability from her, to leave her cast out, washed up on the shores of illiteracy and ignorance, cursed forever. (p. 80)

The passages above are from a book called Instructions for a Heatwave, and refer to a character named Aoife who never learnt to read at school. Letters jump at her when she looks at a page, and after years of frustration, she leaves school without completing any of her subjects, and unable to read simple texts. When we meet her, she is working as a photographer’s assistant in America. While at work, whenever she receives a contract or any other document she must process, she puts the pieces of paper in a blue file folder. By now, the file is overflowing with things that need attending.

Because she cannot read the labels on the boxes of equipment in the studio, she memorises the location of every tiny item in the studio so that nobody guesses her secret. I don’t know what happens to Aoife as I’m not done the book, but I can sympathize with her. I have (like many other readers I’m sure) had the experience of travelling and being unable to read the local language. Such moments can leave you feeling diminished, unintelligent, and embarrassed. They can impact how you feel about yourself. You can become reluctant to speak for fear of making grammatical mistakes, and overwhelmed figuring out key things such as where you are, and how the transit system operates. Struggling with basics means it is harder to tackle more complicated topics such as learning about current events and debates with different levels of government.

If the experience of being unable to understand your local environment is frustrating even in short term doses, it is difficult to imagine how frustrating that must be if that is your long term reality. And in fact, even at home, there are so many people who struggle with low literacy every day.

In Canada, “four of ten adult Canadians, age 16 to 65 – representing 9 million Canadians – struggle with low literacy. They fall below level 3 (high school completion) on the prose literacy scale.” 27% of those 9 million Canadians struggle with simple reading tasks. (ABC Life Literacy Canada). This has multiple social impacts, from employment prospects to health impacts to civic engagement.

I currently work with a nonprofit that supports social programs in the city, and seeks to (among other goals) target the root causes of poverty in order to create systemic sustainable change. Thinking about illiteracy this evening though, I can’t help thinking that while there are important contributions to make on a systemic level, we cannot lose sight of the contributions that are needed on an individual basis as well. There are organisations that need tutors, there are libraries that need books, there are people who need someone to help them gain the confidence to read out loud and to practice their writing.

There is so much to do! My last post was about loving words, today, I am realising that each love, each gift that one is given necessitates sharing, and serving others in a way that is of benefit.

On Reading Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture

Not Starbucks (Bandung, Indonesia)

“How excited can people get about coffee and milk? Starbucks’s worldwide explosion was about more than coffee; it was about the way the company was selling it. Coffeehouses provided something society needed: a place to just be. But no one had any idea of how badly we needed it.” (p.51)

“The coffee wasn’t the point, the place was.” (p.92)

Despite my less than warm feelings towards Starbucks (I prefer local, personal cafes), I read a fascinating book about it recently called “Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture”. Published in 2007, the book is about the journey of Starbucks from a simple coffee company selling coffee for people to drink at home to the coffee empire it is today just a few decades later. The author is not a Starbucks lover or hater, and his perspective makes for a good, credible read.

The book is divided into two parts. The first is called “The Rise of the Mermaid” and describes the rise of Starbucks and the craze for coffee in North America. It describes how coffee was originally discovered, how coffeehouses were originally a creation of the Muslim world that later became popular in the West, and how coffee decreased in popularity in America as the quality of coffee declined. It details the stories of the roasters who were keen on bring the beauty of coffee back to popular consciousness, how the company that gave birth to Starbucks began, and how Starbucks we know today was born from CEO Schultz’s belief that adapting the culture of Italian cafes to an American context would create a profitable business. From there the book details the rise of Starbucks, and describes some of its successes to date.

The second part of the book is titled “Getting Steamed” and describes the debates around Starbucks from the negligible earnings of coffee growers (the milk costs more than the company pays its growers), the company’s relationship to its workers, the machinization of coffee making, the lack of resemblance the company’s products have to actual coffee, its colonization of cities worldwide, its predatorial tactics towards other coffee companies, and other topics that come to mind when you see the familiar green and white symbol.

What fascinated me about the book was how much discussions about place were a part of its explanation of how the company became so popular so quickly. As driving dependent suburbs became a more prominent part of our landscapes and public spaces became harder to find, Starbucks tried to position itself as the provider of the ‘third space” that was missing from cities and communities. (Interestingly enough, the inventor of the term “third space”, and the author of a book about the concept, never approved Starbucks’ use of the term. And according to Starbucked, as time went on Schultz claimed to have invented the concept himself). Beyond the third space idea, the book talks about how many communities vie to have a Starbucks relocate in their town, as the company opening a cafe is seen as a signal of economic vitality, though there is little causational evidence to back up such claims.

On a personal note, reading about the company’s connection to place led to a deeper conviction that truly public, non commercial spaces are needed in cities. Public libraries are an excellent example of such spaces (the Surrey City Centre Library for instance was designed to be the living room of the city), but we need to have a diversity of public spaces that offer choices to residents about where they want to congregate.

The second thing I took away from the book is that it is a not a neutral enterprise to build a city, and where values are not clearly articulated, that gap will be filled by companies/culture makers that may not hold the same values and concern for community that a municipality should. The book talks about how Starbucks tapped into people’s need for connection and closeness by claiming to meet that need, but municipalities should be able to meet these needs in less harmful ways.

On Reading Muhammad: A Prophet for our Time by Karen Armstrong

The world needs bridge builders (Cambridge, UK)

Though wearing the hijab tends to bring (unwanted) questions about place of birth and ethnic origin, it does have the pleasant consequence of attracting questions about the Prophet Muhammad. Whether it is with coworkers at previous summer jobs, with roommates, or during grad school, genuine conversations with people trying to learn more about the Prophet are a joy, because they are an opportunity to share and strengthen my own love.

Yesterday to further my learning, I read Karen Armstrong’s book “Muhammad: A Prophet for our Time”. It’s a short, accessible text that focuses on select events instead of a comprehensive view of the Prophet’s life. At the outset, Armstrong explains that she wrote the book because most non-Muslims don’t know much about Islam, totally misunderstand the messenger and the message, and this has to change. In a post 9/11 world Armstrong says, we need to strive for understanding and appreciation and declare to ourselves and others that bigotry and prejudice is unacceptable. If we have misconceptions, we need to make the decision to learn.

As a Muslim reading the book, it is neat to see a scholar describing the Prophet’s accomplishments and beauty, and how his life and commitment to peace, equity and social transformation holds lessons for our world today. I appreciate her work because unlike so many authors who find themselves in the “Islam section” of bookstores and libraries she is striving to be a fair and respectful scholar, and doesn’t indulge in stereotypes. She respects and likes Islam, and that sentiment comes through in her writing.

And yet, the love that is missing makes a world of difference. The book doesn’t convey the love Muslims have for the Prophet, how Islam has shaped civilizations and societies, and the details of his character that Muslims try to embody today. Compared to reading Tariq Ramadan’s book, a book that softened my heart and made me want to be a better urban planner, a better family member, a better citizen, and a better person overall, I felt distant from this book, and it wasn’t a book that engraved itself on my heart.

What I did learn however, is that the world needs more bridge-builders, more people who can explain their deep love and commitment to their ideals in a way that is understandable to others. When I was in undergrad preparing for a trip to the city of Makkah and Madinah, my roommate saw me poring over maps and books, realised that she really didn’t know much about Islam, and asked for material to learn more. In reply, I gave her one of my favourite books, a children’s book called “Tell Me about the Prophet Muhammad”, and we supplemented that text with long conversations about how the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him had impacted my own life. Reading Karen Armstrong’s book was a reminder that we need to cultivate spaces and cities where this can happen more frequently, where we can be open about what we love and care about, feel comfortable to ask questions, and confident enough to challenge our own assumptions.

Role Models Remind Us of What One Person Can Achieve

Everything brings me back to compassion.
Role models remind us of what one person can achieve. Person who is compassionate draws people like a magnet. People were drawn to the Buddha. Anyone who puts in a regimen of compassion can become such a person (a person that people are drawn to).
Compassion is tough. It requires that you put yourself on the backburner. Socrates said that dialogue is about opening your heart and receiving dialogue.
Need to make place for another. Need to practice compassion all day and every day. It’s not that you do something and say, “that was my good deed for the day,” and then go back to living lives of spite and compassion.
Have to be able to have your own mind changed. Socrates said that at the point that you can say you know nothing, you are wise.
We act so omniscient. We say “she does this, because..” But in reality, you have no idea!
Mustn’t identify with your opinions, that is your ego speaking. Socrates told us to open our mind and listen to the other person. We need to empty our minds and forget what you think that you know. Go into dialogue willing to be changed. Fight for cause, but be willing to change your mind.
There is no good in speaking with spite and anger.
A spot of time is something you go back to and drink from. Similar with an unkind word.
To become a sage is hard work.

~Karen Armstrong, Toronto Reference Library, Jan 17th 2011