A horseman riding by would never know the difference.

You totally made that up Geoff said.

Did not. My grandmother used to say that her mother said it.

Whatever Geoff said. You totally made it up.

Then, reading Ramona and her Father, page 59 in my edition: It will never be noticed from a trotting horse.

And, on page 166: Those pink bunnies will never be noticed from a trotting horse.

Thank you Beverly Cleary for vindicating me in my unending fight to be perpetually right against Geoff.

South Africa: Who Was Nelson Mandela by Meg Belviso

Synopsis: (from amazon) As a child he dreamt of changing South Africa; as a man he changed the world. Nelson Mandela spent his life battling apartheid and championing a peaceful revolution. He spent twenty-seven years in prison and emerged as the inspiring leader of the new South Africa. He became the country’s first black president and went on to live his dream of change. This is an important and exciting addition to the Who Was…? series.

Thoughts: I had thought I’d read a book about South Africa for my Readings Around the World, but I guess the last few books I read about South Africa were before I started trying to read my way around the planet, so this is sort of late, since I read this book in April.

I bought this book for Tesfa for Easter because Supermom made me feel bad about not having any presents for Tesfa (Supermom is someone I know, not an amalgam of great parents or something). I felt bad, but not bad enough to go anywhere other than the grocery store where I was already going. The previous week, the grocery store had a huge stack of Roald Dahls, but they vanished and the only children’s books not involving hypersexualized Bratz or Monster High dolls were either this one about Nelson Mandela or a book about Pokémon. Easy choice.

I’m sure this whole series of Who Was books skirts some sort of copyright or trademark issues – I don’t think it was authorized by the estate of Nelson Mandela (which reminds me of an episode of Made In Canada when Alan wants to make a movie about a conman but the lies the conman told so that it would still be fiction and he wouldn’t have to buy the rights). I’m also pretty sure this book was published to capitalize on the emotion following Mandela’s death in December.

All that being said: it’s a good book. Obviously aimed at the younger crowd, and Tesfa at five may have been a bit too young to grasp some of the more salient points other than that apartheid means separating people based on skin colour and if your skin was dark, you were treated poorly. But she was interested in reading it and seeing what happened. The book didn’t seem to sugar-coat the situation. People were shot at. There were riots. Nelson Mandela wasn’t readily available for his family.

Most importantly, unlike many books that discuss race relations in terms of the benevolent white savior (The Help, To Kill A Mockingbird), Nelson Mandela and his black South African compatriots are the focus of this book. It’s probably sad that I have to be excited when a book about a POC is actually about said POC.

Random fact: Nelson Mandela’s birthday was the same day as my birthday (is? I don’t know the correct verb tense when comparing the dead to the living).

Rating: 4.5/5

Previous Readings Around the World.

Remember a few posts back when I said the most promising book on my wishlist was See You Later by Christopher Pike?

Yes, my most promising book was a teenage novel that I read when I was twelve, but anyway, I put it on hold at the library. Yesterday, the librarian tells me that they have to cancel my hold as they don’t know whether this Christopher Pike novel has go to.

Insert sad face.

In any case, I can buy a copy for a penny plus seven dollars shipping on amazon if I really wanted to (I don’t, partly because amazon and partly because I don’t know whether this book is really worth seven and a penny plus the anxiety I get having things shipped from across the border [how long it takes, possibility of unexpected duty and handling fees, etc.]). But instead, I will just say to whoever misplaced (I’m going to think positive and assume this book was misplaced rather than stolen, which it very well might have been given the number of times I’ve gotten books out of the library only to come home and realize they weren’t scanned out properly) Christopher Pike’s See You Later, please find it and bring it back! Thirty-somethingers longing for their tween years are counting on you!

In the car, we were listening to Five Children and It. There’s a line about flying when you’re dreaming.

I’ve never dreamed of flying I said to Geoff. Have you?

Geoff nods.

That hardly seems fair. But if I were to fly in my dreams, I think it would be like a painting by Chagall. I would fly like a woman in a Chagall painting surrounded by colour.

Perhaps I’ll try to think of Chagall and flying before going to sleep tonight. Just to see what will happen.

Growing up in the suburbs of Ottawa in the eighties and nineties, we didn’t have tweens. Well, we did, but when I was what would now be called a tween was called pre-teen or young adult. I was in my final year of high school, the now defunct year of OAC, when tween had made it’s way to Barrhaven, too late to wrap me up in it’s silly sounding label.

But, when I was a tween, the list to take out scary books from the school library was a mile and a half long. R.L. Stine‘s were for our younger siblings. We went for Christopher Pike, with his mixture of teens having sex before gruesomely dying. But before those, we all read the same collection of scary stories, whose pictures were worse than the words themselves: Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark.

Tesfa and I were at a book sale on Saturday and there I found and purchased for the sum of twenty five cents:

Excellent. Now Tesfa can be as traumatized as all of us were back in 1991. I didn’t let her look at it yet though. Possibly the pictures are a teensy bit too much for a five year old with as overactive an imagination as Tesfa has.

Syria: In Praise of Hatred by Khaled Khalifa

Synopsis: (from amazon) In 1980s Syria, a young Muslim girl lives a secluded life behind the veil in the vast and perfumed house of her grandparents. Her three aunts—the pious Maryam, the liberal Safaa, and the free-spirited Marwa—raise her with the aid of their ever-devoted blind servant.

Soon the high walls of the family home are no longer able to protect the girl from the social and political　chaos outside. Witnessing the ruling dictatorship’s bloody campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood, she is filled with hatred for the regime and becomes increasingly radical. In the footsteps of her beloved uncle, Bakr, she launches herself into a battle for her religion, her country, and ultimately, for her own future.

Thoughts: This is a book that seems more interesting in the abstract. It seems more interesting now that I’ve finished reading it than I did while reading it. I really felt tugged apart while reading it: I could describe this book as both fascinating and tedious. I don’t know whether it just doesn’t translate well or whether the style and content are simply at odds with the structure and layout of standard Western novels. It struck me at times as similar to an old-fashioned novel with an omniscient narrator, even though this is a story in the first-person singular.

There is a lot of talk about dreams (my most hated thing in books ever, but I know that in certain sects of Islam, dreams are given tremendous importance). There is a lot of waiting around. The internal voice of the narrator never gives much of a reason or justification for her radicalization; it seems to just happen one day almost beyond her control. The narrator’s character isn’t given much depth or agency. Of course, the lack of agency makes sense, being raising in a fundamental, religious household. But there is something lacking (in the novel or in the translation) to make this lack of agency compelling.

But I think I’ll still think about this book for a long time. So I guess in that sense, it succeeded.

Rating: 2.5/5

Previous Readings Around the World.