My Dark Vanessa

this is by far the most disturbing & painful book i've ever read. it's crushing my soul & like a glass piece cutting thru my mind but i don't cry, just bleed out like Vanessa did. it F me up pretty bad. she's 15, the kind of teenager yearning for adulthood, desperate to be taken seriously. well, who wasn’t like that as a teenager? unfortunately, when Strane, a 42 years old English teacher, starts to give her the attention that she thinks she needs, she falls for his manipulative, mind-twisting sexual abuse. this leads her into decades-long battle convincing herself that it's love, not abuse. 

thing is, the system & everyone failed Vanessa. other teachers do nothing. her friends vilify her. she’s a victim, not a participant, whether she thinks so or not. but we live in society where she isn’t permitted to be deemed a victim, she’s deemed troubled, willing, a slut. it’s a student sleeping with a teacher to get good grades, not a child being sexually abused by a grown man. even her mother drops the ball. it's so disappointing.

well, i think that this is a very well-written & thought-provoking novel about pedophile. it’s important that we learn not to draw distinct parameters of what's deemed abuse, thus marginalizing women who didn’t understand they were being abused, like Vanessa.

trigger warning: the story's a little too graphic at times. understand the shock-value of the explicit scenes, that it’s meant to be uncomfortable. it can be bit too much for some of you.

This is How you Lose the Time War

 

it tells the story of 2 agents, Red & Blue, from opposing factions that are in the race of controlling the time flow. it begins with Red receiving a taunting letter from Blue, which kick-started a long history of letters exchanged in the most unexpected ways. from being enemies to confidantes & eventually falling prey to inescapable passion, making them question their missions & their very existence. no one ever waits for another, instead they seek each other out & that makes a whole different world. all this while trying to avoid getting caught by their factions, or else it'd spell death. 

i cried in several moments of this book bcoz the words just hurt & they felt too real. so heartbreaking in its beauty. it ruined me. it's like a love story of epic proportions. the way Red & Blue write & send their letters? come on! the deliberate care each of them makes these? unbelievable & i was in awe. such a unique & revolutionary take on time travel & romance. 

the writing is divine. the little things & the subtle way they show their affection to each other, omg. the prose is breathtakingly good. the sort of book that comes one in a thousand for me. GOLD. a glowing, solid 5/5. i may sound like i'm exaggerating, but i'm not! and oh, it won many literary awards. so if that's not saying something, idk what will.

Otherness

i used to think that loving someone meant knowing everything about them. every mole on their back, every childhood memory that left a mark, every corner of their mind, however dark. i longed for these precious pieces of knowledge, to be trusted with them, and to trust someone with the pieces of me in return. i longed for them for the same reason we often long for things: bcoz we lack them in another place.

at the time, my relationships were sustained by the opposite of knowledge, by concealment: stories not told, feelings unexpressed, opinions withheld. and so, in a quiet place in my mind where i knew i wanted intimacy and this wasn't it, i dreamt of knowing every beat of another person. of a place where nothing was held back, not a single thought left unshared.

now i know that intimacy doesn’t work like that. not really. it does require us to share stories, feelings and opinions. but it also asks that we find the courage to accept that there are some parts of another person, and of ourselves, that we will never know entirely. as much as it is about intimately knowing someone, love is about accepting the mystery in each other too. not being threatened by the pieces of a partner or friend that are beyond your reach, and instead seeing that these unknown parts are what allow for mystery and beauty and newness, even after decades of knowing a person. isn't that a gift? 

i wish we'd realised sooner that love is about closeness, but it's also about tolerating the gap between all people. it might have spared us some heartbreak to understand that we can still engage and connect and be close, but respecting otherness is really valuable. when we can accept that we don’t know everything about each other, or ourselves, then we can remain open to experience.

 

We are Finite

 it's easy to mourn the lives we aren't living. easy to wish we'd developed other talents, said yes to different offers. easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, gone to Paris, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

it takes no effort to miss the friends we didn't make and the work we didn't do and the people we didn't marry and the children we didn't have. it's not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you're all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. it's easy to regret, and keep regretting, forevermore, until our time runs out.

but it's not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. it's the regret itself. it's the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people's worst enemy.

we can't tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. those lives are happening, it's true, but you're happening as well, and that's the happening we have to focus on.

of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. we don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. we don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. 

we just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. we're as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.

we only need to be one person.

we only need to feel one existence.

we don't have to do everything in order to be everything, bcoz we're already infinite. while we're alive we always contain a future of various possibilities. 

so let's be kind to the people in our own existence. let's occasionally look up from the spot in which we are bcoz, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever.

Letters to Young Muslim

 

a series of letters written by Omar Saif Ghobash to his son, & to all of us especially the young muslims of 21st century. Ghobash is an Arab-Russian diplomat from UAE. his multicultural & multilingual upbringing combined with his education in UK exposed him to a diverse range of philosophies & perspectives, which he learned to appreciate while staying true to Islam. 

it's an honest, thought-provoking book that speaks the uncomfortable truth & has given me a religious perspective in a refreshing way. he stresses the importance of thinking critically & allowing room for good questioning in the process. questions like how much responsibility we carry, when will political leaders stop dividing & plundering, why are some of clerics still living in time capsule of glory days of Islam in the past, & why women are given lesser place in some countries. 

he holds the mirror up & the reflection isn't pretty. Ghobash is not making excuses for what's wrong with Islam today. he's asking us to stop accepting the order of things, to reflect, to study, to pause, to think & to engage with others. bcoz at the end of the day we do have a shared humanity & we owe it to educate ourselves, work hard & find answers to life's difficult questions. 

we gotta look beyond the binary world of black & white while welcoming the diverse opinions which are made up of all shades of grey. for a long time we've been told to follow the clerics & just accept the orders that it is what it is, without allowing a single doubt, uncertainty or curiosity, while ignoring the gray area of things. not many of us realize that as much as we stick to Quran & hadis, Islam also encourages questions & different opinions. 

my favorite quotes from the book:

"you can choose to live as a Muslim who insists that only Muslims are able to have knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. Or you can choose to find knowledge, wisdom, and understanding in all cultures, literatures, and philosophies. You can choose to be locked into a particular world, or you can set forth into a world of human experience"