something everyone should read

[snugglekitty]

The other day, I finished Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America And American in Iran by Azadeh Moaveni.

As I wrote in a previous post, I thought that this would be a neat book for me to read, because I really liked Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Iran has been in the news a fair amount recently. Wow. I was right, but it went far beyond that.

This is the book that Reading Lolita in Tehran wanted to be. An honest, funny look at being young and female in Iran right now. Moaveni talks about the inefficiency of a regime that intimidates its foreign journalists. She talks about the Westernization of Islamic culture. She talks about what it's really like to date as a young Iranian today. She tells us what it's like to be from Iran and America simultaneously. (I think mixed-race folks would find a lot to relate to in this book, despite the fact that both of Moaveni's parents are Iranian.) Her struggles to be a "good Iranian" without compromising herself are poignant. Her struggles with her family are moving without being cliched.

I LOVED this book and you should all read it. Five stars for book 90.

Comments

[tisana.livejournal.com]

I'd been curious about Reading Lolita, it sounds like this is the one I should go with. I haven't read novels in a while, though. I probably should get through the ones on my bookshelf, huh?

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

Yeah, RLIT left me... somewhat cold. She assumes familiarity with a certain type of English literature which I mostly haven't read, even though I was an English Lit major. I think this one is much better.

I do want to follow it up with a book on women in Islam, if I can find one that isn't horrifying.

[tisana.livejournal.com]

I was about to snicker at the concept of a book about women in Islam that doesn't horrify a feminist, but then there's Grandmother's Secrets, which I have and have mostly read. It's really about dance and women's relationship with movement and the inherent spirituality (which can get a tad fluffy for me), but the first quarter is full of vignettes of growing up in the Middle East among other women. Kinda like a modern day Red Tent.

(Stupid HTML...sorry)

[lady-anemone.livejournal.com]

In searching on amazon, it seems as though there are actually quite a number of books on feminism and Islam. However, they seem to mostly be written by and for Muslim women and scholars. Not that that's a problem - just that since I don't even know what a Hadith is, I think they might be a bit over my head. One review raves, "You can spend hours just reading the footnotes!" Right, but, well, I don't feel up to that right now. So actually, I'm kind of looking for something in between that and the book that you reference. Something a bit denser but still comprehensible to someone who only learned the word fatwa fairly recently...