Above: Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Young Girl Reading
My reading ranges from literature to political theory, Islam. Some highlights of my reading are logged below. For more detailed discussion of specific books, you can consult my YouTube series of reviews of new poetry books. Longer lists books I recommend are here.
Update: check out my film reviews on at MUBI
June 2022
It’s been a year since I last posted about my reading! Of course I have read a great deal in the interim. Just to note a few highlights: Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Windfell Hall, Harem by Armenian writer Raffi, and two books for my forthcoming book Sex and the State: Kate Bolick’s Spinster and Michael Cobb, Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled. Plus many amazing movies, the best of which are Karim Aïnouz’s THE INVISIBLE LIFE OF EURIDICE GUSMÃO and Alexandre Rockwell’s SWEET THING, and Sean Baker’s TANGERINE. I’ve started rating the films I love at MUBI and plan to add more detailed reviews soon.
May 2021
Marie Silkeberg, Damascus, Atlantis: Selected Poems.Translated from the Swedish by Kelsi Vanada. This is an innovative collection, that brings together different voices into a visual collage of Damascus during war. I had some questions about the co-authorial relation that remained unanswered by the end. But it is highly recommended! You can read my review of the collection here.
Purchase this book in the US (Amazon). Purchase it in the UK (Amazon). Purchase it from Bookshop.
April 2021
Ibn Arabi, Translator of Desires, translated from the Arabic by Michael Sells. A classic text by a masterful translator. Read my review here.
Purchase this book in the US (Amazon). Purchase it in the UK (Amazon). Purchase it from Bookshop.
March 2021
Threa Almontaser’s The Wild Fox of Yemen (2021), an exciting debut collection by a Yemeni-American poet. You can read my review of this collection here. Here is my video review of Almontaser’s book:
Purchase this book in the US (Amazon). Purchase it in the UK (Amazon). Purchase it from Bookshop.
February 2021
Nathaniel Tarn, The Hölderliniae (New Directions, 2021) I was lucky enough to get access to this two months prior to publication.
I have written up my impressions of this book here, and have also created a video review of the book.
Hafez: Translations and Interpretations of the Ghazals, trans. Geoffrey Squires (Miami University Press, 2014)
Marina Tsvetaeva, Dark Elderberry Branch, trans. Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine (Alice James Books, 2012)
January 2021
Agha Shahid Ali, Rooms Are Never Finished: Poems (2001). This magnificent work was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in poetry.
December 2020
George Eliot, Middlemarch
November 2020
Dalia Sofer, Man of My Time. A brilliant chronicle of the aftermath of the Iranian revolution for Iranians abroad and in Iran.
October 2020
Andrew March’s The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought (Harvard UP, 2019)
September 2020
Elif Shafak, The Forty Rules of Love. An historical novel about Rumi and Shams Tabrizi.
Nietzsche, “The Uses and Abuses of History for Life” (1873). Rereading this remarkable essay.
Edward Said, On Late Style. Reminds me that there were so many facets to Said not represented by the polemical Orientalism.
August 2020
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
For Rushdie: Essays by Arab and Muslim Writers in Defense of Free Speech
July 2020
Ilya Kaminsky, Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004)
June 2020
Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884)
May 2020
Wislawa Symborska, Maps
Eavan Boland, Domestic Violence (reading in honor of the poet’s passing in April)
April 2020
Zadie Smith, On Beauty (great bathtub reading!)
Borges, The Craft of Poetry
March 2020
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor
February 2020
Richard Yates, The Easter Parade (Always stunned by the brilliance of this underrated novelist.)
January 2020
Robert Duncan, Root & Branches
December 2019
The Secret Barrister
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
November 2019
Richard Yates, Disturbing the Peace (the more I read by Yates, the more awed I am. Would love to write about him someday)
Charlotte Bronte, The Professor (am working on an essay about this book and Bronte in Belgium)
October 2019
Friedrich Holderlin, Letters and Essays (brilliantly translated by Richard Sieburth)
September 2019
Jason Rezaian, Prisoner (thinking of my last trip to Iran in 2016).
August 2019
Kafka, Letters to Milena (I also read Kafka’s Letters to Felice, but the letters to Milena were much more striking and easier to relate to).
Joakim Garff, Kierkegaard’s Muse: The Mystery of Regine Olsen (Princeton, 2017). A strangely painful, but also riveting, read.
July 2019
The poetry of Robert Duncan, a pioneering visionary poet whom I am pleased to have encountered, if rather late in my life as a reader.
Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road (unbelievable how long it’s taken me to discover this masterpiece!)
June 2019
Houria Bouteldja,’s Whites, Jews, and Us Toward a Politics of Revolutionary love (MIT Press, 2017), a provocative critique of the whiteness of leftist politics, and a call to revolutionary action. Moves beyond many of the cliches that continue to structure postcolonial theory.
May 2019
Heavily immersed in Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies. A classic tomb. One of those books that make one wonder how one managed to get through life without reading it.
April 2019
I’ve been mostly immersed in reading poetry, and am pleased to have discovered the work of Ada Limón, Nathanial Mackey, and Carmen Giménez Smith, among many others. American poetry is flourishing more than I realized, and seemingly more than American fiction.
March 2019
G.A. Cohen, If You’re Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (2000)
- a great work of political philosophy by a Marxist thinker close to my heart
This is turning out to be a great month for plays. So far I have seen (links to reviews where available):
Shakespeare, Richard III (Bristol Old Vic)
Tennessee Williams, The Two Character Play (Alma Tavern Theatre)
Caroline Williams and Reem Karssli, Now is the Time to Say Nothing (Bristol Old Vic)
February 2019
The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History Edited by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg (2019)
Adrienne Rich, Poetry & Commitment (2006); Essential Essays
- classic texts, that diagnose current predicaments in American politics (and poetics)
Siri Hustvedt, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women (2011)
- scintillating reflections on sexuality, desire, and aesthetics from one of the best living novelists
January 2019
Edward Said, Beginnings (1975)
December 2018
Jean Bodin, Methodus (1566)
October 2018
Jeremy Waldron, The Harm in Hate Speech (2012)
September 2018
Ronald Dworkin, Justice for Hedgehogs (2011)
August 2018
John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (1994)
- brilliantly written & important reflections on conceptions of paternity and childhood. I look forward to reading his work on medieval same-sex desire.
Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (1988)
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Perpetual Reading Projects
Over the years, I have created working bibliographies on a range of topics I have researched on Worldcat. A great and under-utilized resource!
I have highlighted some of the texts I turn to for pleasure reading on Goodreads.
