[Pen]ultimate Uzma Aslam Khan’s nine must-reads
Uzma Aslam Khan shares with bibliophiles nine books that captivated her
Recommended reading by award-winning Pakistani writer
1. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
A woman is entitled to her own uninterrupted space, protected and nourished by her own money. No one had ever told me this till I read Woolf’s essay when I was 15. I absorbed the idea and it soon became my faith and practice.
2. Possession by AS Byatt
Many writers have tried to write about writers, but if Woolf did it best in the essay A Room of One’s Own, Byatt does it equally well in this novel. Possession examines the enclosed and separate spaces women writers have lived in and, too often, still do.
Read: [Pen]ultimate: Javed Jabbar’s 13 must-reads
3. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I wanted to write a book with drawings ever since reading this one as a child. Years later, when starting my novel The Geometry of God, I set about doing just this. Now, about once a year, I am pulled back to The Little Prince. I have to touch and smell it or I feel something is missing.
4. Confronting Empire: Interviews of Eqbal Ahmad with David Barsamian
In this book, Ahmad is at his most personable while making searing predictions. I include here just one, from 1998: “Dictators rarely leave behind an alternative leadership or a viable mechanism for succession. Saddam Hussein is not an exception. Disarray and confusion shall certainly ensue if (he) is eliminated. Iraq is a greatly divided country… It is not clear that the US has either the will or the resources to undertake (its) remaking. If it does not, the scramble over Iraq may ignite protracted warfare involving Turkey, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Kurd, Arab, Shia, Sunni and, in one form or another, the US. The fundamentalist brand of Islamism may thrive.”
Read: Going, going…: Reading culture dying in capital
5. Genesis: Memory of Fire by Eduardo Galeano
This book opened my eyes to the stylistic possibilities of storytelling and the genocide of American Indians and indigenous people worldwide. Galeano died earlier this year and has left a valuable gift for readers in this fierce, beautiful work that is part mythology, part history, and part novel.
6. The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our time by Jonathan Weiner
Poetry and science make the most perfect marriage in these pages. I read it while doing research for The Geometry of God. It is the books that feed you most when you are lost in your own language that become your truest companions.
7. Touch by Adania Shibli
This novella can be read in a day but should be relished slowly. It describes life in an unnamed Palestinian village through the purest, most intimate sensations of an unnamed girl. Nothing is explained yet everything is felt, making the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, which hover at the story’s edge, all the more terrifying.
8. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
There are similarities between this book and the previous one, Touch. Each creates a shimmering, dream-like language that must be experienced, not evaluated. Each does what the best fiction will: urges us to fall in love.
9. The Known World by Edward P. Jones
How blessed I am to live in a world where historical fiction like this exists. The novel recreates life under slavery in the United States in piercing detail, more so because the slave owners are black. The cast of characters is immense and each is given a dignity and validity that defies the system they lived under. This is a miraculous, majestic book.
Uzma Aslam Khan is the author of four novels, including Trespassing, The Geometry of God and Thinner than Skin. Trespassing was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize 2003. The Geometry of God was voted one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2009. Thinner than Skin was nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, at the 2014 Karachi Literature Festival, it won the inaugural French Prize for Best Fiction. Visit her at https://uzmaaslamkhan.blogspot.com
Published in The Express Tribune, August 2nd, 2015.
A woman is entitled to her own uninterrupted space, protected and nourished by her own money. No one had ever told me this till I read Woolf’s essay when I was 15. I absorbed the idea and it soon became my faith and practice.
2. Possession by AS Byatt
Many writers have tried to write about writers, but if Woolf did it best in the essay A Room of One’s Own, Byatt does it equally well in this novel. Possession examines the enclosed and separate spaces women writers have lived in and, too often, still do.
Read: [Pen]ultimate: Javed Jabbar’s 13 must-reads
3. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
I wanted to write a book with drawings ever since reading this one as a child. Years later, when starting my novel The Geometry of God, I set about doing just this. Now, about once a year, I am pulled back to The Little Prince. I have to touch and smell it or I feel something is missing.
4. Confronting Empire: Interviews of Eqbal Ahmad with David Barsamian
In this book, Ahmad is at his most personable while making searing predictions. I include here just one, from 1998: “Dictators rarely leave behind an alternative leadership or a viable mechanism for succession. Saddam Hussein is not an exception. Disarray and confusion shall certainly ensue if (he) is eliminated. Iraq is a greatly divided country… It is not clear that the US has either the will or the resources to undertake (its) remaking. If it does not, the scramble over Iraq may ignite protracted warfare involving Turkey, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Kurd, Arab, Shia, Sunni and, in one form or another, the US. The fundamentalist brand of Islamism may thrive.”
Read: Going, going…: Reading culture dying in capital
5. Genesis: Memory of Fire by Eduardo Galeano
This book opened my eyes to the stylistic possibilities of storytelling and the genocide of American Indians and indigenous people worldwide. Galeano died earlier this year and has left a valuable gift for readers in this fierce, beautiful work that is part mythology, part history, and part novel.
6. The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our time by Jonathan Weiner
Poetry and science make the most perfect marriage in these pages. I read it while doing research for The Geometry of God. It is the books that feed you most when you are lost in your own language that become your truest companions.
7. Touch by Adania Shibli
This novella can be read in a day but should be relished slowly. It describes life in an unnamed Palestinian village through the purest, most intimate sensations of an unnamed girl. Nothing is explained yet everything is felt, making the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, which hover at the story’s edge, all the more terrifying.
8. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
There are similarities between this book and the previous one, Touch. Each creates a shimmering, dream-like language that must be experienced, not evaluated. Each does what the best fiction will: urges us to fall in love.
9. The Known World by Edward P. Jones
How blessed I am to live in a world where historical fiction like this exists. The novel recreates life under slavery in the United States in piercing detail, more so because the slave owners are black. The cast of characters is immense and each is given a dignity and validity that defies the system they lived under. This is a miraculous, majestic book.
Uzma Aslam Khan is the author of four novels, including Trespassing, The Geometry of God and Thinner than Skin. Trespassing was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize 2003. The Geometry of God was voted one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2009. Thinner than Skin was nominated for the Man Asian Literary Prize, the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, at the 2014 Karachi Literature Festival, it won the inaugural French Prize for Best Fiction. Visit her at https://uzmaaslamkhan.blogspot.com
Published in The Express Tribune, August 2nd, 2015.