BOOKS WE READ BY SWANA AUTHORS, 2024
When Samia reminded me about our list, I was like oh idk how much I’ve really read by SWANA authors :/ and then I went through my Good Reads and well, it was quite a lot, as it usually is, but it still feels like I didn’t read at all? I was reflecting on the art I engaged with in 2024 overall, feeling a little sad that I’m not coming away with a book that really Changed Me. It’s not fair to place such high expectations on the average book, but it’s also possible the state of the world has mostly everything feeling a little more muted. There are things I loved, of course, and am excited to return to, but my enthusiasm isn’t there. Just like last year, there’s a lot lot lot of Etel Adnan, and then mostly 2023 poetry releases. Almost too typical…it’s like how my Spotify Wrapped is Mitski #1 yet again…like yeah, likely for Summer! At the end of the year, I found myself reading more translated fiction — I want to try to do that more in 2025, translation in general, and shoot for more books from Arabic…I’m tired of the USA… I have a Kanafani essay collection I should get to, I have Huda Fakkredine’s translations of Ibrahim Nasrallah, I have Minor Detail…soon, soon! I want to return to a more intentional approach with my reading habits, feel less like I’m just coasting through everything. Oh well! Where applicable, we’ve hyperlinked to the Workshops4Gaza storefront through Open Books a really fantastic poetry-focused indie in Seattle. All proceeds from those books go to rotating Gaza funds — right now, it’s for the Sameer Project. — Summer
This year was a Bad Year for reading for me mostly because I spent half of it reading 80+ books and writing 80+ pages for my PhD exams. Many of those books were by SWANA authors, but with the exception of two memoirs I have omitted them from this list because it was not really fun to read them and it would not be fun for me to write about them, nor do I think the casual follower of this list really wants to read about 40 academic books. The PhD exam slog will continue for the first few months of 2025 but by the end of next year I should be back in the novels/poetry/literary swing of things and I have soooo many books on my list that I can’t wait to get to. Despite all this, I did actually read some great books this year and kept up with new releases more than usual! I had my favorites, both old and new (The Book of Collateral Damage, My Friends, Living Things, The Anthropologists) and my potentially controversial least favorites (The Coin, Stranger in the Desert). We have also included our DNFs for the first time for some potentially juicy takes… Ultimately a bad reading year for me these days looks very different than it did a few years ago and a lot of that is thanks to the ritual of doing these lists with Summer and how much exposure it’s given me to SWANA lit!! I’m grateful for every year that we get to keep up the tradition. — Samia
Read 2023 here, 2022 Part I here, 2022 Part II here, and 2021 here.
POETRY
White Blight by Athena Farrokhzad trans. Jennifer Hayashida
This book was a birthday gift from Summer on my last birthday! For a few months it’s sat beautifully on my shelf, its silver reflective cover reminding me not to let it sit too long without being read. I finally picked it up to start the year and it opens with a true banger of a first line: “My family arrived here in a Marxist tradition.” It doesn’t let up from there, drawing out a long poem made up of artfully rendered lines from the mouths of the speaker’s family. A favorite: “My uncle said: If you do not tremble when you cross a border/ it is not the border you have crossed.” It reminded me of Solmaz Sharif’s poems in tone and precision often, which is saying something!!! A stunning little book, inside and out. — Samia
IN/SOMNIA by Etel Adnan
This was a Christmas present from a dear friend, complete with a rock from the top of Mount Tamalpais. My quest to read Everything by Etel Adnan continued this year; something very rewarding about going through a writer’s complete body of work is that there are things that you will just not vibe with — and that’s okay! One of my favorite things about Etel Adnan is the way her work is primed for me to return to; in January 2024, a lot of this went over my head, but maybe in January 2025 I can revisit it and have a new reading. — Summer
Night by Etel Adnan
Started off the year with one of my favorite rituals, getting stoned and reading Etel Adnan. I’ve had this book since 2019 and was pretty sure I had read it already but either I never finished or my brain has developed a lot more since, so it felt brand new! Felt a little more lucid than some of the other book-length-poem-essays from her, a nice brain reset as the month kicks off with continued worldly horrors. Essentially stunning musings on the night and dark and what happens during. Lots of beautiful little moments that felt very impactful, but my favorite was “Light is blinding, is the enemy. Desiring desire: that’s when a body disintegrates, and contaminates every river it has ever known.” — Summer
PORTAL by Tracy Fuad
Wow, I love Tracy Fuad’s poetry so much!!! This is a wonderful book. It walks a line between the everyday and the profoundly weird and it does it so well. I think I am fascinated by literature about the inherent alienation of being a person (as is perhaps obvious by both my own writing and the collection of literature I’m choosing to read lately) and this book is one of the best entries in the catalog of ~alien poetics~ I’ve read in a while. I love how many of these poems are long but populated with sharp, brief lines. It’s full of rich phrases that aren’t half as rich out of context, like “In this life, at night, I find I choose to scrape the meat of my attention on a grater so it tatters, disappearing into ether. Into the nether of the internet.” I love how this book talks about the internet while still maintaining a groundedness, a relationship to the earth. I am rattling around with these poems, thinking about what it means to live a life. As Fuad writes, “Once I’d thought destiny a sort of room that you entered./ Bliss, or misery, another./ But sometimes my life really feels like my life.” — Samia
I could die today and live again by Summer Farah
I reread this once it was out in the world, in its beautiful finished form! I also got to hear Summer read from it (at the greatest poetry reading of all time where I randomly and magically bumped into Samia Finnerty 45 minutes before our reading and invited her and she came) which brought it to life in new ways. I wrote about this book in more detail for our list last year but now that it is out and officially endorsed by everyone’s two favorite Samias, you simply have to buy it, no excuses! — Samia
Portrait of the Alcoholic by Kaveh Akbar
Instead of finishing Martyr! after about 6 months of having an ARC (and it’s December 2024, and I still not have finished this book), I decided to read Kaveh’s chapbook that I’d had for a while but hadn’t actually read? I think? I know a lot of these poems find their way into Calling a Wolf a Wolf (one of the greatest debuts of all time), but it’s really really rewarding to see them collected in this way. It gave me a lot of affection for the chapbook as a project, especially with the release of my own impending. — Summer
Surge by Etel Adnan
This was the first book I’d read by Etel Adnan, ever! back in 2018. Revisiting it was awesome — I am way more attuned to her work, now, and much of the philosophical writing resonated in a way that it definitely didn’t back then. It’s hard to summarize her writing, but if you’re a first-timer, I wouldn’t recommend this one unless you want to have the sort of looking-back-5-years-later-completionist experience that I’m having now. — Summer
Crib and Cage: To Etel Adnan by Kazim Ali
What a beautiful experiment! The poems in this chapbook are an amalgamation of languages, medieval and contemporary and otherwise; it sort of feels like one of those “what English sounds like to non-English speakers” YouTube videos, and it’s like gibberish Italian-Dutch? But in the most positive way possible — for an art form that is known to be about the precision and care of language, a little book of poems that approach almost-meaning is really fucking cool; there are elegant sketches throughout as well. I had a lot of fun reading it aloud. — Summer
Self-Mythology by Saba Keramati
I went on hiatus from my position at The Millions right before I could put out the Spring poetry preview; this book was going to be on that list! I also wanted to write a long-form piece about it, but didn’t; it’s sad the ways my health has kept me from uplifting books I really, really, really loved, but at least we are here–this collection fucks! I loooooveeee the way Saba writes about the mouth and its various uses — speech, consumption, eroticism — as the title suggest, there’s an interesting attention to self-creation in each poem, and a lot of it starts with the motif of the mouth. “Self-mythology” as a concept reinvents itself over and over, it’s so special. I loved it, definitely one of my favorites of the year. — Summer
Something about Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
This was another 2024 release I really wanted to write about — and am still seeking a space to write about, editors, I’m trying to place a profile pitch on Lena :) — and man, what an oracle I would have been! The National Book Award Winner of 2024, and so well deserved. This is actually my favorite of Lena’s collections so far — tender, sharp, inventive, all of her trademarks at their best. If you haven’t spent time with her work yet, there is no better time to start. — Summer
Trace Evidence by Charif Shanahan
I didn’t enjoy this collection very much, which was a bummer considering the buzz it got in 2023 and my enjoyment of Charif’s past work. I could see some of the attempts with interesting formal departures in the middle section, but it rang hollow as compared to other recent collections that adopt the Long-Poem-Middle-Section (maybe it’s becoming a formula!) like Customs or Invasive species. — Summer
Coriolis by A.D. Lauren-Abunassar
I was OBSESSED with this book. Literally a creation of new grammars in every poem. Intense and beautiful, dense in a way that’s immersive rather than inaccessible. As I reflect on the books I’ve read this year, there were very few that felt like I was jumping into a pool that was entirely of a different world…this was one! Another really strong debut, but from 2023. — Summer
The Spring Flowers Own & The Manifestations Of The Voyage by Etel Adnan
This is probably the most typical Poetry Collection by Adnan that I’ve read! And it was good. It’s been so many months, I can’t remember much, please forgive me. — Summer
Customs by Solmaz Sharif
Getting into the tradition of a yearly re-read for this book…I don’t really have new insights except it remains a banger. — Summer
Premonition by Etel Adnan
I spent a weekend in Seattle at Open Books (best place ever), a pseudo-residency where I spent most of it dealing with a mysterious chronic illness that would not be correctly diagnosed until six months after. This has little to do with anything except, of course, since I stayed at a bookstore, I bought many books. They had many, many Etel Adnan books in stock that I did not yet have, and this was the one I associate most closely with the trip. It was strange and beautiful on the inside, of course, but I was really drawn to the design of the book itself — really small trim and hardcover! Most of the Adnan books I have are unconventional sizes to accommodate her line, but paperback with type-based or abstract art covers; I want to carry this one around in my pocket wherever I go. — Summer
The Call of Paradise by Majda Gama
I read a lot of great chapbooks this year! After spending a lot of time in very hyper-specific project-book mode with my own, it was nice to remember the other functions — an offering of a poet’s work can be contained, yes, but can also clearly exist in an expanded form, making you excited for whatever else they’ll have later down the line… — Summer
Some Things Never Leave You by Zeina Azzam
I’d been familiar with Zeina’s work for years, and so spending time with this full-length was very rewarding!!! I really want to check out her chapbook Bayna Bayna, In-Between, too. — Summer
Kaan and her Sisters by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Another Lena collection!!! I feel like when you release two full-lengths in two years one gets a little overlooked? The only way to know for sure is to ask her, but I really loved the form of this book — the propelling via the letters/lessons, the engagement with Palestine and the region through a sort of looking-back-on-child-gaze perspective; as usual, strong work from one of the greats! — Summer
Exit Signs on a Seaside Highway by Lara Atallah
I first started reading this collection as an ARC in early 2023, then met Lara at AWP and got a copy of the finished book, then finally read it all of the way through this year after getting to hang out with her a bit more last summer (and see her read with Lubna Safi!!!). It’s really fun for the poet voice to morph over time, to engage with the book in different forms and levels of ~finished and familiarity with the writer…good collection! — Summer
What To Count by Alise Alousi
One of the few poetry collections I read this year where I had no previous knowledge of the poet at all! Felt like a really significant entry into ~Arab American literature, a Coming of Age narrative as an Iraqi American during the Gulf war, alongside poems about motherhood in a later context, wrapped up in the geographies of Michigan and the region — really beautiful! — Summer
[…]: poems by Fady Joudah
Another collection I wanted to write about that was collateral in my myriad of health issues this year (sorry Fady), but wow! This is my favorite book from him, I think — the fragmentation really works as a continuation of the direct-precision of language in his past works. I find a lot of kinship with this book and Kamelya Omayma Youssef’s A book with a hole in it, both with their spirit of being written in real time and the formal choice of abrupt or interrupted lines. Fady’s is a response to witnessing genocidal violence to his family in Gaza, his people, an interruption of language on the literal front of the dead no longer speaking, but also the metaphorical silencing of Palestinians globally, and a manifestation of the sentiment of what is there left to say? in the face of ongoing horrors. Kamelya’s is intimate in a different way, close to the chest, interruptions indicative of the diary as an object, the Arab feminist voice and its various silencings, and on and on. But the work still gels. Interruption in the works of Arab American writers is really fascinating — I notice it in my own, in different ways, but I don’t think I took notice of it until I had the deployment of it so explicitly in […]. — Summer
apocalypse blues by Raya Tuffaha
It was fun to contrast this with Raya’s first chapbook To All the Yellow Flowers and see how her work has changed — language far more fragmented, abstracted towards something larger and maybe more sinister? It makes sense, the world has gotten worse :) Reading it alongside […], too, was interesting, considering the frequency of fragmented language in works by Palestinians in particular, and the varied ways poetics writing against empire resist more coherent forms or easy deliveries. — Summer
If My House Has a Voice by Elina Katrin
I’d had this chapbook for a while, reading a poem here and there throughout 2023, but finally read it in full for my abandoned 2024 Sealey Challenge — I love Elina!!!! She writes about place and family so beautifully, and so this chapbook’s shape and focus is so strong. — Summer
Hard Crush by Sarah Yanni
Sarah and I were on a panel about chapbooks for the Southern California Poetry Festival; I was going to read it anyway, but when she said the book’s structure was simply falling in love I knew it was going to be my shit. The kind of book you send to every crush, the kind of book you tell everyone in love about. — Summer
AND MOST OF ALL I WOULD MISS THE SHADOWS OF THE TREE’S OWN LEAVES CAST UPON ITS TRUNK BY THE ORANGE STREETLIGHT IN THE SWEET BLUE DARKS OF SPRING by Mira Mattar
Another good chapbook to read alongside apocalypse blues and […] to be honest! I was first introduced to Mira’s work after George Abraham raved about her when putting together the global anglophone Palestinian poets anthology (coming out next year in May from Haymarket) — I got a copy of her chapbook Affiliation but lost it in a move before I could actually read it! So, when she came out with AND MOST OF ALL… I knew I wanted to spend real, solid time with her work. She is amazing!!!!!! The shape of this book is awesome — it’s very LONG and THIN, which is a trim size that basically none of my other books share (most of the time they are WIDE if strange). I like the way it gives every poem more and more space, as if each line is searching for each other, reaching down the page to connect with the word after. It renders grief in a way I haven’t really encountered, alongside really sharp, strong critiques of empire — maybe things you wouldn’t want to someone to hear you say out loud. One of my favorites of the year! — Summer
[…]: poems by Fady Joudah (again!)
I started this book way earlier in the year but then my reading was interrupted by the USC campus cops THROWING A BUNCH OF MY BOOKS IN THE TRASH when they raided the campus encampment. Ultimately I did get this one back but I thought it was lost for like a month until it showed up in an English prof’s office. Anyway! I forgot to finish it until the end of the year. But the practical disruption of my reading by the unfolding genocide and our efforts to resist it felt in some ways very in line with the text itself. As Summer said, this book is disrupted, responsive, living in relation to its surroundings. A lot of it is very devastating but there’s some unexpected moments of beauty and tenderness too. Many lines I loved — “How is the view from my window?/ How does my salt taste?…. Oh how you love/ my body, my house.” — Samia
FICTION
The Book of Collateral Damage by Sinan Antoon trans. Jonathan Wright
It was particularly devastating and illuminating to read this novel — which follows a profoundly alienated Iraqi academic in the U.S. in the years following the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and his friend, a bookseller in Baghdad desperately trying to catalog everything destroyed by the war while the destruction piles up around him — while the genocide in Gaza rages and so much of this history grows and echoes. The scenes of the protagonist navigating elite academic institutions and trying to teach through the general American apathy to Iraqi lives were particularly resonant for me as a current grad student at an elite institution. The book within the book, the catalog of the lost books, archives, ouds, rugs, futures, lives, lovers, siblings, and children, rips us back into the everyday reality of imperial destruction, and despite its breadth remains utterly and obviously incomplete; more has been lost than we could ever begin to account for. You can tell this book was written by and about an academic because there’s a lot of Walter Benjamin references (not a complaint I love Benjamin) and other engagements with theory — of archives, mourning, colonialism, history, etc. Antoon’s integration of theory isn’t stale though, and the book’s tone has a lot of charm despite the heaviness. This book shows us the power and perils of bearing witness, explores the drive to archive violence as that violence is ongoing, and examines the ways our love and grief transcend distance and borders. I’ll keep this story close to my heart. — Samia
White on White by Ayşegül Savaş
I feel somewhat apathetic about this book. It has some characteristics that tend to turn me off of a novel: it features a graduate student as a main character (though I don’t always hate this — see Sinan Antoon); it also does the thing I usually hate where it exists vaguely in ~a country~ or a city or a context that is never named. On the other hand I think it makes up for some of this lack of specificity through the intimacy of the characters. But also, not all of it. There are things I liked, too. While I was reading this I watched Anatomy of a Fall (2023) which was an interesting parallel; both examine how the lives of women artists are marked by their husbands ambitions and perhaps by a certain madness. The detachment of this novel makes the characters a lot less compelling than the film though, for me. This novel’s tone is very European, which can be good or bad depending on the day. I picked it up because I wanted to check out Savaş’s work before the release of her new novel The Anthropologists, but sort of wish I’d started with her debut, which looks a bit more specific. I’ll still read the new book though. I just feel like this left me feeling weird, but not in an especially exciting way. — Samia
My Friends by Hisham Matar
You know how sometimes you’ll just never get around to reading books by an author who is really famous and who you know you’d probably like a lot but you just don’t prioritize it and then eventually when you do read one of their books you’re like wow I am a Fool? That’s the experience this book gave me. Hisham Matar’s prose is simple in a way that makes it tender and wonderful and sad. This is truly a book built around and driven by its characters. As I read I was struck by how easily Matar inhabits the voices of these characters across decades of their lives in such a way that it was always easy for me to see them growing up, even as they also stayed fundamentally themselves. These are lives shaped profoundly by the quick and violent movements of history, and yet this story is really one of the slow and personal movements of everyday lives, in exile and at home, comfortable and uncomfortable wherever they may be. I loved this brilliant little (not so little) book. I’ve got to read more of Matar’s work so I can stop kicking myself for taking so long to get here. — Samia
Anatomy of a Disappearance by Hisham Matar
Frankly I liked this a lot less than My Friends so I’m glad I read that first. It’s not bad, it’s just not quite as special. There’s less room for the plot and the relationships to really be fleshed out in the same way. The story lends itself to the narrator developing a sort of harshness that is interesting but also feels like it cuts away at some of the care and charm I found in Matar’s characters in My Friends, though I suppose this is sort of the point. Overall I think it’s just less compelling. I read a published excerpt of Matar’s memoir and it’s so stunningly well written so I think I will read that next. I think that his work is just at its very best when it fleshes out a whole web of precious and devastating relationships, whereas this book remains quite close and contained. — Samia
Living Things by Munir Hachemi trans. Julia Sanches
Ever since I came across this book doing research for my 2024 releases lists and read a published excerpt I have been so looking forward to reading it!! This book is diabolically good — it’s only 140 pages but in that space it offers such a rich, tight narrative that nothing feels missing. It follows four friends, newly graduated from college, who drive from Madrid to the south of France for the summer to work the grape harvest and instead end up in a comical but dark hellscape of agricultural labor exploitation. Because of its length and that it is partially told in diary entries, it’s light on character study and light on dialogue but this is certainly one of its strengths; Hachemi reflects memories concisely but with enough brilliant detail that they never feel detached, and our characters feel real and alive too. The writing (and translation!) of this novel are just excellent. There’s a great mystery-ish thrust to the plot as well, and a little horror-adjacent grossness for people who like that sort of thing (though not too much for the slightly squeamish readers like me). But what I really loved most was the sharp political explorations of this story, which manage to get at agribusiness, labor and class, migration, animal rights and veganism all in a short span without feeling overdone, heavy handed, or overly intellectualized. This book is seriously just so good and I hope people give it the readership it deserves!! — Samia
The Coin by Yasmin Zaher
Hm. I had many different experiences while reading this book. For the first bit, I found the writing quite engaging and good. Some of the stylistic choices felt slightly at odds with the tone of the character, but not enough to really pull me out of it. Then in the middle, during a lengthy sequence where the main character gets involved in a handbag pyramid scheme, I found it dreadfully boring, tedious, and overly detached, so much so that I stopped reading not only this book but any books for the better part of a month. Then at the end it took a hard shift which at least made it… interesting? Though I can’t say that it necessarily worked for me. Many people have compared this book to Ottessa Moshfegh (whose work I dislike), and for some of the book that comparison seemed unfair or primarily aesthetic (this book has a political sensibility that Moshfegh lacks), but in other places (the middle section I struggled through) it seemed entirely accurate, especially when it dipped into matter of fact racism or classism. Some parts of this book are excellent — the teaching parts and any discussions of Palestine and her childhood were all really rich — but the rest felt disjointed for me, as though it was trying to add shock and complexity where it wasn’t especially needed, rather than leaning into its shining moments of earnestness. Perhaps this book just isn’t for me, though. I don’t want to pontificate too much about this book as it relates to broader trends in literature by and about women, but I do have a lot of thoughts and feelings, which I will keep to myself. I expect it will be tropified into the “unhinged women” genre, and I only hope that this does not lead its richer moments of reflection and political frameworks to be collapsed under the umbrella of “girls being weird and off putting.” Then again, perhaps the book lends itself to such a collapse. — Samia
The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş
This book saved me from a dreadful novels slump but more than that it really blew my (admittedly somewhat low after White on White) expectations out of the water. Wow, is this a special little novel!!! Would NOT recommend reading this as I did (in one sitting on an airplane) because I teared up several times while reading and it was too loud on the plane to gush to my husband about how beautiful it was when I finished. Like in White on White, Savaş often veers away from specific details, never naming the city or even country where this story is set, or the countries of origin for our two main characters, but unlike in her previous novel this text has so much rich character detail that I found the lack of specificity of place much less annoying and often even effective. A simple story, this novel follows a young couple living in a city as they try to find an apartment to buy, navigate new and old friendships, wonder if they’ll ever have kids, and support their families from abroad. The narrative is unremarkable and yet simultaneously one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever read!! Savaş may or may not be living in my walls — this story felt soooo familiar at every turn, as if the shape of my life had been carved out and filled up again with someone else’s. This is certainly part of what makes it so special for me, but I think its resonances extend beyond the very particular familiarity I felt. Do yourselves a favor and spend a little time with this novel. — Samia
Daughter, Son, Assassin by Steven Salaita
Like The Anthropologists, I read this in one sitting on a plane which is truly where I get my best reading done these days. But not all novels hold up for a one sitting plane read and this certainly did! It was interesting to read Salaita’s fiction after reading so much of his scholarly and political work, and I wasn’t really sure what to expect but found it enjoyable! The prose was a bit uneven in places — he inhabited the voice of the father character much more easily than the voice of the daughter, especially in the early chapters where she’s a young kid. But as the plot developed I got much more into it. He did the not-naming-specific-countries thing that I generally just find annoying, though the analogous countries were much more obvious here than in Savaş fiction. It was interesting and perhaps a bit surprising to me that Palestine remained an unspoken presence in this book. There were places where I would have liked more explanation, more specificity, but the central plot was really engaging and well thought out and the development of many different types of familial relationships was very beautiful. I’d recommend it! — Samia
A Guide to the Dark by Meriam Metoui
Samia and I were looking for middle grade/YA books written by Arab/SWANA authors for whatever reason when she found THIS!!! If you’ve talked to me at all since March of 2023 (or read any of the 50k words on my substack, or knew me when I was in high school,) you know I am a big fan of the TV series Supernatural…In my depressive, unemployed, peak loser state, I have adopted and abandoned a million little projects, mostly filtered through my obsession with the possibilities presented in fifteen years of network television. In a week where I was suspended from my locked Twitter where I tweet extensively about Supernatural (you can’t say KYS on Elon Musk’s Twitter unless you have 10k followers), I listened to an episode audio commentary where creator Eric Kripke talked about his influences and the way they end up in the show; flippantly, he said something like “I wanted to do Constantine, I wanted to do Sandman” (famously I love paraphrasing this guy). Of course, I already know the abundance of references built into Supernatural, but something about this formulation made me think, wow, I should do Supernatural as a novel but they’re Arab girls and from Detroit and the Dean one is a lesbian. And so that’s been a project for a year or so. It’s very unlikely I will ever actually finish a novel, as I am who I am, so it’s great this book exists instead!! Scratches a similar itch. Two best friends (Arab, from Michigan) heading on a road trip to visit colleges get wrapped up in a haunted motel situation. Very classic dealing-with-grief ghost story, fun character voices, and sweet romance. One of the characters is a photographer and her camera picks up the paranormal affect, so we get kinda funky fun photos throughout. I went into a semi-existential spiral after reading and looking into the author who works in publishing, is a similar age to me, etc etc, but at the end of the day I am just happy something like this exists :) Very much a “happy for my younger self” kind of deal, and I will probably read her other books, too, despite very much ageing out of YA. — Summer
The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas (again ❤)
I was asking everyone to give me recommendations for Books That Keep You Off Your Phone and this was Samia’s vote :) I’d heard about this book when it was on submission, actually, with incredibly high praise from everyone who’d read it — that, plus Samia’s endorsement, made me really excited to dive in! And you know what? It was gorgeous! I’m always a little uncertain of books that seem to answer the questions you pose as you go by turning the question back on you, if that makes sense? Wondering why we didn’t get a specific context for the narrator and her partner’s cultural background, wondering why we don’t know what city/country they’re in, what does it mean to be a “native” of this space — in turn, our narrator expresses how she’s viewed solely through her accent, her otherness, and how she craves being a Specific Person. I think the book is successful in its rendering of specificity without naming, ultimately. There’s a quiet intimacy to every scene, named vignettes instead of chapters to build out the story. The sensibility reminded me a lot of the film Past Lives, which I loved so dearly and have often felt difficulty with a description that gives it justice. A simple complexity? Very Being a Person. Romantic, in a horribly mundane way. Celine Song, here’s your next film! It’s super short, too. I’ll probably read her other books!!! — Summer
OTHER
I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti trans. Ahdaf Soueif
This is such a brilliant and poetic memoir that ruminates on exile, multiple displacements, the memory of martyrs, especially Palestinian writers and artists, and the structures of the occupation. I read this for a reading list for my grad program and am so grateful for the ways that I’m able to carve out space to do reading like this as part of my academic life, because this is really what feels important and grounding to read. Barghouti’s discussion of the particular role of poets, writers, and intellectuals in representing and engaging with the struggle for Palestinian liberation was especially interesting to me, but there are no parts of this book that aren’t rich and important. A chronicle of return, of ongoing displacement, of political setback, of the continual struggle to return, this really is a classic for a reason. I’m grateful I got to spend time with it. — Samia
Stranger in the Desert by Jordan Salama
I received an ARC of this book before its publication and even wrote a full length review of it but ultimately never pursued publishing it because my relationship to this book and its politics remains….. complicated. There were a lot of things I found genuinely moving in this book. The writing is really rich and engaging, and the stories of Salama’s family history echoed my own family history in familiar ways. I really wanted to love this book (there’s so few places I see stories like this one, of Arab families that migrated to the Americas generations back, and even fewer about Arab migration to Latin America) but unfortunately my appreciation for it was dampened by subtle forms of Zionism that pervade the book. Salama’s efforts to dissect his family’s traumatic history of multiple displacements as Arab Jews are undermined by his overall failure to name or directly contend with Palestinian existence and history and the way Arab Jewish communities have been weaponized to further Israeli colonialism. There is one brief moment in the text where it felt like a different possibility was being articulated, when Salama spends the night in the home of a Palestinian-Qulla family on his trek through the Andes and reflects on belonging beyond the boundaries created by nations and settler colonialism. This glimmer of a different sort of politics gave me enough hope in the possibility of this book to write a review, but once I saw that the author chose to do a bunch of book promo with the openly very Zionist Jewish Book Council, I gave up on it. Honestly probably my most disappointing read of the year! — Samia
Resistance: My Life for Lebanon by Soha Bechara (trans. Gabe Levine)
I read this for my exams but feel like it’s worth including because it’s just so brilliant… everyone should read this I think! It’s a perfect slim little memoir that’s so direct and biting in its description of Israeli occupation in South Lebanon, of conditions in Khiam prison, and of the imperative to resist however we are able. The prose is brilliant without being overly complicated, and Bechara’s conviction that Israel’s occupation of Lebanon would inevitably end has stuck with me since I finished it. I watched the movie Incendies (2010) a couple months after reading this book and learned that it’s loosely based on this book/Bechara’s life story and while I think it’s a good if insanely harrowing movie I think this memoir is much better and politically clearer and more worth your time. — Samia
The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between by Hisham Matar
This book took me a long time to get through mostly because of life things unrelated to the book itself but it made it harder for me to enjoy it all the way through. But the beginning of this book really sucked me in, some of the most gripping prose I’ve ever encountered in a memoir. This lengthy excerpt gives you a taste of it, and this is really what made me want to read this book. It’s really just so good!! I also liked reading this after My Friends because it highlighted all the little autobiographical twists of the novel across all of its characters. At 3 books, Matar is my most read author of the year and I really enjoyed digging into his work! — Samia
Of Cities and Women by Etel Adnan
Structured as a series of letters to a friend, Of Cities and Women was probably the more puzzling of Adnan’s works I read this year. I read it using the Internet Archive, which might have dampened the experience a little, but for the most part the observations felt too airy! Each letter is a sort of ethnography of women in different cities. She writes of the freedom of women in various places across Europe, Spain of particular note — in the cities where she has no ancestral connection to, the observations were distant, especially since the company she kept were both not From The City she engaged with and often Not Women. There’s a wistfulness in her perception of these women, which is fine, but without awareness — a flattening, ultimately. Something she cannot touch, but not necessarily because of inaccessibility? I read some critique of these essays as they pertain to the way Adnan conceptualizes gender, but a sort of bio-essentialist reading felt both in bad faith and anachronistic. I think there is something interesting about an Arab lesbian writing about white Western women in a way that we might more typically see from a man–-it’s not disrespectful objectification! It’s an approximation of desire — what kind of desire, though, I’m not quite sure. There is ultimately something missing that makes the work dissatisfying. It might be something to do with the letter form — I really enjoy reading correspondence between writers, but I do wonder what the intention was when they were penned; are these observations ultimately for other’s eyes? It’s not like I want people reading my texts to Samia, they are not Good Enough (even if we are brilliant and cool etc etc). I feel a little foolish, sometimes, in that uncertainty. Like, of course these were meant to be read, Fawwaz Traboulsi isn’t real (he is real), or something like that. But, in such a stark contrast, the way she writes of her mother’s native town in Greece is so painful and aching. There’s almost a bitterness to it that enhances the wistfulness of the previous letters, but these tones do not connect. The way she writes about women in Lebanon, of course, is so specific and lived in and beautiful. These are women she can touch; these are the women I want to read about. I want to revisit this book and take it slower, think more meaningfully about the engagements with gender and place. And maybe get a hard copy if anyone wants to send me one…to complete my collection… — Summer
The Beauty of Light: Interviews between Etel Adnan and Laure Adler
I started this collection of interviews on the plane to Mizna+RAWIFest in October of 2023; it felt very meaningful, to sit with Etel Adnan in plainer language than I was used to as I was on my way to spend time with a community made possible, in part, by her work and her legacy. I had an ARC but didn’t pick it up again until it was published in the summer of this year. I really love interview books — the other notable one I would recommend is with Edward Said, The Pen and the Sword — for the way you get to experience the same ideas and sensibilities in looser terms, to see how much of a person’s writing comes through in their personality, in a more casual setting. I have a poem partially about this set of interviews in Mizna, in which I quickly mention having back pain; my back hurts so much right now, to be honest, and it doesn’t feel very poetic, so maybe I need to give this another read…– Summer
The Sun on the Tongue by Etel Adnan
This is a scattered collection of essays, interviews, and a play excerpt that I initially wanted because it opens with a “Letter to a Young Poet” from Etel Adnan; I’m thankful to have engaged with this so late in my exploration of her work, as it re-energizes my approach to her writing, makes me want to revisit everything with the various philosophies and orientations towards writing, love, and religion discussed in mind. You can read the the opening essay here. I read part of an interview where she discussed her relationship to religion aloud with my mother, who felt a lot of kinship with Etel; two Pisces who respect the practices of others but ultimately find more faith in the rhythm of the universe than a particular domination. I was very affected by some of her meditations on love, particularly this paragraph:
This state of being in love is an uneasy state: it is unstable, permeable to all winds, almost irrational. It easily creates a sense of terror, becomes obsessive. That’s when heartbeats accelerate, and one puts out the lights, lies down with another body, and sinks into a kind of desperate bliss. How can one bear such an intensity? Love becomes a river of fire that replaces blood in the arteries. It leaves one breathless. One wants to stay still, not moving having forgotten the hour. Even the state of one’s body disappears. The body disappears from memory. There’s immobility due to the total mobilization of the senses functioning henceforth in an altered state. Desire itself is eventually overcome. Strangely enough, this state approximates the experience of death.
– Summer
DNFs
Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj
I rarely DNF books because once I’ve started something I like to finish it to at least know what I’m up against but this book unfortunately crossed one of my hard lines early on which was having a POV cop character who is not clearly being treated with utter ridicule and disdain. This is sort of a novel in stories from different POVs each chapter and I really liked the first chapter from the POV of a teen girl, which had incredible voice, but after reading the second chapter from the POV of a Palestinian-American cop I gave up. In this one chapter there are two sequences where he heroically disrupts domestic violence which is just……. Anyway, after reading Laila Lalami’s much awarded The Other Americans (my vitriol for this book is well documented in our 2022 list Part I) I am really begging SWANA writers to divest from sympathetic portrayals of the police. I promise I’m never going to want to read all that. For a really sharp novel about how the police destroy SWANA communities, try Aisha Abdel Gawad’s Between Two Moons instead. — Samia
Holiday Country by İnci Atrek
Ok, like I said I rarely DNF books but I’m also trying to get better at doing it since I do not want to spend my free time doing things that don’t bring me joy. I wasn’t totally excited about this book because the age gap relationship premise and love triangle with her mom (?) didn’t sound all that interesting to me but I really genuinely tried to get into it, I just found the writing incredibly boring and the main character quite irritating, but not in a compelling or interesting way. Even in the first few chapters I read there was already a pervasive tedious rich diaspora attitude that felt very uninteresting to me. Maybe there’s more self reflection later in the book, but there just wasn’t enough going on to keep me interested long enough to find out. — Samia
The Parisian by Isabella Hammad
This is less of a purposefully-didn’t-finish book and more of a this-is-so-long-for-a-girl-that-doesn’t-read-historical-fiction kind of thing; I got a signed copy of this book in an auction raising funds for Gaza family evacuations (truthfully because it was the cheapest thing I found to bid on, I am unemployed) and got 250 pages in of the total 500+; honestly, the fact that I got that far means it’s pretty good! Towards the end of the year, my reading trended way more towards novels (just not by SWANA authors, sorry specifically to The Skin and its Girl, Minor Detail, Sitt Marie Rose, and Martyr! which remain notably unread on my shelf, I’ll get to you eventually!!!!), but normally it’s all tiny little poetry collections. I found the writing and character voices strong, but so flippantly? I really can’t care about a Palestinian man studying to be a doctor who is in love with a French woman…Part 2 brings us back to Palestine, which makes you think I’d be more into it, but my motivation/investment sort of faded away with the change in focus. I felt very aware of the gap between the genre conventions and my typical reading. I know everything will connect eventually, but ❤ I’ll finish it eventually, I think, but it’s likely Enter Ghost is more my speed. I won’t give up on Isabella Hammad yet! — Summer
