Jordan and West Asia Book Choices (From & About Asia Reading Project)

 As I promised last week, this Wednesday's post is going to focus on my book choices for month three of the From & About Asia reading project. This month is following the usual format whereby participants have to read one book from each of two categories (I will list them below, but for a more in-depth refresher please feel free to check out my masterpost on the project), this time restricted to Jordan and other countries in West Asia. These categories are:

Category I: a book by an author from that country

Category II: a book about the culture of the subregion where the country is from

For Category I, I have been reading Willow Trees Don't Weep by Fadia Faqir, who is a Jordanian woman writer and academic. I generally prefer to read books by women and realised this month that so far less than half of my books chosen for this project have been written by them, so for July I deliberately tried to choose books by women authors. Fadia Faqir is one such writer, but I didn't only choose her book for this reason. It also sounded like a poignant story of a young Jordanian woman who sets out to find her long-lost father, who abandoned his family decades ago to join a Jihadist sect in Central Asia. So far I have been enjoying the book, although parts of it are quite sad to read. I am motivated to keep reading and interested to see where the story goes.

For Category II, I am planning to read The Beauty of Your Face by Sahar Mustafah. While I believe Mustafah was born in America, she comes from a Palestinian family. I was a little hesitant to choose this book because I wasn't sure how much it focuses on the culture of Western Asia, but from what I've seen of reviews, I believe that it is informed by Mustafah's experience as a child of Palestinian immigrants. The protagonist of the book, like Mustafah, is a Palestinian-American woman living in the US. She is the head of a Muslim school for girls, and the story shows her reflecting on her life as a school shooter invades the building. I imagine that this book is not going to be an easy one to read, but at the same time it seems to address some very important issues and I have heard very good things about it. 

While this isn't exactly relevant to my book choices this month, I would like to mention that this is the first month in which I have actually scheduled my reading. In previous months, I just sort of told myself I needed to finish both assigned books by the end of the month, leaving it up to how I felt each day to determine how much I read on a daily basis. This month, I am approaching things a bit differently by giving myself a daily reading requirement: 20 pages a day. While my ebook reader seems determined to sabotage me, by showing my book progress in percentages rather than pages, I think that this breaks down a larger goal (reading two books in one month) into easily achievable chunks (20 pages a day). I have previously used this strategy when completing reading for university, so I am fairly confident it will work. That said, I will wait until the end of this month to judge its effectiveness and if it positively or negatively impacted my reading experience. 

So, that's all I have to share for now! I realise this is quite a short post, but I just wanted to give a quick update about my progress with the project and to let you know which books I am reading this month. There's a chance I may have finished Willow Trees Don't Weep by the time of next week's post, so that blog may well be a review of that book. If not, I suppose the topic will be a surprise!