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🍁i yap about books and languages
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As an account that posts mainly about books and languages, I feel that it isn't just relevant and important but my responsibility to post this.
I ask you to scroll and read the poem written by prof Refaat AlAreer, who was martyred along with his family.
When they tell you ⚪🔵 forces are targeting "terrorists" these are some of who they mean; educators, professors, scientists, doctors, journalists all risking their lives to be heard.

To the language learning community, and I'm talking especially about the ones who never distanced themselves from politics, and the ones that have been vocal about injustices in the world before but have turned a very obvious blind eye to all this, you have been nothing but an embarrassment. Some of you are learning Arabic and somehow think you can distance yourself from the politics and the issues of the Arab world to the point where you can't even as much as say you stand with one of the countries that speak it? Shameful. Embarrassing. Clearly all you care about is enjoying the culture and the language without even caring about the people who speak it.

Language learning is a form of resistance. Educating yourself and reading what the oppressors and western media don't want you to know is an act of resistance. It's the least we can do, in fact. If it wasn't they wouldn't be targeting anyone who speaks about their injustice. If you care that is.

Distancing yourself from politics is a privilege but so is freedom of speech. You can choose which of those to take. While people are being mass slaughtered in a genocide and risking their lives to be heard, you have the privilege of spreading their word and at the very VERY least educating yourself and boycotting whatever sustains this apartheid state.

So, let me say this loud and clear:
⚪🔵 has no right to exist.The civilians there are colonizers, and so are not innocent.
🇵🇸 and its people have every right to resist and you cannot condemn them for it. They're fighting all alone with barely any support for their land and people against colonialism.
🇵🇸 will be free inshaallah
but until then we won't shut up. We can't. by @nmx.jpg

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3 years ago

In July i read the dream hotel and are prisons obsolete together as they both tackle the concept of confinement or prison. Unfortunately the dream hotel wasn't all that and i will not waste my time talking about it. I did come out of the latter book with some thoughts.

Are prisons obsolete by Angela Davis is a short and very accessible book on the US prison complex, with every chapter tackling how things such as gender and race affect prison systems.

Angela Davis compares the prison complex with slavery; how we cannot imagine a world without prison systems today is similar to how no one could imagine a world without slavery before it was abolished. (Ultimately I think it's difficult to imagine a world where a certain groups of people are not exploited because we cannot stop dehumanizing said groups of people but I'm getting ahead of myself...)

While this was heavily from an American perspective, it was interesting to connect similar aspects to prison systems globally. About how prisons are a way to control certain "undesirable" people and to exclude them from society, whether its because of their race or identity. While this feels obvious ofc I feel this is the main reason why we can't really have a world without prisons despite knowing that they are not a place of reform because of this dehumanization.

Another thing she touches heavily on is how the prison system generates free labour (a continuation with the slavery comparison). So I think even if we DO abolish prisons, there will always be another place to use "undesirable" groups of people for free labour, but we will have other names for those.

She has a chapter at the end about alternatives to the prison system but I found it very disappointing?? was not expecting her to provide a solution but it gives this false hope that we dont really need to hear. The very concept of the prison complex will not be abolished until we abolish the main reasons that lead to its formation in the first place. by @nmx.jpg

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24 days ago

Call me silly for being excited about a new bookstore opening but I had sososo much fun at @kinokuniyabangladesh on opening day!! I really didnt expect them to have such a good collection of manga and light novels right away and I cant wait to see them bring even more ‼️
Although I will say I wouldve loved having more Japanese books 🥀 I wouldve been happy with even one shelf please gang I have one request 🤲 by @nmx.jpg

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3 months ago

There is always conversation about the arts in times that are politically rough for all types of reasons, but what we rarely talk about is being forced to make art that does not necessarily align with our beliefs.
The director is a historical fiction during the nazi regime set amongst the nazi elite and celebrities that basically made "propaganda" films and fiction. They make you believe that they're giving you the freedom to make whatever you want, and yet they make you apologize for ever vaguely disagreeing with them and make you believe it was your wish all along to repent. And so our main character GW Pabst, a huge "communist" film maker has to go around unspoken rules in his films and make them as ambiguous or as trite as he can.
We always talk about how avoiding talk about politics is a privilege but the way I see it this book addresses the idea of how that is not always true. There are times where we have to tone down and censor what we believe in on the internet or in public for our own safety, and at that point talking about politics freely and truly having freedom of speech is the privilege. In this book, Pabsts decision to come back from the US and make ultimately politically ambiguous movies and working with a nazi team not only affects how his views and older communist movies are perceived, but also affects his son Jakob who grows up to join the Hitler Youth, and his wife whose health rapidly deteriorates as she sees their son grow up into what they have always feared. It's easy to blame Pabst for dragging his family back into this truly evil regime where they have to watch every step and every word they say, and to feign support for it even infront of their own son, but ultimately what else could he have done? The borders were closed, and it was either do as they say or face the consequences.
I really enjoyed how multi faceted this book is. Every decision the characters make could start hour long discussions, and there's nothing I love more in books where the authors personal views don't announce themselves too much, and they let you decide what to make of these characters. Highly recommend!! Go read it and talk to me about it please 🙏 by @nmx.jpg

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5 months ago

i read like,,, 3 extremely short books in Jan but two of them were really good and I had an awesome month so it doesn't matter 🫶🏼 by @nmx.jpg

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8 months ago

[ this will contain spoilers ]
One thing I like about Joyce Carol Oates is her ability to write about that feeling that something is not right but you can't really put your finger on. That there is something wrong but you're not sure what or why it feels wrong. I noticed this in "where are you going, where have you been" and (to a lesser extent) in her novella "beasts".

Our main character Gillian becomes infatuated with her professor who is married to an infamous artist in their town and... things don't go really well from that point on.

I would like to think that Gillian is not particularly an unreliable narrator in the typical sense; she doesn't particularly mislead the reader or lie in her narrative, it's all what she really feels in the moment and our feelings are not always real or the most coherent. She thinks her friends are jealous of her because they suspect she's going to her professors house but in reality it seemed to me like concern because they've been exploited in the same way, she thinks she is in love with her professor and then battles with the feeling from thinking that maybe that's not entirely true to realising that she's being groomed.

I saw a reel of someone reading this book a while ago and op was talking about how she was also kind of in love with the professor just like Gillian and y'all....idk what to say lol.. he was not written in any way that was even remotely likeable. Gillian herself said he was not even attractive. Why is your takeaway from a book that is very obviously about SA that the predator is kinda hot-
I do think you can read books with your brain turned off sometimes but can we lock in for a minute sometimes? because not every book is a silly one or just simply about "a girlboss" who makes questionable decisions.. there's time and place for that and it is not in books that are clearly about serious themes.

I dont particularly like this book; the themes in it are not ones I would usually read and it's not one I would recommend lightly, but also I could not stop reading despite the discomfort, which is why I can't really rate it on a basic star system because this is easily 5 stars but also like,,, 2 stars. by @nmx.jpg

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9 months ago

hello friends~
can y'all believe we're more than half way thru the year? honestly I can.Time really doesn't fly when you're suffering lol.
I've been in a kind of reading slump for the past few months but I did read a lot of Japanese favourites earlier in the year. I actually can't tell if it's a real reading slump or my luck has just really been bad with books recently 😭 cause recently I read jade shards which I wanted to take my time with but then I finished it in a day???? so maybe I've been picking shitty books 😔 if you think we have a similar taste in books please drop some fun fast recs I can recover to 🙏🏼
Also I did the reader colour test a while ago and honestly I kinda agree with purple. I always thought my top favourite genres were fantasy (which is true) but when I think about some of my recent favourites (Piranesi, 壁, never let me go) I really do see it. I didn't even notice it but my preferences have changed drastically.
But anyways!! my luck may not have been good with books recently but has it been AMAZING with anime 👀 I watched a banger one a few months ago and y'all will be hearing about it soon. City the animation is currently airing and I'm having the time of my life. Nichijou is so back I love insane slice of life anime. by @nmx.jpg

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a year ago

I was trying to find the ISBN of this book from a a bookstores website (now that I think about it idk why I didn't just check goodreads but that's not the point lol) and I noticed that the country under this memoir was "Israel". Now I should be mad but I actually found it kinda funny. Trying to erase Palestinian history by putting a memoir about how the Balfour declaration and the Nakba changes this man's life and many more forever. Try as they may and the truth will always slip through.

I'm not big on memoirs but I enjoyed reading this!! I'm glad I took my time reading this in like a year and a half. I feel like I've known Wasif jawhariyyeh my whole life; he worked a lot of jobs through out his life but above all he was a musician and a collector. I loved reading the parts about his Jawhariyyeh collection and whenever they included a picture from his albums in this edition.

I learned a lot about the ottoman rule in palestine and about the Nakba that I've never known before but I also learned about so many christian celebrations and traditions and in general I really just loved reading about his life. He mentions at the beginning how he is not a writer and he is just doing his best recording his life but I loved it. There were parts where he addresses the reader directly and it felt like listening to a friend talk about their life. I loved his love for music and musicians and art and palestine. I especially loved his trip to Cairo with his wife. wdym you stayed at the best hotel with a view of the Nile for THREE EGYPTIAN POUNDS???? And it was a lot too????? absolutely wild like I knew all this but reading about it in context always shocks me.

Another part that really stood out to me was how much he still found little moments of joy to write about when they were getting displaced and the future was so uncertain. idk if this is a "good memoir" when there shouldn't be such a thing anyway but this a good read 👍🏼 by @nmx.jpg

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2 years ago

Happy new year friends 🎊💗
This may have been one of the longest most eventful years of my life, with the good and the bad but alhamdulilah regardless.
The second half of the year was very academically exhausting and little to no reading was done 😔 I did really get into audiobooks though especially nonfiction while on my way to uni which was fun.
Basically all the language learning I did was in the last 3 weeks of December lol but some wins:
- finishing 101 pages of Malamander in Turkish (the original plan was the whole book which is around 300 pages but I'm satisfied with this)
- Restarting German and finishing A1 stuff from the course I'm using
- really getting back into reading in Japanese with 20th century boys 👁️☝🏼
- starting to feel more confident in my Japanese output (I wrote a whole substack post on that!!)

I have no expectations from 2025 and no long term goals either. I'll take it one month at a time 🙏🏼 I hope this year goes well for you and me <3 by @nmx.jpg

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2 years ago

#booksthatmademe 📚

I've been seeing this tag around and just had to do it 🫶🏼
One of my core memories is my mom coming back from work with picture books and those Disney magazines in Arabic and English even though I could barely read either at the time. I remember learning English used to be so annoying but I loved the books she got me and actually tried to read them. Ever since I was a little girl I believed in the power of immersion as you can see.

These are just a few of many books that I've read at each stage of my life especially in my teen years. I've tried to keep the ones that were the most memorable or shaped my taste in reading now. by @nmx.jpg

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2 years ago

Happy too tired July everyone!! I'd say that I can't believe half of the year is already over but honestly this time the first half of the year was so full of memories I did not even stop to consider the passage of time. Did not even realize half the year is over.
So far this has been a decent reading year; 14 English books, 11 in Japanese and 2 arabic (💀). One of my reading goals this year was to read more in Arabic so as you can see that's not going very well lol but otherwise im happy with my reading so far.
In terms of language learning it has been bad tbh, I think I really need to actually make peace with the fact that my progress in all my languages especially Turkish and German will be painstakingly slow with uni. Idk how some of you guys manage it but I really can't 😔
Nerd hobbies aside this year has been so surreal; the past 6 months have been so unusually eventful frankly im not even used to this 💀 like that's too much fun time to bedrot. As I look back I realize how close I've come to 14 year old me's vision board.
Life has been good recently, alhamdulilah
and I pray the same for you <3 by @nmx.jpg

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2 years ago

I feel like I always treated religion as a very technical aspect of my life; routines to read the Qur'an or any islamic books, studied them like I was writing a thesis, always asking questions that honestly probably got annoying after a while but I could not help it I had to know every little detail about Islam. All of this came of course out of my own love for my faith but the extremity of it came from a constant fear that any minute I will be put in a position where I question my faith, where someone will say something or ask me something I don't know the answer to that will just make me rethink all my ideals and all my beliefs. When you're in STEM this is not very rare.

After a while it frankly got a little exhausting.

Piranesi isn't necessarily religious fiction but reading it made me realize something that I think I'll live with forever; that some things can remain unknown to us and that's where their beauty lies. Sometimes there is really no direct benefit to finally cracking what was there before the big bang or how God sent Adam and Hawa to Earth, but once we know it's like the beauty and mystery of this knowledge has been wrested out of it and now it's merely an image that maybe we will think about sometimes.

Instead of seeing the unknown as an obstacle or as a limitation, sometimes its beauty lies in the FACT that it's unknown.

I have this book to thank for making me feel more spiritual and more confident in my faith, and for assuring me that religion and science can after all not really be so mutually exclusive.
After all, the Beauty of the House is immesurable, it's Kindness infinite ❤️ by @nmx.jpg

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2 years ago