100 books like If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

Madame Bovary is the story of a woman who endlessly struggles to escape the banalities of her provincial life.

This novel makes you feel like you’re in the head of its main characters: first Charles Bovary, then Emma, his second wife and the novel’s eponymous hero. It is so realistic that upon its release, the author was taken to court for public offense against morality.

Still very modern, Emma’s drama is, to me, the discrepancy between illusions and reality. Her quest for happiness outside of her own condition and her inability to be satisfied with what she has are themes that, I believe, still resonate today.

Set in Paris, with David the sexually conflicted central character who has an affair with the doomed Giovanni.

This book – written in 1956 – is an incredibly brave exploration by Baldwin into Gay/Bi sexuality – breaking new ground in LGBTQ+ representation whilst at the same time creating an atmosphere of almost stereotypically gay angst – perhaps even initiating some of the cliches around gay life that were to become mainstream – and used by heterosexual society against us.

That doesn’t stop it being a novella of great significance and febrile passion – like a passionate quickie up against the wall!

Bluets is a work of fragmentary nonfiction so overwrought, and so filled with tears and heartbreak, that I return to it for solace whenever I’m wrought with such feelings.

It begins with the claim that the narrator has fallen in love with the color blue.

She writes of different encounters with the color’s pigments and presentations, as well as Joni Mitchell’s Blue, the biology of color, philosophy of perception, and more like this, all while she is blue: lonely, heartbroken, sad.

Bluets is beautiful, intelligent, heartbreaking, consoling; it is not afraid of to weep.

Just like Nelson describes wishing to ingest the color blue, not knowing what else to do with its beauty and the longing it produces in her, I sometimes wish I could ingest this book. 

When I was puzzling through how on earth to write about unreasonable desire, I found many of my unformed thoughts reflected in recent Nobel-prize winner Annie Ernaux’s very short Simple Passion.

Ernaux’s narrator records in detail her affair with a man that seemed to possess her for a while, and believes she “could even accept the thought of dying providing [she] had lived this passion through to the very end.”

She becomes, she believes, acquainted with what people are “capable of; in other words, anything.”

It is a passion told dispassionately, and a rare record of what erotic obsession feels like from the perspective of someone who has survived it.

It is also a record of a woman’s desire, which feels, to me, revolutionary. 

The study carried out by Grajetzki is truly original, since no one had carried out work on the burials of the elite of the Late Middle Kingdom.

In fact, this book uses a large number of archaeological finds, many of them made at the end of the 19th century, that have never been compared. Furthermore, Grajeztki carries out a synthesis to understand how funeral customs are changing in this period.

As someone who moved to Egypt in 2012 I only experienced the 2011 Revolution in the past tense, in a secondhand way but this book puts this story in a clear, factual way. This is a meticulous work of journalism and passionate study of the time from someone who lived through the street protests and the book has combined on-the-ground reporting with wider investigation of the causes and the revolution’s achievements. The heart of the book is with the struggle of the Egyptian people during 2011 and the author knows Cairo as a city to bring alive this historic narrative for political freedom. 

There are lots of excellent contemporary picture books about children from other countries adjusting to life in the United States. What sets this book apart for me is that, rather than just sprinkling in some words in the family’s native tongue, it specifically talks about languages and bilingualism. The writing is a little on-the-nose in spots (children say things like “I didn’t realize how important a different language is” and “Aren’t languages a beautiful thing? They can truly unite us!”), but it’s a likable story with charming illustrations. My favorite part is at the end, when the Arabic quilt inspires another class to make one in Japanese.

In this autobiography, Ahmed describes her childhood growing up in a Muslim family in the 40s and 50s in Cairo where she witnessed many of the formative events that transformed Egypt—the end of British occupation, the changes wrought by Nassar’s reforms, and the break-down of the largely peaceful coexistence of multi-ethnic and multi-religious groups after the establishment of Israel. Ahmed goes on to school in England and then later to a life in the U.S. where she has difficulty resolving the contradictions of her comfortable Islamic upbringing with a growing sense of feminist identity. Ahmed is professor of women’s studies at Harvard Divinity School. Although not veiling herself, she supports Muslim women who wear the veil as a symbol of their own version of feminism.

Palace of Desire came out in 1957 in original Arabic and got translated to English in the early ’90s, and that’s when I read it. I’m not sure why NY waited so long, except that Naguib Mahfouz couldn’t get the right connection for those years. Your request for reasons that I chose this book made me take another look, and I’ll reread it soon. Thumbing through it now, it still flows with classic narrative, a form still vibrant in 1957, before books in English lost that traditional flow and began to read with a sameness, like most authors went to writing seminars or demanded their rights as women with feelings. I.e. Mahfouz reaches for nothing but the moment, which happens to be in a Cairo neighborhood populated with everyday Egyptians carrying on with life. It’s a slice unavailable to readers like me, revealing a reality far away and compelling, sitting… show more.

Ziad Fahmy’s book on the importance of popular culture in the history of modern Egypt and the anti-British revolution of 1919 was a real landmark. Bringing together songs, jokes, vaudeville plays, and more, he manages to draw out a story of Egyptian anti-colonial, nationalism that is not confined to elite circles or confined by bourgeois morality. This is history from the streets. Although it is an academic book, it is written with an engaging style that captures some of the excitement of this period. Published in 2011, Fahmy’s book opened up space for research and writing on the history of Arabic pop culture.