Fans pick 100 books like If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

A male author describing the adulterous passions of an unhappy woman, Flaubert tears into Madame Bovary as superficial and ridiculously narcissistic. Yet Flaubert was a terrific writer and also shows how empty and purposeless the restricted life of a middle-class woman was in his time–not poor enough to be preoccupied with surviving, but not rich enough to lead a glamorous life. It’s not like Emma Bovary can go to law school!

Flaubert’s dissection of Emma’s forbidden love life is brilliant. It’s downright painful to see Emma’s hopes and fantasies when the men in her life take what they want from her, and she pours all she has into them. I can relate.

As a writer, each time I read anything by James Baldwin, it´s like I´m getting a master class in how to capture a feeling and translate that into an articulate thought. When a friend told me to read this book over 30 years ago, shortly after I came out, they said this was “the best, and perhaps the most tragic novel about bisexuality ever written.”

Years later, it still kicks me in the gut each time I read it. Baldwin´s detailed examination of David´s desire for Giovanni while simultaneously being engaged to his fiancé, Hella, remains achingly beautiful.

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. 

I love this children’s book about languages and how quilting can become a metaphor for our patchwork society, with differences and unity.

I particularly liked the Arabic words scattered here and there without an immediate translation (there is a glossary at the end), and it was fun to try to make sense of them by the context and empathize with the characters as they learn to live a bilingual life.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

From witchets to moulding planes, from Roman tools to eighteenth-century American tools, this was my first "bible" on the subject. A more thorough grounding — with amazing photographs — would be hard to find. Reading this book puts two millennia of woodworking into a useful perspective. Once read it will illustrate in greater detail every other book on the subject. Totally essential.