Provenance

 There is a right time for a book, a right mood.  A great book may just be wrong for a specific moment: sometimes magnificent works languish under my bed for months because I am simply not in the mood for them.  As in so many things in life, timing is paramount.

However, how a book comes into my world is also undeniably important: did I see this work in a bookstore on a rare afternoon of leisure (so I associate it with that pleasant feeling, regardless of its topic)?  Did it come to me from a trusted friend (in which case I feel myself in conversation with them as I am reading)?  Was it a little free library find (yippee! free book!)?  Is it from a family member (read with a certain heaviness that comes from responsibility . . . which means it is a special surprise and delight if I actually like it)? 

Kaveh Akbar's Martyr was a bookstore find that coincided with a brief, happy period in which a man that I met via the adventures of online dating really pushed me to think differently about the so-called "Arab" world.  It came at a moment when I wanted to understand more about a Muslim world view, and was experimenting with learning basic Arabic on duolingo (I'm still working on that: "tirr3," you are a weird phoneme).  I was also, coincidentally, teaching Edward Said's Orientalism.  My mind was primed for learning about Iran, and surmounting any homogenizing stereotypes that might be lurking in my own brain.  

This is kind of what I did get from Martyr (but also not really). . . .

Protagonist Cyrus Shams, a young man with addiction issues, has to deal with the legacy of his parents.  What I learned about the Persian Gulf in this novel was small in the much larger lens of how Cyrus deals with his memory of his parents and their respective pasts: "Cyrus prided himself in descending from people comfortable sitting in uncertainty.  He himself knew little about anything and tried to remember that.  He read once about a Sufi prayer that went 'Lord, increase my bewilderment.'  That was the prayer in its entirety" (209).

Akbar gives a compelling account of what addiction feels like: "Getting sober means having to figure out how to spend twenty-four hours a day.  It means building an entirely new personality, learning how to move your face, your fingers [. . .] You're moving into a house the last tenants trashed" (271).

Most surprisingly, this novel is a love story: "Love was a room that appeared when you stepped into it" is a particularly nice line (319).

Provenance: happy bookstore day;  association, very loosely, with someone I dated and liked.

**

Julia Enders's Gut was recommended to me, insistently, by the friend of my (deceased) mother who has basically adopted me.

I am, as a good Virgo, perhaps especially susceptible to health advice.  However, I am also strongly resistant to fad diets and trends.  Gut is not a fad diet: that's good.  The illustrations are ridiculous, but that is kind of charming, and in keeping with the conversational patter of the whole.  It's a remarkable text for giving concise and readable layman's narratives of peristalsis, of vomiting, of the actual digestive actions of the stomach, and of the two separate neurological processes that facilitate pooping.  I haven't yet gotten to the fermented foods part.  Or the bit about how the brain and the gut are interconnected.

Provenance: Dutifully reading this to please a "relative," and to my delight finding it enjoyable.  Also influential.  I now keep a small stool in the bathroom to help with that other kind of stool.