REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE
Julian of Norwich

I don't know about you but sometimes I wonder if the problem is that I haven't read enough medieval mystics. Is there some great secret hidden in some semi-obscure text that'll make everything make sense for me?? Probably not, but how will I know unless I read every single book ever written! Julian of Norwich was a 14th century anchorite, probably now most well known for her phrase "but all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well." This book, REVELATIONS OF DIVINE LOVE, is her account of a series of visions she had and her own interpretation of them. It's considered to be the first book written in English by a woman. When I first started reading it I was very into it, but it quickly started to feel monotonous and it ended up taking me almost six month to finish. Mystical experiences are fascinating to me, but they are definitionally kind of hard to write about or explain to anyone else, so reading about them can be frustrating and tedious. The main things I remember now are one of the visions in which she is extremely moved by the sight of the giant bleeding head of Jesus, and another in which she realizes that "as verily as God is our Father, so verily is God our Mother."

SISTER OUTSIDER
Audre Lorde

This was the second book I read for my favorite rapper's book club and I liked it a lot more than the one I read for it last month. Some of it's political, some of it's about poetry, almost all of it is great. Here are some quotes:

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.

Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.

The answer to cold is heat, the answer to hunger is food. But there is no simple monolithic solution to racism, to sexism, to homophobia. There is only the conscious focusing within each of my days to move against them, wherever I come up against these particular manifestations of the same disease.

If I look at my most vulnerable places and acknowledge the pain I have felt, I can remove the source of that pain from my enemies' arsenals.

Although I've been in Tunisia for almost six months now, I haven't done a good job of improving my Arabic. Obviously I'd like to get better at speaking it, but I also want to be able to read it, and I haven't been putting enough effort into either one. Reading comes more naturally to me in any language than talking to people though, so this month I decided to at least focus on that. At one of the bookstores in town I found a series of childrens picture biographies of Muslim historical figures. I'd already attempted to practice by reading picture books, but because I'm interested in history and religion and religious history, this series has proven to be a lot more fun for me than struggling through a story about a goat and a fox and a chicken or whatever. Basically I read a page in Arabic, getting the main idea but only understanding about a quarter of the words, then I google translate the page into English a sentence at a time, and then go back and read the page in Arabic again, this time understanding more words. Seems weird that I'm a language teacher and have no idea if this is an effective reading strategy, but it works alright for me. This month I read about the explorer Ibn Battuta, the philosopher/theologian/astronomer Al Ghazali, and the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan. Gonna go back to the bookstore in the next day or two to pick out some new books to read this month.

other books I read this month:
THE DUTCH HOUSE - Ann Patchett