Mutmainah > Recent Status Updates

The most annoying protagonist I’ve come across in a while. Why is she so passive in her own life? The lack of self awareness is astounding. Plus the prose is so clunky - “Half-heartedly, I go for the one where I look the most natural, then upload it to Instagram, selecting the Clarendon filter to brighten it up.” Like ???

I’m a little embarrassed to be reading this

Covering my face in shame.

now we're in prison with neo-nazis???

Emily ILY and a plotless book as much as anyone else but this is so dead boring...

“We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while.” Isn’t this ironic

Been thinking about the expansion of whiteness (last year when I reread some of the little house books I was struck by the Ingalls’ xenophobia to people I’d lump them in with) through the lens of immigrant stories like this one. I’m struggling quite a bit with the parallels in my own immigrant experience because I don’t really want to relate. Pulling a reverse on the Ingalls, I don’t want them either 😭

Reading this in lieu of continuing with the Little House series. My standards are low but already I’m noticing how this is more ready to deconstructs the narrative of the American Pioneer and isn’t as romanticized. These books were published within a decade or two of each other and were ostensibly responding to the same hunger for nostalgia but that element has allowed this to age better I think.

“As the old saying goes, every generation believes they invented sex and war. I will add to that list: graduate school.” Grad school gets us all, even Ann Patchett.

Practicing reserving judgement over other people’s husbands. It hasn’t been easy 😬

The plot twists were a little convoluted but I liked this all the same

Loved the first essay “Three Fathers” and “The Worthless Servant” feel meh about the rest. I think the tone might just be slightly too preachy for me but my exact problem with her prose has eluded me for this long so we’ll see.

Very disquieting so far

Almost Austen level declaration of love - “I’m not an easy person to be with, I know that. But if you think there’s any chance that I could make you happy, I wish you would let me try. Because it’s the only thing I really want to do with my life”

And - “If you weren’t my friend I wouldn’t know who I was”

What else is there really - “When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child – a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all…just to live quietly and then be buried in the earth. What else is life for?”

There's more I want to remember - "It's hard to believe I have to use the same body for both things...These hands touching you now, I use them to pack boxes"

Sent this to my own sis - "In fact the person who reminds me most of myself is my sister - because she is completely insane, which I also am, and because she makes me so angry, which I also do"

Sally snuck up on me

This - "i was sitting half-asleep in the back of a taxi, remembering strangely that wherever I go, you are with me, and so is he, and that as long as you both live the world will be beautiful to me"
And this - "And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good"

I love this bit - “isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person?”

Wish this landed more on the earnest end of the corny-spectrum than the MGK x Megan Fox extreme. Like, “He was a fucking outlaw. And she wanted that power inside her” and “They hated everyone who wasn’t them”????
With this and the irresponsible handling of self-harm, a lot of my goodwill was squashed in the last twenty pages alone.

Was a little too self assured that I’d be able to finish before the due date last time. Round 2

The plot got more Nollywood (and Tyler Perry - but maybe they’re venn diagrams) as it went on but at least it was a fun read. The connection between Boo and Isobel was a touch predictable. Simi and Boo got off way too easy for being horrid friends and partners.

With friends like these (basically everyone but Ronke)…the snide comments they’re constantly making about her weight, relationship, desire to be a mom, even the food SHE makes them. They’re basically no different from Isobel.