Homeland Elegies: A Barack Obama Favourite Book 2020

Puerile pleasures, that’s what Father was learning again—we all were—and Trump was our tutor.

Out the window, the dramatic mountain vistas had given way to the familiar concatenation of sometimes ramshackle roadside constructions, stores and schools and homes, tea stands, food stands, pumping stations; the earlier evergreen of the Hazara steppes now replaced by sundry shades of drying earth, from ecru to umber, mud-brick walls and sand-brow

If you can do anything else with yourself, anything more certain, you owe it to yourself and to everyone you love to do that. But if you can’t, if you need to be writing, well, then, one of the joys of the lonely journey ahead, beta, is the comfort of reading. A day spent reading is not a great day. But a life spent reading is a wonderful life.”

They deserve what they got. And what they’re going to get.” These last words were the lines that would end up in my play.

I had never heard her say this. But the resignation in her voice made me think this was not a new thought.

the original Companions of the Prophet recast as sex-crazed purveyors of snuff films whom even Rushdie’s satirical genius could not have imagined.

There was silence on the line. “You’re different,” she said. “Different from what?” “From the child I raised.”

interpretation has more to do with the one interpreting than the one being interpreted.

(For Muslims, to speak of Muhammad as the author of the Quran is a surpassing blasphemy; only God could have authored such a miracle, we are told; Muhammad was just a holy stenographer, if you will, taking divine dictation.)