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Today I learned these flowers are called hollyhocks.

Isabel Allende was the first non-white writer I ever read. She was also the first writer I read in translation. I was young, probably around fourteen or fifteen. My mother had made the whole family watch The House of the Spirits movie and almost immediately after I found her copy on a shelf in our house and started to read. It was one of the first adult novels that made a very personal impression on me. I felt for the first time that literature could be more than the British and American classics I had mostly been reading until then: Dickens and Austen, of course, and Little Women and Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre and The Great Gatsby (all of which I loved, by the way). Reading Allende was a whole other experience: the difference between a thunderstorm and a drizzle. In her books I found that stories could be about family trees and aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and their aunts and uncles, about religion and also spirits, ghosts, and seemingly ordinary women with psychic powers who could see or dream the future – these were stories that I had grown up hearing too. Chile felt so much closer to Pakistan than England or America ever did (even though I had visited the latter and never the former). I’m not sure how conscious I was of all this at the time, what I do know is that I WAS HOOKED. I sought out Allende’s other books: Paula (also sitting worn out on my mother’s shelf), a heartbreaking memoir about a mother (Allende) sitting on her dying daughter’s bedside, telling her family stories (many of which found their way into The House of the Spirits). Then I read Daughter of Fortune – a story that starts in Chile in the 1830s and finds its way (by boat) up to California at the height of the gold rush, and Portrait in Sepia – a story that begins in California and finds its way to Chile, and I honestly don’t remember much more about it except for what I remember about them all: sweeping sagas exploring love, family, sorrow, belonging. Listen to Allende read from her latest novel on @fbhutto and @topbastard’s #stayhomestayreading series. Thank you for inspiring this post! #bookstagram #booksofinstagram #isabelallende #bookstagrammer

Too many pictures of trees? 🌳🌱🌿☘️🍃

“What is extraordinary is that, given everything that has happened, the natural alignment of the heart remains towards the light. It is in that direction that there is the least resistance.” — Hisham Matar in “The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land In Between” By now the birds know to photobomb all my pictures. The sky these days is impossibly pretty! #lahore #lockdownsky #skyphotography

Some people find it depressing to read about other people’s experiences of grief, loss, and helplessness, but I find it cathartic. It’s especially true for these four stunning memoirs that are written with clarity, empathy, and thoughtfulness, and that are lessons in finding wisdom and beauty (or just the shared humanity of feeling with others) in the midst of hardship. You absolutely must read them whether you do it now or save them for later. ⭐️ Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking — Every so often a book comes along that changes you and becomes a part of you from then on. Didion recounts with piercing and devastating clarity the year following the sudden death of her husband, and the confusion and grief that followed. ⭐️ Hisham Matar’s The Return — In 1990, when the author was nineteen years old, his father, a prominent opponent of Gaddafi’s regime, was imprisoned in Libya along with several family members. It was the last time he saw his father. A contemplative, illuminating memoir of a son searching for a father, a story steeped in sadness and violence but told with a determined dignity. ⭐️ Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me — written as a letter to his teenage son. Coates’s prose is charged with emotion, fear, honesty, and poise as he attempts to share with his son what he knows about being a black man in America. ⭐️ Samantha Harvey’s The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping — A short, luminous and inventive examination of novelist Samantha Harvey’s year-long struggle with insomnia – the “blankness and blackness; the yawning expanse of a night awake.” ⭐️ Head to my stories for some amazing quotes from each book, and I hope you find some solace (or at least, momentary distraction) in them. ⭐️ #bookstagram #bookstagrammer #books #bookrecommendation #bookish #bookishfeatures #readersofinstagram #readersofinsta #igreads #stayhomereadabook #stayhomeandread #instareads #booksbooksandmorebooks

Right place, right time. 🌙🦅

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