Review: The Tenth Island: Finding Joy, Beauty, and Unexpected Love in the Azores by Diana Marcum

The Tenth Island is a book written by a young(ish) journalist who falls in love with the Azores and decides to stay there for a sabbatical from her unfulfilled, stressed out life.

As a young(ish) writer who has fallen in love with the Azores and who has decided to stay there for a sabbatical from his unfulfilled, stressed out life, I found myself intrigued by the premise, though perhaps somewhat envious of the fact that it resulted in a book about the experience in her case.

After reading it, I can say with confidence that I was not the target audience, regardless of any theoretical similarities in my situation. In fact, I could not help smiling while reading Hannah Green at the same time as this book, because it had a throwaway line about real stories as opposed to those about "needy middle-agers overturning their lives in a fit of First World pique and finding true love running a funky little book shop in Barcelona". Apparently, there is an entire genre for this sort of thing, which I had hitherto been ignorant of. (Side note: I would be delighted to run a bookshop on any Azorean island. Having watched Black Books, I am confident that I am the perfect guy for such a project! Contact me with lots of cash to make this happen!)

So, ignorant of the entire genre, I cannot comment about whether The Tenth Island is as good as Eat Pray Love, the book mentioned a lot in publicity about this one. What I can say is that it is filled with affection for the Azores. It's a bit of a shame that the writer spends her entire time on Terceira, the party island, which is the least scenic of the bigger islands. (Then again, she's mostly interested in the people, not scenery, so it's not the wrong island for her)

The author is a very different person compared to myself. An extrovert, perky, pretty, interested in people, fast at making hundreds of friendly acquaintances, a real social butterfly: she is essentially my polar opposite. Thus the text is a bewildering list of all the people she meets, filled with impressions of their lives and snippets of their life stories. As a journalist, the author talks to people, and asks them questions. What a bizarre thing to do. I barely remember people's names in real life, so I found that, aside from one or two of the people in her book, I had no idea who anyone was most of the time.

The author also had a very different way of looking at the humans: she looks at everyone she meets with affection, but also a strong tendency to cutesify everyone's culture, habits and history (except for Americans, who are the default and whose culture therefore isn't interesting enough to smile about). Her book isn't full of people, it's full of quaint, cute caricatures. Whether Azorean or Armenian or Iranian, she gives everyone just enough colour to draw a cartoon person, an Instagram polaroid snapshot with technicolor filters, but not enough to make anyone come across as a real person with a real life. As such, the character I enjoyed most turned out to be Murphy, her labrador, because at least with a dog it's not so shallow or patronising to feel bemused affection  to the exclusion of any other sentiment.

As for life lessons, the book does occasionally include an aside to the reader with some theory / snippet of wisdom. None of those theories resonated or stuck with me, unfortunately, which left me feeling as if this book was a bit vapid. This was a surprise, as the author is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, someone who has done outstanding, world class work. Perhaps she has a better eye for other people's stories than she does for her own. Or perhaps a feel-good book about happy laid back quaint Azorean cartoon people living on their quirky, pretty islands and in their homesick diaspora is simply too light a subject matter to burden with deep insights into greater truths.

In the end, The Tenth Island felt a bit empty. The title promises the finding of things (joy, beauty and unexpected love), but only two out of three are found in the text. In a pleasant surprise, there is no love, or rather, she never actually gets together with the man whom she seems to feel the greatest affection for. Instead, she has a relationship or two with men whom she has no discernible feelings for, although this might also be a factor in the empty feeling the book left behind. Her (multiple) visits to the Azores are basically extended holidays. They do not seem to change her, nor her life. The main gist of the book could be summed up as "woman enjoys taking a break now and again", something which could surely only come as a surprise to Americans with their pitiful holiday allowances. At least she describes the Azores, well, and with affection, and that is good.

So yeah, I was really not the target audience. On the other hand, if the book makes a few more people curious about the Azores, that's a lovely achievement, and it might make for a pleasant, light read for any travellers heading to these islands.

Rating: 3/5

Book Review: Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age by Amani Al-Khatahtbeh

Muslim Girl is one of those things that seems a little hard to define. It started out as a web community and blog (on Livejournal! Remember Livejournal?), but these days, it's a Facebook page, a Twitter profile, a website, a hashtag, a column in magazines, a slogan on apparel... essentially, Muslim Girl is now a brand rather than any singular entity. It is the brainchild of Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, and now it is also a book - her autobiography.

From its scattershot, breathless introduction, to the very last page, the book zips from one thought to the next, largely without a linear path. This was a surprise: I'd vaguely expected an autobiography, possibly with a little politics and a dollop of lifestyle stuff for young female Muslims (which is more or less what I perceive Muslimgirl.com to be), but generally following the linear route that autobiographies tend to take. Like pretty much every expectation I had about the book, this was not the case.

The introduction sums up the essence of the Muslim Girl project. The first sentence:

"I'm kind of playing the game right now," I told Contessa Gayles in the bathroom of Muslim Girl's overpriced studio in Brooklyn, New York.

Then, after the name dropping (who is Contessa Gayles? Never heard of the woman) a brisk tour of post-millennium history and some of the things that sent shockwaves around Muslim communities in the West  (9/11, France's headscarf ban, the Iraq War and American atrocities against Iraqis, Trump),  followed by the final paragraph which sums up the Muslim Girl media phenomenon:

I think we've become starved for people to actually listen to us. We've become so desperate to hear our own voices above all the white noise that we have willfully compromised and repackaged our narratives to make them palatable - to make them commercial and catchy, to make them headline-worthy, to sell a story that you will find deserving of your attention. We call it playing the game, because you consuming some semblance of our truth is better than you consuming whatever else is out there, conjured by someone else on our behalf. But that's not good enough any more.

 ("White noise" ... Hah! I certainly did not expect her to use a pun...)

Reading the book was easy and pleasant enough: it's accessibly written, jumping around thoughts and little scenes fast enough not to get boring, and while it may occasionally get quite ranty, the rants rarely get to that eye-rolling stage. That said, the book did not leave me with very strong impressions or a deeper understanding of anything. My most fundamental take-away from the book is a certain envy of Amani: ten years younger than myself, she has achieved so much more, and left her mark on the world in a way that I have not. I can only take my hat off at her achievements.

I guess the second take-away is the matter of identity. I was 19 when the two towers fell. The author was 9. I'm a white, atheist male. She is an Arab Muslim. For me, world politics since 9/11 has often felt like an enormous, slow-motion train wreck: something with near-infinite momentum, with atrocities, disasters, injustice, and erosion of the liberal, multicultural values that I hold dear, and something I have been completely impotent to stop or change, no matter how many petitions I signed, protests I attended, or charities I donated to to undo some of the damage. When all is said and done, I have always been a spectator, which is, I guess, the luxury afforded to me by my visible identity. For Amani, a young Muslim girl, the geopolitical events weren't something that she could watch from outside, but something that shone a spotlight on her identity, and seemingly defined her life. I have to admit to being quite tired of identity politics, and every time someone mentions "intersectionality" I groan inwardly. The book did remind me that this is a luxury that not everyone shares, and that there are some instances where ticking many boxes in the check list of "disadvantaged groups" really does mean an accumulation of troubles.

Where the book fell flat is in the "autobiography" bit. Perhaps it's because the author is still so young that she simply hasn't lived long enough to have many stories to tell. But my suspicion is that Amani shares a quality with many Muslims: that of being essentially a private person. It's perfectly understandable (and wise, in a world where racists are emboldened), but it means that even after reading the book, I have only the vaguest notion of what her family are like, and virtually no idea who else is in her life. I might know about some instances when she was bullied, but there is very little that's personal in the book.  If you were hoping that Muslim Girl would be like a Millennial Muslim version of Caitlin Moran's "How to be a Woman" (as I must sheepishly admit, I was), then that hope, too, will not be realised.

Finally, the book made me wonder about the future of Muslim Girl. When it launched, the idea of a pop culture, lifestyle-heavy, feminist, tolerant media outlet for Muslim Girls was overdue, revolutionary, and ripe. Now, after the girlpower phase is possibly approaching its zenith, with Amani appearing in music videos and casually name dropping celebrities she's met in her first autobiography, I cannot help but wonder: will Muslim Girl grow up? Will we see Muslim Woman, aimed at the Linda Sarsour generation, perhaps a little less consumerist and hip, perhaps daring not just to "play the game" but to meet the problems Muslim women face head-on: right-wing populism, discrimination and Islamophobia in the West, genuine oppression and persecution in Persia and much of the Arab world...

In summary: the book might not be exactly what you expect from an autobiography. It chronicles a life that has only just begun, and it shines a spotlight on how Muslims in the West are victimised by a society where racism flourishes, rather than giving in-depth, personal insight into one life, but it's short, never boring, and worth a read.