With Pakistan stuck in an endless socio-political quagmire while a global pandemic rages simultaneously, literature acts as a form of escapism its people, especially with reintroduced lockdowns.
This year’s (ongoing) bestselling list is an amalgamation of Sufi literature, political drama and mental wellness. From Yuval Noah Harari’s ’21 Lessons For The 21st Century’ to Tehmina Durrani’s ‘My Feudal Lord’, below are all the books Pakistanis are currently reading, according to Liberty Books.
1. Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak
Goodreads synopsis: Ella Rubinstein has a husband, three teenage children, and a pleasant home. Everything that should make her confident and fulfilled. Yet there is an emptiness at the heart of Ella’s life – an emptiness once filled by love.
So when Ella reads a manuscript about the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, and his forty rules of life and love, her world is turned upside down. She embarks on a journey to meet the mysterious author of this work.
It is a quest infused with Sufi mysticism and verse, taking Ella and us into an exotic world where faith and love are heartbreakingly explored.
2. Pakistan: Beyond The Crisis State by Maleeha Lodhi
Seen through the lens of the outsider, Pakistan has often been reduced to a caricature. Its diversity and resilience have rarely figured in the single-issue focus of recent literature on the country, be it journalistic or scholarly.
This book seeks to present an alternative paradigm and to contribute a deeper understanding of the country’s dynamics that may help explain why Pakistan has confounded all the doomsday scenarios. It brings together an extraordinary array of leading experts, including Ahmed Rashid, Ayesha Jalal and Zahid Hussain, and practitioners, such as the book’s editor, Maleeha Lodhi, Akbar Ahmed and Munir Akram.
Together they debate their country’s strengths and weaknesses and offer ways out of its current predicament. This book provides a picture of how Pakistanis see themselves and their country’s faultlines and spells out ways to overcome these. Pakistan’s political, economic, social, foreign policy and governance challenges are assessed in detail. So too is the complex interplay between domestic developments and external factors, including great power interests that are so central to the Pakistan story and explain the vicissitudes in its fortunes.
3. 13 Things Mentally Strong People Dont Do by Amy Morin
From Amy Morin, author of “13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do”, the article that went viral and garnered million views in two weeks, comes the ultimate how-to guide to overcome the obstacles getting in the way of a fabulous, more fulfilling and happier life. Morin knows that of which she speaks.
At just 26, while working as a psychologist and therapist, Morin’s husband died suddenly. Inwardly reeling, she realised what pitfalls she didn’t want to succumb to: self-pity, a sense of entitlement and resentment.
In the ten years since then, she’s refined these principles and worked on them with countless patients. The results are impressive. In this book, we learn to identify the 13 common habits that hold us back in life, and how to avoid them. We go to the gym to build up our physical muscles, but we haven’t yet thought about mental strength: the real key to a more productive and meaningful life. This revolutionary book shows you how.
4. 21 Lessons For The 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
How can we protect ourselves from nuclear war, ecological cataclysms and technological disruptions? What can we do about the epidemic of fake news or the threat of terrorism? What should we teach our children?
Yuval Noah Harari takes us on a thrilling journey through today’s most urgent issues. The golden thread running through his exhilarating new book is the challenge of maintaining our collective and individual focus in the face of constant and disorienting change. Are we still capable of understanding the world we have created?
5. And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
From the no. 1 bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, the book that readers everywhere have been waiting for: his first novel in six years. So, then. You want a story and I will tell you one… Afghanistan, 1952.
Abdullah and his sister Pad live with their father and step-mother in the small village of Shadbagh. Their father, Saboor, is constantly in search of work and they struggle together through poverty and brutal winters. To Adbullah, Pad, as beautiful and sweet-natured as the fairy for which she was named, is everything.
More like a parent than a brother, Abdullah will do anything for her, even trading his only pair of shoes for a feather for her treasured collection. Each night they sleep together in their cot, their skulls touching, their limbs tangled. One day the siblings journey across the desert to Kabul with their father. Pad and Abdullah have no sense of the fate that awaits them there, for the event which unfolds will tear their lives apart; sometimes a finger must be cut to save the hand.
Crossing generations and continents, moving from Kabul, to Paris, to San Francisco, to the Greek island of Tinos, with profound wisdom, depth, insight and compassion, Khaled Hosseini writes about the bonds that define us and shape our lives, the ways that we help our loved ones in need, how the choices we make resonate through history, and how we are often surprised by the people closest to us.
6. Blasphemy by Tehmina Durrani
Heer is a beautiful woman who was forced into marrying Pir Sain when she was just fifteen. Her marriage to the evil man was followed by years of torture that stripped her of any dignity. She was left to deal with her husband’s brutal and corrupted world.
Pir Sain calls himself a man of God, but the cruelty meted out to his wife, several other women, his daughter and his son speaks otherwise. His ruthless behavior is the cause for Heer’s miserable life and extreme exploitation. Every day and night is filled with agony that she could never dare to speak about.
As unfair and unholy as it is, all of Pir’s actions are carried out in the name of the Almighty. This is a story about how many religious leaders of today take advantage of their power and the faith of believers.
7. Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
In a prison cell in the US, a man stands trembling, naked, fearfully waiting to be shipped to Guantanamo Bay. How did it come to this? he wonders.
August 9th, 1945, Nagasaki. Hiroko Tanaka steps out onto her veranda, taking in the view of the terraced slopes leading up to the sky. Wrapped in a kimono with three black cranes swooping across the back, she is twenty-one, in love with the man she is to marry, Konrad Weiss.
In a split second, the world turns white. In the next, it explodes with the sound of fire and the horror of realisation. In the numbing aftermath of a bomb that obliterates everything she has known, all that remains are the bird-shaped burns on her back, an indelible reminder of the world she has lost.
In search of new beginnings, she travels to Delhi two years later. There she walks into the lives of Konrad’s half-sister, Elizabeth, her husband James Burton, and their employee Sajjad Ashraf, from whom she starts to learn Urdu.
As the years unravel, new homes replace those left behind and old wars are seamlessly usurped by new conflicts. But the shadows of history – personal, political – are cast over the entwined worlds of the Burtons, Ashrafs and the Tanakas as they are transported from Pakistan to New York, and in the novel’s astonishing climax, to Afghanistan in the immediate wake of 9/11. The ties that have bound them together over decades and generations are tested to the extreme, with unforeseeable consequences.
Sweeping in its scope and mesmerising in its evocation of time and place, “Burnt Shadows” is an epic narrative of disasters evaded and confronted, loyalties offered and repaid, and loves rewarded and betrayed.
8. Elon Musk: How The Billionaire CEO Of SpaceX And Tesla Is Shaping Our Future by Ashlee Vance
South Africa-born Elon Musk is the renowned entrepreneur and innovator behind PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla and SolarCity. Musk wants to save our planet, he wants to send citizens into space, to form a colony on Mars, he wants to make money while doing these things and he wants us all to know about it. He is the real-life inspiration for the Iron Man series of films starring Robert Downey Junior.
The personal tale of Musk’s life comes with all the trappings one associates with a great, drama-filled story. He was a freakishly bright kid who was bullied brutally at school and abused by his father. In the midst of these rough conditions, and the violence of apartheid South Africa, Musk still thrived academically and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he paid his own way through school by turning his house into a club and throwing massive parties.
He started a pair of huge dot-com successes, including PayPal, which eBay acquired for $1.5 billion in 2002. Musk was forced out as CEO and so began his lost years in which he decided to go it alone and baffled friends by investing his fortune in rockets and electric cars.
Meanwhile, Musk’s marriage disintegrated as his technological obsessions took over his life…Elon Musk is the Steve Jobs of the present and the future and for the past twelve months, he has been shadowed by tech reporter, Ashlee Vance. Elon Musk – How the Billionaire CEO of Spacex and Tesla is Shaping our Future is an important, exciting and intelligent account of the real-life Iron Man.
9. Islam: A Short History by Karen Armstrong
In the public mind, Islam is a religion of extremes: it is the world’s fastest growing faith; more than three-quarters of the world’s refugees are Islamic; it has produced government by authoritarian monarchies in Saudi Arabia and ultra-republicans in Iran. Whether we are reading about civil war in Algeria or Afghanistan, the struggle for the soul of Turkey, or political turmoil in Pakistan or Malaysia, the Islamic context permeates all these situations.
Karen Armstrong’s elegant and concise book traces how Islam grew from the other religions of the book, Judaism and Christianity; introduces us to the character of Muhammed (PBUH); and demonstrates that for much of its history, the religion has been a force for enlightenment that promoted liberties for women and allowed the arts and sciences to flourish.
Islam shows how this progressive legacy is today often set aside as the faith struggles to come to terms with the economic and political weakness of most of its believers and with the forces of modernity itself.
10. My Feudal Lord by Tehmina Durrani
Born into one of Pakistan’s most influential families, Tehmina Durrani was raised in the privileged milieu of Lahore high society and educated at the same school as Benazir Bhutto. Like all women of her rank, she was expected to marry a wealthy Muslim, bear him many children and lead a sheltered life of air-conditioned leisure.
When she married Mustafa Khar, one of Pakistan’s most eminent political figures, she continued to move in the best circles, and learned to keep up the public facade as a glamorous, cultivated wife, and mother of four children.
In private, however, the story-book romance rapidly turned sour. Mustafa Khar became violently possessive and jealous, and succeeded in cutting his wife off from the outside world. For the course of her 14-year marriage, she suffered alone, in silence.
This is the story of Tehmina’s rebellion from an unhappy marriage. As a Muslim woman seeking a divorce, she paid a high price. She signed away all financial support, lost the custody of her children, and found herself alienated from her friends and disowned by her parents.
The book, which she originally published herself after publishers in Pakistan refused to do so, shocked Pakistan’s society. She had succeeded in reconciling her faith in Islam with her ardent belief in women’s rights.
