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| photo: Manal al-Sharif | |
Manal al-Sharif was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, in 1979. In 2011, she was imprisoned for driving a car and charged with "driving while female." The mother of two sons, she now lives in Australia and is a leading women's rights activist and the author of Daring to Drive: A Saudi Woman's Awakening (Simon & Schuster, June 13, 2017). In 2012, al-Sharif was awarded the Václav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent at the Oslo Freedom Forum and Time named her one of its "100 Most Influential People in the World."
On your nightstand now:
The War on Women by Sue Lloyd-Roberts. Sitting next to it is Yassmin's Story by Yassmin Abdel-Magied, the Sudanese Australian mechanical engineer. And next to both of them is Pippi Longstocking.
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Five Adventurers mystery series by Mahmoud Salem. I loved it because the characters, the heroes, were children my own age. They helped solve crimes and catch outlaws, and I remember being so captivated by the stories that I often imagined myself with them. I even wrote my own Five Adventurers stories.
Your top five authors:
It's difficult for me to name my five favorite authors because, to me, having a top author means having read all of his or her books and that is rare. In fact, I have only read (and re-read) one author's entire canon: Ghazi al-Gosaibi, the Saudi minister, ambassador, poet and writer.
In addition to his works, some other extraordinary books by extraordinary authors include Elif Shafak's The Forty Rules of Love; Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea; Mona Eltahawy's Headscarves and Hymens; Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame; and Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In.
Book you've faked reading:
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. I had wanted to read it for a while, and when I finally got to it, I was discouraged by a number of text-fillers. The ideas of what contribute to success in the book are unlike any other book you might read about the same subject. But, in my opinion, these ideas could have been illustrated with less jargon. I had to skip through chapters looking for the main points.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Anything written by Ghazi al-Gosaibi. Although he was a high-profile Saudi politician, most of his books were banned for his explicit language and political views. The clerics in Saudi hated him, and whatever wasn't banned was heavily edited.
Growing up, I was lucky to be part of an underground group that exchanged his smuggled books--and whenever I traveled outside Saudi, I always make sure to smuggle a new one back in. His novels are the most captivating books I have ever read, and his poetry, articles and autobiography are also wonderful. When he passed away, everyone was in a deep shock: the stream where we quenched our thirst had stopped.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I never fall for a book cover. Any book I buy, I carefully research ahead of time, asking my bookworm friends for recommendations. I scan the book's table of contents before I read the introduction and first paragraph from each chapter. I then randomly open to a page and read it, and if I can reflect on that page--if it makes sense to me--I know the book is worth my time and money.
Book you hid from your parents:
Growing up in a very conservative society, I hid A LOT of my books from my parents. As a child, I liked romance novels--but, of course, they were banned in Saudi Arabia. I had to wait until we visited my mother's family in Egypt to read them and other banned books, and I would then smuggle them home. Because Egypt had much looser restrictions on books, I loved traveling there (and elsewhere) because it meant I could read more. And I could choose what I wanted to read, not just what was approved and available to us, as was the case at home.
Book that changed your life:
I won't say my life was changed by one single book--it's unfair to the rest. Every great book is a life-changing experience. For me, with every book I read I live another life.
Favorite line from a book:
From Ghazi al-Gosaibi's banned political novel The Apartment of Liberty: "My problem is not forgetting, my real problem is having an excess memory." This quote means so much to me, I included it at the beginning of my memoir. I also love Richard Peck's "I read because one life is not enough."
Five books you'll never part with:
As you might guess, I'll never part with anything written by Ghazi al-Gosaibi or with my childhood copy of The Five Adventurers. I also love Stolen Lives by Malika Oufkir--I couldn't eat or sleep or do anything until I finished it. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle and The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho are also important to me.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
All my childhood books, especially Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Growing up, I always wanted to be Josephine March.
Book you'd most like to see written:
If all history books can be rewritten to include both sides of the story, the world would be a better place. We need to stop experiencing history from only the perspective of the victor. We need to read--and feel--what it is like to be on the defeated side.