Book Review - Beauty by Raphael Selbourne

Selbourne's debut novel Beauty got me into a 'love-hate relationship' with it.

Simply put, I hate how ignorant, stupid, simple, racist and judgmental the title character is.
Consider this:

She thought old people were in the hospice homes because they never married and is therefore childless. She positively had conniptions when she found out some of the old women had children by different men and never married a single of them or that their children had put them there 'cause they wouldn't look after them.

She thought all white people lived in a shithole rack of a house filled with dog wastes.

She looks down on black people like their some kind of mold off a badly kept aquarium tank.

She refers to all free-thinking women as prostitutes and Hindus. What do you expect from a patriarchal brainwashed Muslim girl? Maybe because I am an enlightened West Asian female, seeing women like Beauty still stuck in their Middle - East savagery irks me.

All men are pervs. In a small way this is true but I hate how she behaves as if they're gonna rape her every chance they get. Some of them certainly have that intention, but come on - the whole time I wanted to slap her into another nationality - "get a grip, you little bitch". The sad thing is people like Beauty really do exist.

I love how he accurately captured the lives of the majority of West Asian women still in the clutches of their families.

Picture this - rape from male relatives, early marriages to abusive husband and in-laws, emotional and physical abuse from family, dehumanized to a point that you believe you're nothing but a puppet to be controlled at will by others. Most West Asian females are raised to believe this : you're nothing but a vessel for the highest bidder. As a West Asian female myself, I know this way too well.
Any hint of free thinking is not dealt with kindly. We are given hell to deal with.
The families sometimes preplan, not educating/schooling the girl so she stays dumb and ignorant, obliterating any potential for intelligent thought and autonomy. Beauty is shown to be somewhat an illiterate.

The truth is, the story of Beauty is relatable to many women, Asian or otherwise. You see a human in their rawest form, the most human they can ever be - a good balance between yin and yang. The characters are incredibly flawed but their strengths shone as well amidst their crassness.

A good read.

Of Dickens and Mozart

I only started reading books hoping it will make me smart. Well guess what, I am still stupid. I just don't have the knack for it.

I thought reading books would make me think, but it only got me bored. When I told the others that reading isn't my thing, I was made fun of. I was called dumb and illiterate. My sister and my mother would deliberately use a book reference to make me feel small and insignificant.

So I started buying books obsessively. I found out I liked fantasy adventure and truly, the classics bore me to death with their unnecessary fanciful language. I liked books that made me use my imagination and action packed. So I like some sword-singing and witch killing, so what?

My vocabulary improved a lot after that, granted but why don't they respect my choices as much as I respect theirs?

When I told them exactly how I feel about their choice of books, they look at me scandalized like I said something blasphemous.

Rainbow Dash started off hating books, seeing reading as something absolutely time-consuming. Is she wrong? She's not. It isn't her thing. There are the 'Doers' and then there are the 'Thinkers'.

The Doers need to channel their energy with their bodies, the Thinker is able to sit down and well, think.

Rainbow Dash is a Doer - she needs to move around to learn. But she did end up reading books, she liked adventure-type books. That's the only thing she reads. Just like me, I like Fantasy Adventure. I am so much like Rainbow Dash in this aspect. I just wish the people around me aren't being assholes and actually respect my choices.

Such a simple concept, why is this so hard to comprehend?
Fuck it, there are people who like to read. There are those that who don't. Your job is to respect that choice.
There are those that have a preference difference than yours, one is not superior than the other.

There, I said it. I only started reading so I wouldn't miss out on things. I hate myself for being something I am not to impress people that don't matter.