The Man Who Snapped His Fingers | 
"I don‘t care one way or the other if those guys go around killing each other, but for Christ‘s sake, why can‘t they wash their dirty laundry in their own country? I wonder why he didn‘t say “in your country.” Does he really think I belong to his country now?"
"Torture, like love, destroys, distorts, and transforms. Indubitably. Love, like torture, alters bodies. From precipices of torment. Both love and torture mortify the soul deep in one‘s inner chaos. Where the self disintegrates. Driven to such an extreme, a monster is transformed into a man of conscience, and an idealist into a turncoat."
"I don‘t care what happens to me. I just want you to know the truth. So the children will hear it from your lips. And so I will receive justice. From you. The only judge whom I respect. The sentence of the Last Judgment will come from your lips. It doesn‘t matter when. I will wait for my apocalypse."
"I swallowed all the sheets with the poems I had written for Del. One day a garden will grow in my belly. With bushes and flowers made of recycled paper, page after page of ragged words of love, words that have been flayed, and I fear they are repugnant, scribbled with tears of blood."
pickHoly wow. The book alternated b/w two POVs: a colonel from an Iranian regime, under interrogation while seeking asylum, and his translator, who was a prisoner under said regime, with whom he shares a past of torture. This past also leads to a mutual understanding, mainly involving decisions to save loved ones. The book deals with resistance, violence, betrayal, love. A short novel with vast content. All of the TWs. Highly recommend. #24in48
pickThe story of a woman imprisoned and tortured under an oppressive regime and her redemption in exile. Told from alternating viewpoints of the woman and her captor. I enjoy reading about women in the Middle East, so this one was definitely in my wheelhouse.
My reading options for #7in7readathon! Anyone else participating?
so-soSad but didn't blow me away or totally impress me.
He came upon me at the right moment. Happenstance. He needed to escape. I was his great escape. Indeed, I am convinced that love has no axiomatic reality.
