American Muslim

Books galore!

Asalaam Alaikum (peace be with you),

I've mentioned before about my new hobby as a book reviewer and it has really become something enjoyable to do on the other side. It's a total win-win for me - I get free books and I can improve my writing at the same time. Anyway, you can now access all my reviews so far for Pop Matters at this site. Basically, how it works is that every two weeks, my editor sends out a list of books that she'd like all the staff writers and contributing book reviewers - like me - to review. We can recommend books to her and the only criterion is that it should fall somewhere under the popular culture theme, which is a very broad labelling. So, although Danielle Steele and John Grisham have enormous commerical popularity, their books are not reviewed on this site. But, I just reviewed the new book from Thomas J. Wurzelbacher aka Joe the Plumber and that fits more along the lines of what Pop Matters and their readers are interested in.

I just submitted my review yesterday of President Obama Election 2008: Collection of Newspaper Front Pages and it should be live on the site soon. Right now, I'm reading Sophie Dahl's Playing with the Grown Ups, which I hope to finish by today and then write the review later in the evening. But, besides those two, here's what I have lined up in the next month or so:

- Mina Hajratwala's Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents

- Rory MacLean's Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India

- Amy Stewart's Wicked Plants: A Book of Botanical Atrocities

- Niall Stanage's Redemption Song: An Irish Reporter Inside the Obama Campaign

- Neil Bascomb's Hunting Eichmann: How A Band of Survivors and a Young Spy Agency Chased Down the World's Most Notorious Nazi

- Eric Dregni's In Cod We Trust: Living the Norwegian Dream

My long-term goal is to use these reviews to get reviewer jobs for other websites and journals. Inshallah, my review goes online soon for John Tehranian's Whitewashed: America's Invisible Middle Eastern Community. I'm hoping to really use that at the MPSA Conference in Chicago to talk to some journal editors about writing reviews for more academic journals.