January's pleasure reading

This year I hope to read a book for pleasure every month and although I had planned to read The Fountainhead first, I bought another book from Barnes and Noble (yesterday!) on an impulse.

In high school I read a book called Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing up Iranian in America by Firoozeh Dumas and I loved it! Her style of writing is really unique and she has so many funny ways of describing all the situations in her life. So anyway, I knew she was going to be writing a second biography and from time to time when I went to bookstores I look for her books. On Saturday I took a gift card given to me for Christmas by one of my brothers-in-law and lo and behold -- I found another Firoozeh Dumas book!


This month's reading was called Laughing Without an Accent: Adventures of a Global Citizen. Considering I read the entire book in less than a day, to say I enjoyed it is putting it mildly. Her books are just chapters based on funny things in her life and I have to wonder how anyone can have so many amusing things happen to them in the course of their lives. I mean, maybe things that happen to me are also amusing I just don't have the words to describe them in such entertaining ways. It reminds me of David Sedaris and his books (which, coincidentally I have several I received for Christmas that I haven't read).

For example, she was writing about after she had given birth to her first child and her mother came to stay with her for two weeks to help her out. Apparently her mother believed that eating watermelon is good for breastmilk but as the author had had a C section, carrying a watermelon from the store across the street from their house was out of the picture (and I think her husband was out of town).

"One day I awoke to find an enormous watermelon on my kitchen counter and my mother smiling like Sylvester after he had finally eaten Tweety.
'Where did this come from?' I asked.
'From the grocery store,' she said.
'How did you get it home?'
'Nice man help me.'
My mother explained that the store was having a special: all melons were the same price, regardless of weight. She had noticed an enormous, only-in-America-size watermelon, and bonded with it in a way that only a frugal immigrant can. She then did what any self-respecting mother would do. As she described it, 'I looked for a strong man.'
According to her, she asked an unsuspecting soul in the fruit aisle if he could 'Peh-leaze help for my daw-ter eat vater-melon for baby.' This kind, perhaps frightened, gentle giant of a man then carried this super-size fruit across the street, up two flights of narrow stairs, and placed it on my kitchen counter.
'Did you offer to pay him?' I asked.
'I said to him, 'You are verry, verry kind man' and offered him addas polo.'
Not surprisingly, the kind man had turned down my mother's offer of lentil rice, lest he then be asked to clean the chimney."

There are so many other situations in this book that are hilarious, including descriptions of her childhood in Iran, going on a family cruise, and weird foods she has sampled throughout her life. I highly recommend this book (and Funny in Farsi!) to anyone!