Recommendations

Five Books Recommended by Wajdi al-Ahdal

In this corner, the Yemeni short story writer and novelist Wajdi al-Ahdal, who has published 15 books between novels, stories, theater, and screenplays, with his novel 'Mountain Boats' translated into French, 'Land Without Sky' into English, 'Donkey Among Songs' into Italian, while his novel 'Philosopher of the Quarantine' reached the longlist of the 2008 Arabic Booker Prize, will take us into the worlds of reading through what he has recently come across and recommends reading.

Memoirs of 'Brás Cubas' by Machado de Assis..

A man who inherited his wealth from his father, and lived his entire life in Rio de Janeiro, tried his luck in writing literature and articles, and to kill his free time he published a newspaper, and won a seat in parliament to improve his social standing..

He was not a politician, and his life lacked purpose; he never married or had children, and the most notable thing he did in his life was his illicit relationship with a married woman. Critic Susan Sontag said of him: 'The greatest writer produced by Latin America' — Machado de Assis, a novelist, dark-skinned, his father of African origin, his mother white Portuguese. His grandparents were freed slaves. He himself grew up in an impoverished family; his family could not afford to send him to school, so he taught himself. He is a self-made man, a human miracle walking on Earth!

'The Power of Silence' by Susan Cain..

The book 'The Power of Silence: The Hidden Strength of Introverted Children and Teenagers', whose Arabic version was published in 2025 by Jarir Bookstore, is one of the best-selling books in America according to the New York Times. The book draws attention to the grave mistake humanity made when it elevated educational values that focus on acquiring a strong personality, persuasion skills, eloquence, public speaking, fluency, being sociable, and able to make friends and expand one's social circle to the maximum. The author claims that these educational values only produce sales representatives and have led to generations of employees skilled in marketing. The extrovert focuses outward, the introvert focuses inward. But because we live in an era that emphasizes material gains, the introvert is forced to imitate the extrovert's ways to achieve good income or job promotion they believe they deserve, and neglect listening to their inner world, which may contain useful materials for humanity.

'The World of Murtada al-Zabidi' by Stefan Reichmuth..

The book covers every detail about Murtada al-Zabidi, who lived in the eighteenth century (1732-1791 AD), who was the wonder of his age. This man managed to break several assumptions prevalent in the Islamic world. The first assumption is that the era was an era of decline of Arab-Islamic civilization. The second assumption is the claim that the predecessors perfected and reached the ultimate in knowledge, so it is inconceivable that a successor could surpass the fruits of their minds. Murtada al-Zabidi defeated the negative sayings that spread among Arab and Muslim intellectuals about the decline of Islamic civilization, and managed to author 225 books, some of which consist of multiple volumes, such as the book 'Taj al-Arus min Jawahir al-Qamus', which is the largest dictionary in the Arabic language, published by the National Council for Culture, Arts, and Literature in Kuwait in 40 volumes.

'Night Shooting' by Ahmed Zein..

With this novel, the author confirms his position as a pioneer of the modernist narrative wave in Yemen, and his mastery in employing stream-of-consciousness techniques. Ahmed Zein possessed complete courage and narrative cunning to explain the real reason for the affliction that Yemen has suffered for ages. He does not resort to traditional suspense mechanisms to hold the reader until the last line of the novel; his suspense relies on the technique of hiding information and distributing it skillfully across different areas of the novel. In fact, loads of information remain in the shadows even after we finish reading the novel; the reader must deduce it by following their own reflections and analyses, making the novel alive and extended in the reader's mind and heart.

'Abu al-Ruti' by Abdulkarim al-Razehi..

It is considered the best written in the art of autobiography in Yemeni literature. Al-Razehi is one of the great creative writers in satirical writing, and in his autobiography 'Abu al-Ruti' he adds to the Yemeni and human library a precious book that chronicles what Yemen and its people were like in the second half of the twentieth century, and the period he lived in Aden during the sixties of the last century, and the years he worked as a baker while continuing his education. Years full of adventures and suffering, coinciding with the independence of South Yemen and the conflict between the Liberation Front and the National Front, then the National Front's takeover and monopoly of power.

1 Wajdi al-Ahdal