On Beauty and Being Just

When the sun's high in the sky, and you can feel the heat bead on your upper lip, I've found that the kind of restlessness that seeps into me can only be solved by reading.
Usually, I grab a lawn chair, sit in the garden by the rock-wall and curl up and read. One end of my dupatta curled in my hand, wiping the sweat from my forehead.
My courtship of book stores in Karachi has been similar to that of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw-
I walked out of my first bookstore with Wally Lamb's This Much I Know is True and On Beauty.
It's been a while since I really fell headlong in love with a book like this one. Zadie Smith has always been able to astound me with the way she develops her characters- each and everyone as real and solid as I imagine real people.
This book however, was the kind of book that stays with you days after reading it.
She writes so beautifully- each and every word carefully chewed, tasted and deliberated before being put on paper.

The book is her homage to Howard's End by E.M. Forster- but it's so lyrically rich, that I'd never compare her to him. Her title and her story are influenced by Elaine Scarry's essay "On Beauty and Being Just." The Belsey children and Victoria (Vee) Kipps, are as real as if they were walking off the page and into my life. I can imagine each and every nook and cranny of the small college town she describes, and the esoteric conversation that occurs within the academia circles makes me relive those conversations that happened in Karen Osborne's Intro to Creative Writing class.

There are very few books I'd recommend to everyone that I know, and this is definitely one of them. Hand in hand with Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, Khaled Hosseini's Kite Runner, and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, On Beauty's climbed to the top of my list of books you have to read before you die.