 up at Nadia’s house. Not long thereafter, Saeed’s mother is hit by a stray bullet that kills her. When Nadia sees how distraught Saeed and his father are after the funeral, she decides to move in with them. Tensions escalate quickly in the city, and Saeed, Nadia, and Saeed’s father find themselves unable to lead the lives they once enjoyed.
Also, about this time, rumors start circulating about black doors that can transport people from one place to another, taking them far away. Apparently, these doors simply appear in the place of regular doors, and many of the city’s inhabitants actively seek them out as a way of escaping the violent radicals. In spite of the danger of using these doors to leave Nadia and Saeed eventually do so. Their experiences in Greece, London, and northern California comprise the remainder of the story.
Each of the episodes are presented very realistically with their lives buffeted by competing claims of both the need to maintain a daily life and the emotions of their personal relationship. Their story is told in a way that gradually builds the reader's interest up to the last page of the novel. I found myself agreeing with the narrator that "We are all migrants through time." (p 209) The fantastic element allowed one to meditate on the migration of people throughout the world and what it means to leave your family behind and join a new community of people - both natives and others.
Exit West: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid. Riverhead Books, New York, 2017.
Here are five of my favorite non-fiction books, all of them short but overflowing with quality. They have provided continual insight, ideas, and inspiration for my life. I present them in approximately the order in which they entered my reading life.
I have read this book several times over the years, starting the summer before I entered college when it was assigned reading for the incoming Freshman class. It is a classic in the sense that it both retains a freshness upon rereading and succeeds in challenging the reader with the thoughts that it presents. Insightful regarding the nature of those who join mass movements, Hoffer's observations are timeless.
While studying the History of Science as an undergraduate I was introduced to the writings of Loren Eiseley. In this small but profound book he shares personal notes and we slowly come to realize that Eiseley is not just talking about his own life’s journey. Eiseley’s narrator creates a metaphor for the journey of all humankind through the vast dimension of time and space—a journey filled with perplexity, delight, and impermanence.
I also discovered the thoughts of Highet while in College. He explores the power, capabilities, and limitations of the human mind throughout the ages, highlighting the wonders created by the great thinkers of the ages, all the while keeping in mind the tortures that Prometheus endured for giving Man the gift of fire.
George Steiner was (he died this month) a protean thinker writing about tragedy, the classics and more over his career. This short book is an intellectual tour de force, that generates both a profound excitement and promotes a profound unease…like the great culturalists of the past. Steiner uses a dense and plural learning to assess his topic: his book has the outstanding quality of being not simply a reflection on culture, but an embodiment of certain contemporary resources within it.
More than one hundred years ago at the end of the century prior to the last a fifty-one year old man set sail for a trip around the world. Joshua Slocum capped his sea-going career with this trip in a sail boat, named "The Spray", that he built himself and, upon his return, he memorialized his trip by writing this narrative. His career had waned with the gradual demise of large sail-going ships and he put all of his years of experience on them, plus some help from friends and strangers along the way, into this voyage. The story he told about it still has power to grip the reader's imagination yet today. The result is one of the most inspirational books I've ever read.
"Maybe a full day of rest, without the kids, without Ben, soaking in the tub, without Perry, too, was what she needed. Maybe tomorrow she would kick into gear."
I literally could not put this book down. It is a truly memorable story of a family facing the difficulty of raising a child with special needs. More than just the story of this young boy, the book relates the impact on the lives of each of the family members. As they try to cope in their own way the story becomes one in which each member, two older siblings and their parents, find themselves breaking under the pressures of living with and caring for the very demanding dependent young boy.
The narrative follows the experiences of each member of the family: mother Caroline, father Perry, the two older children Hugo and Ivy focusing on each, chapter by chapter. Their lives and relations with each other are shared as they handle the every day and the added burden of the youngest boy, Ben, who is mentally-challenged and prone to severe seizures. At one point, after Ben has been rejected by yet another institution, Perry thinks to himself that it has been "one long and desperate road." That seems an appropriate metaphor for much of what each member of the family encounters in this story.
The author invokes prose that is both suspenseful and beautiful in relating important moments in their lives. The difficulties mount, but there is more to the story than just hardships. Rather it is a complex tale in which their lives are not completely subsumed by sadness and strains as they also experience moments of joy and contemplation that ameliorate the pain in their lives. This is an exceptional first novel from the pen of Julie E. Justicz. Readers who enjoy well-written narratives of real people dealing with the vicissitudes of life will appreciate her novel.
Degrees of Difficulty by Julie E. Justicz, Fomite, Burlington, VT, 2019.
I have selected one book from my reading in each of the years of the decade ending this year. The list includes contemporary novels, plays, non-fiction, and classics. I had to make some difficult choices because I often felt more than one book that I read in a given year qualified. I also limited the list to one book for any given author*. If I had not done this both Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Mann would have been represented twice. All of these books are among those I would reread (and in some cases have already done so), but I am looking forward to the new decade with anticipation of meeting new great books by authors both familiar and not.
* Some of the books that almost made the list included Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Mc Carthy's Border Trilogy and The Road, Elias Canetti's Auto Da Fe, Mann's Doctor Faustus, and Rabih Alameddine's An Unnecessary Woman.
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Thanks for visiting us, please have a look around, pee on a tab or two and most importantly, enjoy your stay!Q: Windows 10 + The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel He there,
I am getting below errors...
System.Net.WebException was caught
  HResult=-2146233079
  Message=The request was aborted: Could not create SSL/TLS secure channel.
  Source=System
  StackTrace:
       at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetRequestStream(TransportContext& context)
       at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetRequestStream()

I am trying to call third party API.. that is working in Windows 7 but after i upgrade to Windows 10 it fails...
I have also tried changing Security Protocol using coding below
ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue = true;

System.Net.ServicePointManager.SecurityProtocol = SecurityProtocolType.Tls12 | SecurityProtocolType.Tls11 | SecurityProtocolType.Tls;

I have also tried some registry edit like below..
Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\.NETFramework\v4.0.30319 
Value: SchUseStrongCrypto 

Another strange issue is that it is connected in alternate fashion...
First time it connects but abort consecutive request..
Please any one can help me solving this issue
Note: Problem comes after i update Windows 10 from Windows 7.

A: I think you are using a web service with SHA1 encryption.  A windows update will block it as its risky.
The following link lists the updates.
https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2016/04/29/sha1-deprecation-roadmap/ 
Uninstall the update/s and it should work.  It did for me.
However you should look into getting that web service upgraded.
I have as of yet to figure out a way around the issue programmatically.
Bridgette