Everyone should watch a movie in a cramped airline seat, with a six or four inch monitor, however big it is, and with lousy ear plugs. That way, they can really tell if a movie is any good.
I always tend to watch movies after the hype has died down somewhat.
I wasn’t very curious about Avatar. [...]

What an experience!
I’m glad I didn’t know that I could have become a librarian when I was a kid, because if I’d become a librarian, I never would have bothered being a writer, I think.
I’d have been having too much fun just reading all those fantastic books!
It wasn’t the first library convention I’d been to, [...]

I know it’s not spelled ‘immigrunt’ but today I felt like a real ‘immigrunt’, not an immigrant.
I just had one of those days when everything stupid you could possibly do, gets done.
It started with Friday, when I went to a school to drop off eleven books some kids had bought. The librarian had it all [...]

All this broohaha over the ‘draw Muhammad (peace be upon him) day’, where people are rioting in Pakistan and all that kind of stuff, just makes me so sad.
Yes the cartoons are hurtful.  Yes, the very thought of them shocks me to my core.
That’s exactly what they’re trying to do.
There’s no doubt that much of this [...]

There are a lot of Chinese malls around here, and my daughters, who all wear niqab, have often gone into them to go shopping.
Surprisingly they said that the feeling they get walking around in Chinese malls is nothing like what they get in ordinary shopping centres. The Chinese people completely, hmm, I don’t know if [...]

Sometimes it amazes me that people can look past other people’s differences and see the humanity behind them.
I find it fascinating that as societies, communities, we develop a certain collective consciousness, where, even though we might have some conflicts, we’re a cohesive whole.
Along come some outsiders, ‘others’, and at first they’re viewed with mistrust and [...]

Frankly, I’ve never really thought about how school boards and PTA’s decide who to invite to visit their school. I just go when I’m called, but today I had a very interesting conversation with a former teacher who was privy to just such a conversation.
She’s Muslim and she was hired by a particular principal of [...]

I always used to wonder why God seemed to put so much emphasis in the Quran on sending a messenger to a people from among their own people.
It’s repeated over and over again.
I thought, what’s the big deal if an outsider were to come and point out what they were doing wrong? After finishing Sold [...]

There’s a line in Patricia McCormick’s book Sold where the mother says any man is better than none.
It’s an interesting line because there are indeed some women who feel that way.
In fact in writing Wanting Mor, I thought the stepmother was a bit like that too. But actually my stepmother is much more calculating than [...]

Just finished reading it, even though my head’s all plugged up and my eyes are watering.
First of all, the good stuff: it’s kind of well written. A bit wooden, but not bad. I thought some of the imagery, her wanting to fly away like the bird Abdo was a bit nice.
There seem to be two [...]