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Steve Middendorf

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Steve is Currently Reading

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The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran

by Shida Bazyar

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Steve Middendorf said: " The Nights are Quiet in Tehran is an excellent novel of exile, of the otherness of emigration, and of memory.

Have you ever finished a book in bed just before you were ready to fall asleep? It happened to me with this book by Shida Bazyar on my Kobo. The Nights are Quiet in Tehran is an excellent novel of exile, of the otherness of emigration, and of memory.

Have you ever finished a book in bed just before you were ready to fall asleep? It happened to me with this book by Shida Bazyar on my Kobo. I didn't want to turn on a light. I certainly didn't want to get out of bed. I looked to the back of the book for inspiration, something I could download and read immediately. I saw that she had won the Uwe Johnson prize. Memories! I had read with @ReemK10, Uwe Johnson’s own great novel of divided Germany. book:Anniversaries, From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, August 1967–April 1968|56489670] Reem had pulled me from the Goodreads group MENA over to Twitter. I think that was my first group read on #BookishTwitter. Also I saw references to Olga Tokarczuk, then, of course, @Jennifer Croft! Ah, Jennifer—on Twitter, in those Covid years… I used to love the pictures that you posted of your kids. Then I saw Homesick. I downloaded it immediately. Of course I was too excited to continue on my path to sleep. Paging through I saw the pictures! Two little blonds. Too much connectivity, maybe, but so delicious, Jennifer (I hope this finds you!). This kind of chain—one book leading to another, one of the #Twitterverse group leading me to another—has shaped my reading life for decades.

Something else happened in a similar vein this week—another book resurfacing from my reading past. I saw a reference to The Great Santini. I couldn't remember why it resonated. The book was written by Pat Conroy. Early in my adult reading career I had stumbled upon this, and then I read My Reading Life. Conroy noted that discussing Thomas Wolfe’s depiction of family dynamics finally allowed him and his mother to speak openly about his father’s -The Great Santini- terrifying domestic violence. And this quote:

I take it as an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever... At an early age, I had turned to reading as a way for the world to explain itself to me.

That’s what Pat Conroy understood, and what I’ve felt in other corners of my reading life, especially in the MENA group on Goodreads and on #BookishTwitter.

As I think back on my reading life, I remember all the books I read with the MENA group, how these books humanized Arab peoples and rewired my brain to understand what's really going on in Palestine, and in Iran. I didn't need The Nights are Quiet in Tehran to understand the politics of immigration and the Iranian Revolution, but it did help me understand it from inside the lives of the people who were the secular, not the religious, revolutionaries in Iran in 1979. I knew that these were people and not narratives. I already knew about "the other" thanks to Gesine Cresspahl, the haunted heart of Anniversaries. ...more "

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"This is a quite good story on two levels: the revolutionaries Islamic and secular fighting for a change under the Shaw of Iran. Secondly the life of the emigrants who left Iran for Germany." — May 30, 2026 03:52PM

Jun 15, 2026 01:23AM · see review

Steve Middendorf is currently reading

The Weight of Ink

by Rachel Kadish (Goodreads Author)

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"It was getting late, time for me to put away the book for the night. I just couldn’t do it. Luckily the author gave me a spot with 10% to go where the heroines were safe both now and then. I could sleep." — Feb 20, 2026 03:11PM

Feb 12, 2026 09:21PM

Steve’s Notes & Highlights

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

1 note & 26 highlights

The steel leaks back the day’s heat, you can feel it through the floors of your shoes. Past these corrugated warehouse walls down little sandy streets where blownout autos sulk on pedestals of cinderblock.

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See Steve Middendorf’s 92 books with notes and highlights…

Steve’s Quotes

“The Party isn’t an army squadron, it’s an apparatus. A machine. A bureaucratic machine. They rarely hired people who’d studied the humanities, the Party hadn’t trusted them since Lenin’s times. Of the intellectual class, Lenin wrote, “It’s not the brains of the nation—it’s the shit.”
― Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

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“The burden of getting older was borne alone, but also as if by someone else, because he often couldn’t recognise bits of himself he caught in the mirror. Whose newly scrawny legs were those? Why was his head sitting further forward on his neck? Was it really kind of the gods to do this to the skin of his face, as if a child had been let loose with a brown marker?”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

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“As if the Irish weather were his adversary. Which it was, in its way, the Irish weather, which would so rarely play ball with the plans of citizens. All public holidays were guaranteed to be rainswept, stem to stern. It was a given of Irish life. A trip to the beach, begun in blazing sunshine, would inevitably end in shivering tears, in sudden storms, in lids of cloud. How often the Irish person, of whatever age or sex, had lain on his or her towel, on any beach in Ireland, body stiffening with the assault of the cold, waiting for the cloud cover to pass away, and the gladsome sun to pour down again. Soon the shivering passes to convulsions, to an epilepsy of exposure. The victim quails, squints up at the sky with one eye, because there is a glare even in the cloud, trying to make a judgement. Should I stay or should I go? Is there any point in lying here, as gradually death seems a desirable thing?”
― Sebastian Barry, Old God's Time

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“China is the major Allied belligerent whose position on the meaning of the war has shifted most thoroughly during the postwar era.”
― Rana Mitter, China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism

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“EVEN HERE, IN THESE FIRST glimmers of liberty, we begin to see the character of a continent. The American-born were hungry for liberties, yet unaccustomed to freedom; resourceful, yet unacquainted with self-rule; racially mixed, yet mistrustful of whatever race they were not. For three hundred years of authoritarian reign, Spain had carefully instilled these qualities. “Divide and subjugate” had been the rule. Education had been discouraged, in many cases outlawed, and so ignorance was endemic. Colonies were forbidden from communicating with each other, and so—like spokes of a wheel—they were capable only of reporting directly to a king. There was no collaborative spirit, no model for organization, no notion of hierarchy. It was why the people of Coro or Maracaibo or Guayana refused to obey their newly independent brothers in Caracas; given the choice, they preferred the crown. And even though Americans had been inclined to mix across racial lines from the beginning, Spain had worked hard to keep the races apart, feed their suspicions. Add to this a church that was thoroughly opposed to independence, and a picture emerges unlike any other in that age of revolutions. If Spanish America now found itself strong enough to rise up against Spain, it would never quite rid itself of the divisions that the Council of the Indies had carefully installed in the first place.”
― Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

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