Book review

Assalamu’alaykum warahmatullahi wabarakatuhu,

It has been a while since I last posted my latest entry. Frankly, I do not know what to write. Went blank for quite sometime. But today I want to share something. It’s a review of two great books that I read few weeks ago, Ar-Raheequl Makhtum, that has been translated to Malay language, by Shaykh Shafiyurrahman al-Mubarakfury and Men are From Mars Women are From Venus by John Gray.

In general, I have to say that the book, Ar-Raheequl Makhtum is quite good and it is a must-have-book in your personal library. The way the author arranged the plots was great and I sure it must have took the author years to gather all the sources and wrote them in sequence that is readable and understandable. The author included all the authentic sources in his book which made it very enjoyable to read. The story, however, is not in great detail. I would say that the author was not quite successful in expressing great characteristics of our Prophet, Muhammad pbuh, or maybe Malay language is not just sophisticated enough to express all the great qualities of him that the author tried to show. Basically, if you want to read and understand the book better, you just have to learn Arabic!

The translated version is quite sucky to me. The translator made a lot of mistakes that sometimes I went confused when I read it. I have to read it over and over again just to get the intended message that the translator tried to give. Well, it is the first translated edition and I bet they didn’t review the book thoroughly before they printed it and published it. I hope they’ll make the correction for later edition, inshaAllah. Or better yet, maybe I should just email the publisher and tell them which part that got me confused? Hurm, maybe…

The next one is Men are From Mras, Women are From Venus. Haven’t read this book till end but well, the message is clear, men are different from women and the way we convey our thoughts are very different. There’s no clear cut solution for this differences. Just that we have to take initiative to compromise and accept our differences. It is, indeed, a very interesting book and I actually learned a lot from it. But one thing that really makes me bored when reading the book is that the author kept repeating the same message over and over again. He should just reduce the pages from 323 to 30 pages. Make it more precise and straight forward! I do not know if I want to finish reading this book or not. Have to decide later because I’m now hooked with other very interesting book. Will share my view on that one too, inshaAllah.

I guess that’s it for now. I know I update my blog very rarely but I will try my best to update it more often. Do not forget to make du’a for our brothers and sisters in Palestine.