Yesterday I ran three miles with my family. My husband pushed the jogging stroller and we did three miles at 11:07, 10:47, 9:34. They felt so easy and I was so proud of myself for cruising along for that third mile under 10-minutes… until I saw the heart rate data from my Garmin. 47% of the run was in Zone 5? What?
I had been so proud of myself until the data told me I was working too hard. I know that data isn’t completely accurate. For one, it’s hot outside and that always pushes my heart rate higher than normal. I am not a very heat tolerant person. For two, it’s just a watch, not a chest strap, and my watch band has been glued back together so when I get sweaty the whole thing kind of slides around anyways. So while it was easy to decide “well, heart rate isn’t everything,” that didn’t take away the sting of feeling like I hadn’t improved as much as I thought I had. It didn’t take away the sting of an outside source and something I had heard was “right” ruining the way I felt about the work I had put in.
Running takes so much patience, but it is always so satisfying to cross a new threshold. Running works on the time scale of weeks, months, years, and it is so easy to beat yourself up for not getting good enough fast enough.
I recently listened to the “Hate Mail” episode of Des and Kara’s podcast “Nobody Asked Us.” Part of the episode was dedicated to discussing the running brand Satisfy’s recent “activation,” something which apparently generated a lot of discussion online. I’ve been thinking about what they said for days and am having trouble summarizing it, but they had some really insightful comments such as “When does social media burn out as a form of communication?” And “I don’t want to be passionate about Satisfy…at all! I don’t want it to steal any emotion from me.” And “Guys…it’s (just) running!”
Those comments were embedded in a broader discussion of run influencers and running marketing, battles for attention, social media and NIL, branding of the self, and the disgusting cycle of social media news and how we are constantly subjected to insane news cycles. I was reminded of how it took less than 24 hours after the DC plane crash one to two years ago for my awful neighbor across the street to text me some bullshit about DEI, and how recently I only see articles about the declining birth rate on my Facebook feed. Surface level takes that generate clicks and ad revenue.
I’m so tired of all of it. I’m tired of hitting refresh. You cannot build anything if you are constantly hitting refresh, constantly berating yourself for not improving fast enough or for not adhering to some ideals someone who has no idea who you are has projected on people in your demographic, constantly stressed about whatever mean people are trying to get you to worry about so they can make more money for themselves.
So far I’ve kept social media, because I use it to message my cousins and read about my career space on Reddit. But I’ve definitely taken a step back and stopped logging on without intentionally looking for something. I want to become a better runner, a kinder person, a better engineer, the parent I know I can be without constantly being told I’m doing it wrong.
If the Law is written on our hearts, then that’s where we’re going to find it. If I want to run in Boston, I won’t get there by finding voices that tell me I can or can’t do it. I’ll only get there by patiently putting one foot in front of the other. I’ll only get there by letting time pass at the pace of the world.
Really did not get much reading done this month. We had a birthday party for our kid towards the end of the month, so preparing for that kind of ate up much of the mental energy I may have otherwise spent on reading. Interestingly, party preparations didn’t necessarily take a ton of extra time, just, you know, the thinking. I’m continually “making a conscious effort to stay off my phone” but some days that effort has better success than others.
Anyways, I’m still working through From Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yew. The author’s tone thus far has been very matter of fact and he makes founding a country sound like a pretty straightforward ordeal. I don’t know if this book would be considered post-colonial literature, after all, the book opens with discussions of British influence and air bases in Singapore, but if it is, it should be studied. Much of the angst present in other post-colonial literature that I’ve read is absent, but, then again, this isn’t a novel so the purpose of the book is different.
I’m supposed to be reading Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang for a book club. I’m actually supposed to have it done by Monday, but I’m only about 30 pages in. It isn’t a difficult read but I don’t know that it is what we all expected. Lots of sexual imagery, people descending into wet holes, slushy sounds, oral..references etc. In a way, I suppose that is a welcome change from the violent phallic imagery that seems to permeate late 20th century literature. Perhaps it could be juxtaposed to Gravity’s Rainbow, creation vs destruction, male vs female, etc. I guess finishing this will be my weekend project.
On Kindle I revisited Just Listen by Sarah Dessen. It was as good as I’d remembered, although, it lost some of the magic the second time around since Annabel’s world no longer felt as “new” to me. Now I’ve studied some ham radio myself, someone being a model is less interesting to me, and the whole ED and SA discussions are much more common and out in the open than they were several years ago. All of that is fine, and I guess it just goes to show that 1) yes Sarah Dessen writes good books and 2) I grew up, just like everyone does.
Started Rick Steve’s hippie trail memoir on Kindle for July and will keep cranking away on the above. Not super exciting, but that is life, working through the stories.
I’ve recently cranked out a couple 5ks under 11:00 per mile, so naturally I set a goal of qualifying for and running Boston in 2031 (or maybe 2032). I’m also finally back to the top of my regular size, so obviously I am going to need a lot of Tracksmith gear to get the job done. Boston is something of a ridiculous goal for me. I’ve never managed to train the required 10 hours or 50-60 miles per week that the Internet states is required, and my first (and only) marathon so far was just barely under five hours. But I also believe in setting enormous goals, knowing that if you fall short you’re still going to get further than if you had never set the goal at all, and I also believe that making a decision to do something is the first step to actually doing it. So here we are, Boston 2031? Or 2032?
The truth is that I miss running with my husband. Back in college we used to go on a Saturday long run, then go to the grocery store, then do homework, then meet back up again for dinner. I miss that camaraderie. I miss conversationally running 11 miles at 9:23/mile. Since we moved to this sweltering city it’s been hard to stay consistent. But I know that if I can get to being able to run with him again, then I’ll blow all my previous PRs out of the water.
The thing is, running itself is not very interesting. Social media tries to make it interesting by selling products. Strava tried to make it interesting by getting you to compete with your friends. Garmin tries to make it interesting by giving you all the stats. But at the end (beginning?) of the day, it’s still just one foot in front of the other, passing the things you are passing, Being the person you are, literally moving through the world, and Being is just so quiet and convenient. That is why I think I’ve stuck with running despite not having a ton of extra talent. There just aren’t a lot of absolutely necessary extras. In a world full of ads, that honestly just feels really nice.
So here is to new (old) goals, a life that is consistent enough to pursue them, and the neon green Arbor Day cotton T-shirt that I’ve been running in since 2015. Here’s to trying. All those earlier miles still count. After all, I guess seeing what can happen is pretty interesting anyways.
I actually wrapped up three books in the month of May, which is much more than I’ve read in the past year or so. The first was A Psalm for the Wild Built. A friend said this book was “like reading warm soup,” and for the most part she is right. I read this book for a book club and it was good for that purpose. The main critique seems to be that there are a lot of “big” topics brought up, but they are never really resolved. I get that critique, and also the counterpoint that that is how life is. This book was also my first introduction to “solar punk.” I don’t know, I enjoyed reading this book and could find a lot to say about it, especially the eco-sustainability infrastructure elements, but for now I am just going to let the warm soup comment stand.
Secondly, I finally finished Baho! which was my reading around the world book for Burundi. This book is the first Burundian novel to be translated into English, so, that’s pretty cool. Like most post colonial lit, there was some graphic violence, in this case related to the Burundian civil war in the 90s and 2000s. Unlike some post colonial lit though, which seems to often end ambiguity (valid though tbh), this one ended with a key character making a choice for mercy and the overall message was uplifting.
Finally, I returned to a Sarah Dessen novel: The Rest of the Story. I really enjoyed this one and it’s good to be back to reading Sarah Dessen. Like Emma Saylor, I’ve often found that stories that happened before my life do affect my life. Pretty generic statement, but, well, it’s true and a thing you tend to discover when you’re coming of age.
Getting started on From Third World to First for Singapore and still working through Tales of the South Pacific. I’m also working through a bio on Jack Welch which I’m a little disappointed in. The tone is more “Reddit thread” than biography, but I’ll finish it all the same.
Rough post light on analysis, but glad to be back at reading and writing with some dependability :).
Once late May hits and it’s truly the beginning of summer, I start to feel nostalgic for reading novels by Sarah Dessen. The nostalgia was first nameable in 2024. My partner and I had just gone to the YMCA pool and then we got snow cones at the little snow cone shack in the parking lot and it all just seemed perfect. The sky was bright blue, his shirt was crispy white, the snow cone was artificially bright red, we both felt tired and smelled like chlorine and sunscreen. Sitting there with the person I loved and eating liquid sugar on ice felt like swimming in the good undertones of high school again. I remembered what it felt like to read recipes on Lauren Conrad’s website, try Pinterest workouts before “runfluencer” was a word, and oh yeah, to be excited about learning calculus.
I loved Sarah Dessen’s novels because her characters were always solving problems I wasn’t allowed to have. They navigated relationships with boys, made up with friends who they hadn’t talked to since elementary school, and invented new personalities for themselves to go with every variation of their name. By contrast, I was a serious-person-who-knew-my-purpose-which-was-fulfilling-my-role-as-a-woman-of-God-by-having-children-with-a-serious-man-after-getting-a-four-year-degree-as-backup-in-case-he-got-hit-by-a-truck. I already had the answers. In the algebra of life, I had found X*. Dessen’s characters were still looking. In my hubris, I called her novels “cupcake books,” something I was allowed to read every once in a while but couldn’t take seriously.
Life never works out how we think it will. I’m thirty now, half a lifetime later and I did marry the high school boyfriend who made me laugh, I only have one kid and he’s the best, I do have an actual career, and somehow it all feels just perfect. Because the kid wakes up so early, I’ve recently found myself regularly running again before 7:00 am for the first time since high school. Muscle memory has a way of jogging regular memories and I find myself thinking about posting my oatmeal on tumblr, wanting to reblog pictures of running shoes, and ditching big thoughts in favor of being myself without criticizing myself. Real life was turning out to be more like calculus; that is, not about finding X, but about describing how X changes.
The one conspiracy theory I allow myself is that time is not linear. Instead, I believe it loops along in a chain, something like this:
After travelling into the future, we loop our way back for a minute and revisit some important point before heading on again for real, like tracking a single point on a wheel using parametric equations in calculus. This spring, I was responsible for scheduling a work event through a catering company and I always thought of one of Dessen’s novels when it came to catering companies. Early this summer, we took our first family trip to the beach, where so many of Dessen’s novels take place. I am making new friends, navigating new relationships that have sprung from being a parent, and realizing that the most beautiful life has come from what I previously thought was so unimportant. This time, when small changes try to make themselves heard over the scraping of my new tennis shoes on the concrete and gravel trails nearby my house, I am trying just to listen.
*Kate Malone from Laurie Halse Anderson’s Catalyst, basically.
Okay great, I think this is month 5 of doing a monthly reading post. I like this. It motivates me to finish books and think about them for 30-seconds, instead of the usual, thank u next. AND I can tell the internet what I think about them instead of bothering people I work with. Win. Win.
In other news, I ran a 5k in 27:29 today. I had a stressful job when I first moved to this city and I gained some weight and got pretty out of shape. There was a lot going on. Gaining weight isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a person, but for me it is usually a symptom of stress eating and not running and therefore not getting those necessary endorphin hits to regulate my emotions. Bad loops. So after getting a better job, I’ve lost some of the weight, and after cranking out 3.1 miles at an 8:40 pace, I feel like I’m back in shape and back myself again. So 10 points for Ravenclaw.
This month I finished Upon Silver Wings II: World-Record Adventure by CarolAnn Garratt about her flight around the world with Carol Foy. They raised money for ALS and broke the world record. The book reads like you are reading a sort of early 2000s email style journal written by the author – very conversational. There are a lot of pictures. Carol’s thoughts have kind of an ethereal quality about them. It isn’t in any way a guide to how to fly around the world or an in-depth study of the experience, just a description of the trip and the planning that went into it. The flight itself only took eight days, and if you’ve ever been in a small plane before, it’s a lot of kind of just being there an monitoring, so there is only so much you can say.
I also finished Dominion by Tom Holland. I’m glad I read this book and I should really take the time to develop better thoughts about it. The book describes Christianity as a cultural narrative and the book itself is, of course, a narrative. I think we miss so much how stories define our lives. There is a part of me that immediately rejects this idea of Chrisitanity-as-narrative; it’s like something a pastor would say or a Facebook post that would read “Christianity isn’t ‘just a story’, it’s real!” or “If it’s just a story, then what’s the point? So the Bible isn’t just a collection of stories! It’s science! And history!”. To be clear, I do believe Jesus rose from the dead, but I think that statements like that undermine the real power that narrative plays in our lives. I don’t know, maybe some people just exist without thinking about the whys, but I can’t do that. I need to be constantly putting pieces together. So anyways, I think this book did a good job for me of highlighting and stringing together a 2000-year cultural impact narrative. Good stuff.
Finally, I read Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defining the Birth Dearth by Catharine Pakaluk. In short, it’s a qualitative economic study of why college-educated women who have five or more kids are having five or more kids. It was honestly a good and quick read. The book has a lot of strengths: long quotes from interviews, a focus on number of children (instead of the usual fundie garbage that shows up), and interviews from women of varying racial, age, and faith backgrounds. The last chapter gets a little dicey (wrote more about it here), but for the most part it stuck to it’s mission. As the author suspected though, not everyone will agree with the conclusions the women she interviewed have drawn – I don’t – I don’t think having eight kids is my “calling” (maybe more on that some other time), but Dr. Pakaluk did a great job of relating their stories and highlighting the positives of their amazing lives.
Next month I’m picking up reading around the world again with Hour of the Wolf by Andrius Tapinas (Lithuania) and I’ve got a couple Boring-A engineering and water books on the list too. And of course, walking and listening to Dune. We also started watching 3 Body Problem on Netflix, so that will have to get into the Audible library soon too…
So many stories, so little time, but so much life. ❤
Alright – Now that we’ve got the background out of the way, it’s time to read around the world. Passports and IDs out and ready everyone, shoes off, laptops in a bin…just kidding.
Here is an Instagram post I made on December 30, 2018.
The caption reads: “For 2019 (2020, 2021…) I am going to read a couple books from every country in the world. Let me know if you know any that are absolutely fantastic.” I got a few recommendations including The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho, In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson for Australia, Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion by several Costa Rican authors, the book about how Singapore transitioned from a pre-industrial to a developed country, and Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Silent Past by Giles Tremlett. I haven’t read any of those yet. So um, keep the recommendations coming. I wanted to start with books I already had, or books I had been meaning to knock out for a while.
So the obvious question is, how do I pick the books? I have a couple different methods. First, I’m not limiting myself to one book from each country. That means this project will take longer to complete, but, for example, I wanted to be able to finish up Les Miserables for France and also read a fun novel by a current author. Secondly, some books are particularly famous and associated with a certain country, like for example, Jane Eyre and England, or Anna Karenina and Russia. So I wanted to give myself the flexibility to read one of those and maybe also, again, a fun book by a current author. The main thing in choosing these books is that the author was born in the country, or has lived there for a significant period of their life, and the book mostly takes place in that country. So for example, while Aminitta Forna, the author of A Memory of Love currently lives in the UK, she spent much of her childhood in Sierra Leone and the book mostly takes place in Sierra Leone, so A Memory of Love counts for Sierra Leone.
The English major in me is sort of “triggered” by this project; after all, how could you possibly narrow down an entire country into one book? Is it possible to do this project without “essentializing”; that is, without unintentionally boiling down say, the experience of being British into one novel like Jane Eyre. Furthermore, is it possible to do this project without “Othering”; that is, without reading a novel of a country that is not my own and walking away with the distinct thought of “wow, people in this country are very different from me.” And finally, I am limited to those works which have been translated into English. I speak very limited Spanish, German, French, and I can read some Russian, but there’s no way I could read a book in another language. Maybe I could get through Harry Potter in Spanish. Maybe. While I acknowledge that reading a book in its original language is a much richer experience than reading one in translation, I do commend the work of translators who put so much work into staying faithful to the original.
So in short, I’ve decided to approach this project with some set intentions and most importantly, to recognize that I’m human and have limited time and resources to dedicate to this project. As much as I would love to spend the majority of my time sitting on my couch reading novels and learning languages, and the rest of it travelling the world, I cannot. So as I embark on this project, I want to acknowledge that every single country in the world has more than one person in it and therefore, has more than one story to tell. There are always going to be some experiences and lives of which I am unaware. Please, do this project yourself, and choose different books than I did.
Okay, enough navel gazing about the limitations of being a human in the world. Let’s move on to Project Structure.
Here is the first page of my Excel spreadsheet.
I started by going to Wikipedia and getting a list of sovereign states in 2018. I suppose now that that was six years ago and it will probably be another six years before I finish this project, I may need to update that. I have one sheet for each continent and I keep the list of countries on the right and the “official pages” on the left. I usually start by reading the Wikipedia page for the country and literature and honestly just googling “Literature in X country”. There are several websites which do a good job of collating popular books or “literature” from individual countries, such as the culture trip or fivebooks.com. I’m finding that sometimes there are web sites for individual countries which bring together translators, writers, etc., such as latvianliterature.lv, which, obviously discusses Latvian literature. So basically, I try to keep track roughly of which websites I look at and just kind of…look around…until I find a couple that I would like to read. Then I check to make sure the chosen books are available and reasonably priced, buy them, and get to reading.
The spreadsheet right now just notes the books and the dates I finished reading them, and the authors. I also list the books on this website. I have a space for comments on the spreadsheet, but I didn’t find myself making many comments, which is part of the reason why I’ve decided to bother with this series of blog posts. I found that it was sort of difficult to cram any sort of long thoughts into this small Excel block, but I didn’t want to write a formal essay because that’s boring…anyways here we are.
The first country I read was France. Looking back at the original page from 2019, I chose France because “Since I read a bunch of British and American Literature, or pieces of it, rather, while studying for the literature GRE and also just in general, and I’m partway through the French tree on DuoLingo, I’m going to start with France.”. So that is where I began. My original plan was to start working through Continental Europe and then up through Scandinavia, across to Russia…back down again, and around the world, but I found that going “next country to next country” like that was too rigid of a structure. Sometimes when it was 100 degrees outside where I live, I found myself thinking about cold snowy days, so I skipped to the Aland Islands. And last December I was thinking about somewhere warm, so I skipped to India. I borrowed a book from my sister for a couple years and wanted to give it back to her, so I skipped to South Africa. So while my “default next country” is still somewhere in Continental Europe, I’m flexible. Books are cheaper than plane tickets and I’m under no obligation to choose an “efficient path.” This is a journey of many years and many words.
Okay, so lets see, I think we’ve got everything now. The Instagram post that started it all, how I choose the books, and how I choose the country. Again I’d like to reiterate, this is a fun project, I’ve already learned so much and I’m really enjoying this exploration. You should definitely try it too. This study is broad and the purpose is to open doors, broaden my horizons, and create questions for me about living in our ~global society~ today.
Okay. That’s enough for today. Thanks for reading with me :).
I’ve thought a lot about (am thinking a lot about?) starting a YouTube channel where I document my ~reading around the world journey~. I’ve even gotten so far as to record the first video, decide the lighting isn’t great, find my partner’s GoPro, try and set that up…and then it stops there. It’s not something I want to do on a week day, and I don’t want to wear makeup on the weekend, and I don’t want to record myself when I’m not wearing makeup…alas. It is the little vain things in life that keep us from pursuing our dreams.
But also, I’ve started to put more brain power into my actual job, so maybe it’s okay that I’m not obsessing over a YouTube channel. And anyway, even if it’s not the most popular form of media, I can say everything I want to say right here, using the ancient technology of the written word. Maybe too this will force me to redo the blog (again), so that my posts are more nicely categorized. Anyways –
Part 1: Welcome & My Reading Journey
Hi everyone, I’m Ally, and welcome to this blog, Reading with Ally. Today, and for many days to come, we’re going to be reading a book from every country in the world. And probably several other books too. But before we take off around the world, we need to start at the beginning. We need to go back home, where our reading journeys began.
I have always, always been a reader. When I was four years old, my mom taught me to read with the Hooked on Phonics curriculum and I remember wanting to get good enough to read Chapter Books, specifically, the book with the girl and the horse on the cover. I’m pretty sure it was this one: Becky and Beauty by Mary Hooper. I remember it being blue, not yellow, but I was four years old, so maybe it was an older edition, or I could be remembering wrong, I don’t know, that was twenty-five years ago at this point.
In elementary school I read the classics (Tik Tok sound), and by that I mean Anne of Green Gables, Little Women and Pollyanna and all the appurtenant sequels, and of course Dear America, American Girl, Boston Jane, and The Royal Diaries. Elizabeth Tudor, Abigail Jane Stewart, Felicity Merriman, and Molly McIntire were my girls. By middle school, I kept an Excel sheet of every book I read, totaled the pages, and broke it down by genre (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Example from the Books I Have Read Spreadsheet.
You can see I read mostly historical fiction, but I made some exceptions for science fiction and fantasy. Eragon, Andy Buckram’s Tin Men (recommended by my dad), and A Wrinkle in Time were all very much enjoyed. Some books from that era that still stick with me today; that is, you know, the ones you think about totally unbidden, including The Silent Boy by Lois Lowry, The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages, and 13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson. I also occasionally think about A Long Way from Chicago by Richard Peck, particularly the scene where a crazy lady was running down the street naked, wrapped in a python. I read those over the summer at my Grandma’s house. I don’t think she would have let me read them if she knew about that scene, but alas, the damage has been done :).
I spent basically the entire summer before 7th grade inside on my bed, reading. I think now we call that “bed rot,” but in 2007 it was just called “laying on your bed all day reading.” I was at that age where my mom didn’t really want me exploring the YA and adult section yet, so I was still reading kids’ historical fiction books. I remember reading Mable Riley: A Reliable Record of Humdrum, Peril, and Romance by Marthe Jocelyn, and feeling strangely disappointed. It was a “good book,” funny, wholesome, hit the enthusiastic historical fiction girl ‘trope’ on the head, but I just remember thinking that I wanted more. I wanted a change of pace. I was tired of quirky Victorian girls and I was tired of sitting on my bed reading about them. Looking back now, I realize that I was beginning to grow up, and I needed new stories, new heroines, new uhhh….scope for the imagination…to steal a line from the OG quirky Victorian girl.
By high school, I was so busy with sports and homework and summer jobs that I couldn’t keep up the Excel spreadsheet. I would say that in general, I read darker books, such as The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, The Lottery by Beth Goobie, and A Day no Pigs would Die by Robert Newton Peck. My parents have said before that ~kids these days~ are depressed because they read depressing books, but I don’t think that’s true. I think ~kids these days, and kids when I was in high school~ are depressed and overworked for various reasons, Anne Helen Peterson and Alexandra Robbins said it better than I ever could. A Day no Pigs would Die was the first book that made me think critically about how we are connected to what we eat, but not in the pseudo-political supply-chain economic-systems way of thinking that a lot of the vegan/vegetarian books I would read later did. I think it was deeper than that; it was one of the first books, stories, narratives, that “touched me to my core” and changed something that is hard to put words too. It was a story of life and love and how hard they both can be.
OK. Enough of that.
High school was also my dystopian literature phase: 1984 and Animal Farm made an appearance, but also Unwind by Neal Shusterman. I also read a lot of Ayn Rand; all of We the Living, Anthem, and The Fountainhead, and 2/3 of Atlas Shrugged. Once there were no more trains in Atlas Shrugged, I kind of lost interest. I know people have strong opinions on Ayn Rand, and if I was reading her books for the first time now, as a 28-year-old, I’d probably say she’s “full of shit.” But in high school, her archetypal heroines gave me strong* women role models. Dagny was “who I wanted to be when I was 17,” and for better or for worse, my biggest takeaway from her work is that it’s okay to work hard, to own your work, and to advocate for yourself. I know *know* kkknnnooooww it’s a trend to hate on Rand, but, I think that take lacks nuance. She is famous for a reason. And, all that said, I do want to clearly state that I Do Not Think greed is good, money is the most moral thing ever, the government is always out to take down smart people, etc. Tbh I’d probably have kept the Rio Norte line up…depending on the intangible values provided to the country as a whole and whether or not there was a Federal subsidy program…etc.
I studied Civil Engineering in college, and that’s my day job today, but I also double majored in International Studies with a concentration in Global Literature. I chose that second major because it was the only humanities major, other than economics, which my college offered. Majoring in global literature was really fun; I took classes on Don Quixote, Russian Literature, South African Literature, European Folk and Fantasy, etc. I don’t have an incredibly deep commentary on that, except that I had a really great time, and – thanks to all my professors for their patience with my bad writing. Engineering school was hard, growing up is hard, this time is past. Probably the most influential books for me in this time period were On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, and Dakota by Kathleen Norris. Again, I know people love to hate On the Road, and they are right, Dean Moriarty leads a reckless life while women hold down the fort, but I fell in love with the sweeping speed of the American countryside, New York, Denver, and pies in North Dakota. Dakota by Kathleen Norris is a very different book, but it gave me similar vibes.
Angle of Repose is definitely a slow burn. I always feel weird saying I like it, because (spoiler alert) it’s about a guy with a bone disease and his cheating grandma, but I don’t know, Stegner’s prose is so, so…powerful. Probably because the novel is a metaphor for how we as the American people have managed the American West. Maybe. Maybe I’ll do a post just on that one.
So, this brings me to the most recent five or so years. If you’re still reading, wow, you must be really interested in what random people on the internet say about books. Anyways, I went to graduate school in English Literature and wrote a thesis on literature and engineering. It still has a long way to go if I ever wanted to make it into a concrete “idea”.
Writing is hard. This grad school time period is more recent than my elementary school spreadsheets, so I have yet to fully understand how it fits in my life and ~my reading journey~. I have no doubt that I’ll put the knowledge and skills I gained during that time to use throughout this series, but I don’t want to delve too deeply into a commentary of English graduate school and all that entailed. I guess what I want to say here is that I kept reading widely (Post-modern literature, Black literature, Literary Theory, Chaucer in Middle English), but I don’t know that I gained as many skills in articulating what I thought about that literature. I hadn’t written, or read for that matter, a good straight up no frills 5-10 page literary analysis paper since high school and early undergrad (my mental health really struggled in jr/sr year of undergrad). So I never really figured out how to take that “next step” to make really goodworthy of graduate level papers. I also didn’t get any better at literary anlaysis while writing engineering reports at a full time engineering job. Second, English grad school did have an interesting culture, very different from engineering, very kind up front saying out loud that everyone is an amazing human being, very brutal and critical of others on social media, like the volume of “awareness” and “calling out” infographics people shared were just insane. I did go to grad school from 2019-2021, so it was the time of Covid and the George Floyd protests, etc. The “calling people out for not posting” phase was just bizarre to me, even as someone who cares deeply about equity in the world.
All that said, each time I sat down to write some assigned paper for some required class, I found myself thinking of all the ways someone could critique my writing or thinking about what angles or marginalized groups I failed to address in this particular paper with this particular idea, instead of just….writing one paper with one idea. I didn’t (don’t) understand how to block out all the noise.
And so finally, here is today. I find myself reading mostly non-fiction, so I started this “reading around the world” project in part to get myself to read more novels. I don’t really go to the library on a slow summer day and browse the shelves reading the back of covers anymore, but instead I tend to find a book by beginning with an interest. For example, I’m perhaps overly interested in labor and the Midwest, so I recently read Boom, Bust, Exodus by Chad Broughton. I wanted to learn how to computer, so I read Code by Charles Petzold. Et cetera.
I also try to hit the big novels that I keep hearing people talk about. I did enjoy A Court of Thorn and Roses, although I haven’t read the sequels; I made it through one Colleen Hoover book, and I have a lot to say about Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. Maybe that one will get its own review someday. If someone takes the time to sincerely recommend a book to me or loan one to me, I try to find the time to read it. I am finding that there are just so many books in the world that even if you like reading, and you know people that like reading, you will inevitably struggle to talk to people about books because all of us have read different stories. One of my friends said, “there is art out there for everyone,” and she’s absolutely right. Reading expands both our horizons and our relationships, and even if my conversations with people about books never really get past “oh that one was good,” then, that is okay. Really, this project of reading around the world is about expanding horizons and learning some stories of people who have lived and grown up somewhere different from me.
Alright, that is enough for today. Thanks for reading with me :).
It’s basically half way through April, so it’s time to write about what I read in March! Which was…not much. I’m still not finished with A View of the River. So instead of finishing that, I started two new books!
First, Upon Silver Wings II by CarolAnn Garratt and Carol Foy. They hold the world record for fastest flight around the world in a small plane (8 days!). Carol Foy came and talked to our 99s chapter and brought copies of her book. They are raising money for ALS research. So far, the book is a pretty easy read; it has a conversational feel and is one of those books that makes gigantic tasks, like flying around the world really fast, seem pretty simple. I’m only halfway through it so far, so I guess, metaphorically, I’m stuck in Thailand.
Second, I started reading Dominionby Tom Holland. This book came recommended by a friend. It’s a narrative history of the impacts of Christianity on Western Culture. And honestly, it’s great. I was a little skeptical…”Christianity” and “Western Culture” are enormous topics. And, I read some about these topics in high school (see, The Sensate Culture, No Place for Truth, and All God’s Children in Blue Suede Shoes) and it was not fun. But this book is different. It’s strikingly narrative, in that, the story flows so smoothly. Holland does a great job of pulling out a thread from each era of church history and tying it into the great rope of ~society today~. I don’t know exactly how to describe it. But it’s really good. It’s probably not “100% historically accurate” or “100% theologically accurate”, but it really gets the job done. I’m not a theologian or a historian, I study narrative and infrastructure, and this book so far is great.
And finally, I’ve started taking a lot of walks while listening to Dune. I bought the book on Audible several months ago and couldn’t really get into it. But I really enjoyed the movies and the soundtrack is full of bangerz. Now that I know the storyline, the book is much more interesting. Some books are like that and I’m not embarrassed about it.
Travelling later on in the month and will probably read Radium Girlsin the airport. I’ve heard mixed reviews on it…but it looks like an airport read.
I keep telling myself I’m going to start a YouTube channel documenting this trip-around-the-world-in-books. And I keep not doing it. So obviously, I don’t care that much.
Anyways, I just finished reading The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste for the country of Ethiopia. I can’t remember why I decided to do Ethiopia; honestly, I think I was watching the Olympic Marathon Trials, thinking about running, and wanted to read a book from a country with a deep running history, so Ethiopia it was.
The Shadow King follows the story of a young maid named Hirut, a leader named Kidane, his wife Aster, a Jewish Italian photographer named Ettore, and various other Ethiopians and Italians as they navigate the Italian invasion into Ethiopia in 1935. Readers see an overall perspective; we see and hear the thoughts and actions of both the Ethiopians and the Italians. This is definitely a strength of the novel. Mengiste develops a tense connection between Hirut (who becomes a POW for a time) and the Jewish Ettore; both are on the oppressed-by-the-Axis-powers side of WWII. Mengiste also has a gift for writing grandiose descriptions. As a reader, I often felt like I had a “sense” of the place / setting, even if I couldn’t visualize exactly what was happening.
The novel is supposed to be about women who fought in the war, but it is mostly about intra-familial conflict (between Hirut, Aster, and Kidane) and the relationships between military commanders and their soldiers. There is some exploration of what it means to be a soldier. The narrative does progress from these small-scale stories to a much larger picture of Ethiopia in 1935, and Hirut’s role in the novel grows in parallel with this plot growth, so in that sense, it does tell a national-level narrative.
I wanted to like this book more than I did. Mengiste has put together a website called Project 3541, which contains pictures of Ethiopian soldiers during the war, so it makes the book come alive to look through the pictures as you are reading the novel. However, the pacing of the novel itself is uneven and the wording feels awkward at times. I thought maybe it was because the book was a translation, but it was originally published in English. There are some Amharic and Italian words scattered throughout though. Overall, I’m glad I read it – it comes up often in searches of books for Ethiopia and I learned about the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, but it did take a while to get through.
TW: several episodes of SA and one of borderline CSA.
Reading with Ally 