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.
I recently sat down with a mentor to talk about being burnt-out-on-being-burnt-out-on religion. I am at a place where I feel like I’ve read everything on the internet about Christian fundamentalism and half the books that have been written in the last decade or so. I’m really, quite frankly, tired of it all, and I want to move on with my life, but the fundies of course insist that moving on is equivalent to losing your faith, and I don’t want that either, so here we are. Maybe more specifically, each time I think I’m past it all, I find myself questioning, why am I doing X – Activity and it’s usually something related to fundamentalism.
I needed to talk to a third party. Someone who doesn’t know me that well, isn’t my age, and who takes ~religion and doctrine~ seriously without also being a fundamentalist. You can always find some anonymous person on Reddit to tell you what you want to hear, but, we are ~social creatures~ and sometimes, you need to talk to a real person. So I did.
The interesting thing about getting out of fundamentalism is that, of course, there is never one problem to solve. Questions about having children are connected to the question of the Dominion Mandate, the question of what-job-should-i-do is connected to what you were taught about gender roles and whether or not whole bodies of human knoweldge have been concocted by liars, and the question of how deeply you engage with things you like to do is connected to whether or not you believe you must continually deny yourself or whether or not you believe God will take something away just because you like it.
To live that way is exhausting and I’m tired of it. It is even more exhausting to make that statement and immediately hear in the chorus of one’s mind “Cry Out to Jesus” by Third Day (which the fundies would criticize as being too “hard rock”) or the age old hymn “Softly and Tenderly” (played by a virtous old lady on a light oak piano). When you say you want to exit the narrative, you’re still stuck in a never ending loop. You cannot exit the hamster wheel of Church Culture.
Sometimes I think about blogging about my experiences with fundamentalist culture, but I don’t know what I or anyone else would get out of it. The few times I’ve emailed such organizations (come on AiG, where’s your global flood RAS model) or written reviews about the books online, I’ve been unable to avoid undertones of sarcasm and anger, despite my best efforts to just critique the ideas (not very Matthew 18 of me, eh). Besides, plenty of peoplehave written or talked extensively about these topics, both in the blogosphere and book reviews and of course written their own formal academic books. I don’t really have anything to add except “lol samesies.” I’ve also read the comments that insist the main perpetrators of these ideas are “really super sweet people” and I know, just like me, they are just out doing a job to make money to live, except they do it by telling other people what to do instead of, idk, sizing pipes or something. Alas, there I go again. The world does not need my anger.
AND, in case anyone is curious, I’m a post-millenialist now.
Part 2– the short part
Well anyways, the mentor reminded me that within the bounds of God (which I took to be Phillipians 4:8-esque), we are free from the rules of man and can pursue God. God will ask a lot of us, but it will be in the line of Romans 8:28; what you are asked to do will be what makes you more like Christ. That will not look the same for everyone. We are free to become who God made us to be. While the mentor used the word “calling”, he clarified that the word “calling” is a term loaded with Christian-ese, and we aren’t called to one specific path, but rather, to be people like Christ.
The Gospel is simple. We are new creations in Christ and our time on this earth is spent becoming more like Him. That’s really all there is to it. I rest in that, and let the rest go.
I don’t think the ‘problem’ of this stuff constantly coming up in my mind will go away, but I don’t have to dwell on it anymore. (Maybe it will though, God created neuroplasticity, too).
The next time I find myself sitting at my kitchen table at 9-pm, scrolling through the James Webb telescope’s Instagram, smashing a Kirkland brand KIND bar in my face and crying over the beauty of the Universe, I can just…enjoy them…and know the images, and the minds that put together the telescope to get them, reflect the infinite power and care of their Creator. That is really beautiful, really nice, and most importantly, really reassuring.
After cranking through several books in December and January, I relaxed a little in February. The slower pace wasn’t intentional…really, I just got distracted learning how to knit socks. Now, I have to fit a few rows of knitting into my 45 morning minutes. Really delays the pace of reading. Smh, hobbies be hobbying.
Anyways, for the month of February, I’ve been reading The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste and A View of the River by Luna B. Leopold. The Shadow King is my novel for Ethiopia. I’m about halfway through, and liking it so far. It takes place during WWII, during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. I don’t know anything about that section of WWII, having grown up in the US and therefore more familiar with the European theatre and the Pacific theatre (did you know the Japanese used a strategy called Island Hopping?). There are some intense, although not graphic, sexual scenes in this novel, so it is one you want to be prepared to read.
A View of the River is far slower paced. It’s something like a very short textbook and contains charts and graphs showing various river characteristics, such as bankfull flow vs. drainage area, how floodplain terraces are formed, et cetera. I picked it up because I’ve decided to get [more] serious about my career and you know, spend a little extra time outside of the work day getting the big picture view of things. As is typical with textbooks, some sections are easier to read than other sections. But on the whole, A View of the River is moving along with a good, steady flow.
Since we’re already six days into March, I’d better get these wrapped up pronto. Easier said than done when you have your regular job, a ceiling to fix, miles to run, dinner to eat, a cat to be fed (and cat vomit to be cleaned up). But it’s the little things in life, bits of progress every day, and there is no rush or schedule to finish these books. Moving forward, I’m finding books for countries along the route of United Airlines’ Island Hopper…I’ve been feeling those end of winter winters and vibing to the Moana soundtrack and thinking about travelling through the warm skies.
I guess most people blog on Substack now. I like what I have here and I don’t want to switch to Substack. I’m suspicuous of Platforms(TM); although, arguably, WordPress is a platform. I’m not going to put a server in my basement or get an AWS account though (alternatives to Substack or WordPress), so here we are. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
I think when it comes to blogging, or writing in general, it’s easy to feel like everything one writes must have a “big point.” High school me could not write an essay without worrying about the eternal fate of humanity. Usually a piece of writing should have a point, unless your point is that some things don’t have a point, but there is a difference between a Point of Cosmic Significance and just Something Nice You Observed. Furthermore, the Something Nice You Observed doesn’t need to segue (segway?) into a Point of Cosmic Significance. The friendly chirping bird in your backyard can be a reminder of God’s creation without also being a reminder of the Persecuted Church and How People Are Sparrows (TM) the Awful Evolutionists (TM) the Problems with the Government (TM) and The Meaning of Life (TM). Whoa, that escalated quickly. Maybe, more on that later, maybe.
That idea though – the idea that all writing must have some giant, cosmic point – has definitely crippled my writing in the past. The second I start to write, I get a thousand whirling thoughts of things that must be said write now. I start arguing against myself. I imagine all the criticizers and what they are going to criticize. At the same time, I feel like my writing is cliche and boring, what could I possibly have to say that noone else has said, there is nothing new under the sun, nobody will be interested. I go around and around in circles without ever actually writing anything. I am pretty good at finding Big Reasons Not to Write.
And you know what? All those reasons suck. It is easy to criticize. It is hard to create. Data is cheap these days. Little words have little meanings and a lot of them are lovely.
I have a problem with finishing crafty projects. I tend to get to about 65% of the way done and then put it down for months. I have the same problem at work, too, although there I’m getting a paycheck which gives me the motivation to wrapitup. I’m not sure why I have this tendency; maybe it’s because the fun is really in getting started and figuring out how this is going to go, and then when project execution becomes a grind, I get bored. Or maybe I just get distracted, or maybe I’m just impatient, I’m not really sure. It doesn’t really matter; I get done what I need to at work and these thoughts aren’t about work.
Currently, I am working on an 1860s 18″ doll dress, an afghan, a puzzle, and a series of dishrags. All of these crafts are those little sort of crafty things; you don’t need them, you can buy them already finished, what-are-you-going-to-do-with-them-when-they-are-done? Why am I spending my life using up this crappy acrylic yarn that has already sat in my basement for a year? It’s just going to degrade and release more microplastics into the universe, I should just trash the whole roll. But then that’s a waste of past me’s $7.00, which I could have invested in a HYSA at 3% interest! Can I sell these dishrags on Etsy? How many hours am I spending doing on these crafts? How much is my time worth?
The next obvious thought is to realize that the joy is in the doing, not in the done. I’m not trying to make a profit, I’m trying to build a skill and do something relaxing. I’m trying to add a little useful-ness back into TV time. I’m trying to slow down and spend time doing something other than cram more facts into my brain. However, even this sort of thinking has been content-ized. There are so many Tik Toks glamourizing the “slow life.” I can’t even relax and do these crafty crafts without feeling like I need a more productive “slow life.” My knitting is garbage. The Civil War doll outfit market is saturated. What is even the point of cardboard puzzles.
I think mostly, I’m just happy to have the time to start and try a craft. There have been so many times in life where I haven’t had this time. I’ve been too busy. I’ve been too stressed. I’ve been under too much pressure. And right now, I have the time to look around and think – “You know what sounds like a good idea? Knitting crappy acrylic yarn into a dishrag.” I am celebrating having the space to start. And if they all end up unfinished – that’s okay. They will sit and wait until I have the space to finish them.
Reading with Ally 