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).

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 7^th 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 good worthy 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 :).