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.
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 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 think the brief Internet Trend Age of curated aesthetics is ending. It’s pretty disappointing; after all, what is more satisfying than a Pinterest board full of assemblies of objects that give “Ravenclaw” or “Dark Academia”? Not much. I dig a Dark Academia aesthetic day.
Before I moved to the city on the prairie, I thought a lot about aesthetics. I was living in a time of transition. Based on what future job my partner chose, I could have moved to the Southern Great Plains, the Upper Midwest, or stayed in a college town in Indiana. I sat in my favorite coffee shop and wrote a bunch of garbage which I’ve copied and pasted below.
Now I’ve seen a couple Tik Toks which rightfully attach aesthetic to Capitalism, saying that we promote and keep this aesthetic thing going by buying shit to live our aesthetic. This idea is especially prevalent with the “eclectic grandpa” and “bookshelf wealth” aesthetics, two aesthetics which boil down to doing a variety of things you’re actually interested in and displaying books you’ve actually read. These Tik Tokers criticizing aesthetics as a tool of capitalism (and other stuff, please, just watch the Tik Toks on your own, this is a blog, not going to find a bunch and summarize them) are right, but damn if it doesn’t make me feel kind of sad.
This article says that it’s “ok to mourn the death of social media,” and I kind of feel the same way about this aesthetic curation situation. I’m glad that people are criticizing the “image-ness” of aesthetics. But there’s a sixteen-year-old inside me that still gets excited when I see a Ravenclaw aesthetic board and I feel a little sad that it feels stale. I feel a little sadder to know that the image feels stale because aesthetics have been over-produced; that is, I’ve consumed so much digital content that I’ve been forgetting to do stuff. So all in all, it’s better that people are criticizing these online aesthetics, and the more we move on and do our own stuff, the deeper and better our personalities and relationships will be.
Idk though, a couple years ago I visited an AirBnB near Point Pelee, Ontario. It was a small add-on to a small house on the shores of the Lake. The decorations, random books and items, were from all around the world. The house was right across the street from a restaurant that had nice sandwiches and beer and it was located a short distance away from a place that served ice cream. I remember thinking that I wanted to have a house that looked and felt like that. And now I actually do, and – I feel – very happy and content.
the words from 2019:
I’ve thought about this idea for at least a year now. These are not original thoughts. Many people have thought them before. Thus, it seemed, not great, to waste time corralling this idea into a narrative, because, it is really just a series of questions.
Experiencing an aesthetic is less exciting than the experience of imagining an aesthetic. Experience is subtle. Experience is uncontrolled. The sounds which create an aesthetic are irregular and we do not choose when they occur. Rain is subject to the rhythms of the wind – the shifting solar pressures of a planet which we do not hold in our hand.
A friend said simply: “Life is not glamourous. My life as a consultant is not glamorous. Life is not an academic TikTok. It is not a stock office photo.” Marketing packages aesthetic, presents an image, tells others. Marketing simplifies complexity to an authentic aesthetic. Marketable authenticity is an aesthetic which forgets that authenticity is beyond complex. It is messy.
The grad school English student aesthetic?
The grad school engineering student aesthetic?
The flying aesthetic?
The water engineer aesthetic?
The dank middle Midwest winter aesthetic?
The southern Great Plains aesthetic?
The aesthetic of the Northland?
I want to feel the aesthetic of the Northland.
The Ivy League theology professor or the Toni Morrison is a goddess aesthetic?
How can we differentiate pursuing excellence from pursuing an aesthetic?
How many aesthetics are acceptable to be combined and packaged into a singular person’s brand?
How can you authentically brand yourself to get a job without constantly falling into the trap of saying, what aesthetic do I fit into?
Are aesthetics a new religion?
Are aesthetics an extension of the postmodern sensate culture of the self?
When one arrives at phrases about cultures of the self and self-centeredness, it is time to look outward.
What kind of person should I be, as a Christian, that part of myself which is beyond myself?
Even then, the summarized sentence, “instead of pursuing an aesthetic, our pursuit should be to come to know God,” has been aestheticized. When I say that phrase, I imagine old men studying books printed with tall 1990s Times New Roman font and the pastor’s wife in the church cinder-block basement, sucking all the fun out of life. In turning from that aesthetic, I imagine awful visits to new churches, the question “how can we serve you,” coffee, Bible journaling.
I guess what I’m trying to say using the aesthetic of a blog post is that my question used to be how does one get out of all the aesthetics and then I realized today when you are out of pursuing an aesthetic and instead you are totally in a moment there is no aesthetic, there is only what is, and you don’t feel what you feel when you look at an acclomeration of aesthetics, instead, you just feel what you are, and how, who, has described that before.
Reading with Ally 