For whatever reason, I seem to have missed the boat on romance stories. Whenever my friends in high school were reading Sarah Dessen novels, I was reading Dickens. The closest I ever got to romance was reading Jane Eyre when I was 16, a novel I would later reject due to the problematic, abusive relationship between Jane and Rochester.
I am an incredibly lucky teacher in that I have the distinct pleasure of teaching some students who are just as nerdy as I am. And, because they periodically Google search their teachers, one of them found out about my Women of the World writing project here.
Another month, another bit of rule-bending.
Over the summer, I listened to All Things Considered’s portrait of the newly appointed U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, the first Native American to ever hold the position. And, last month, the arrival of her first book of poetry as Poet Laureate returned her to the spotlight.
For August’s Women of the World book, I specifically wanted to find a Latina author. Last month, I realized that though I’d done a pretty good job of finding female authors from far away places, I hadn’t found any from countries closer to home. Given the continuing immigrant crisis at the US southern border, I figured it was about time that I put more energy into finding an author that would represent the voices that our country seems so ready to reject.
Ok, guys. I have a confession to make. I cheated a lil’ bit this month. Just a bit. I promised that I would read a book by an immigrant woman of color for every month in 2019 and I sort of did that, but I also sort of didn’t. This month’s book Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is all of those things, but it’s also not new to me. I first read Adichie’s Fifteen Suggestions last year after realizing that the constant damaging news cycle was often leaving me speechless when actually confronting people who were parroting “fake news.” I first read Adichie in an effort to help consolidate my own thoughts on feminism and as a sort of devotional text in the fight for equality.
So, let me start by saying that I realize that poetry is not for everyone. This is true for old poetry, with its repetitive rhymes and rigid structure, but it is also exceptionally true for much of modern poetry, which can sometimes read like some sort of self-indulgent exercise in emotional riddle-making.
But, after hearing an interview with poet Franny Choi, I couldn’t wait to get a hold of her new book of poetry, Soft Science. I usually love poetry and was intrigued by the ways Choi said she wove together the threads of politics, gender, sexuality and technology in her new collection. She also said that she did so using the language of technology and science, which I thought had to be super cool.
As a teacher, the end of the school year can be both completely hectic and ridiculously boring all at the same time. Filled with standardized tests that require me to sit in a room for hours on end, it seems like all of my time is both used and wasted all at once. Perhaps even worse than the eternal boredom of testing season, sitting in a silent room for hours on end tends to lead my brain to some weird places. Because I’m an enneagram 1 and am endlessly concerned with the issues of the world, without happy distractions my brain heads toward incredibly depressing places pretty quickly.
As an English teacher, I often have to remind my students that you don’t have to like a book for its message to be important. March’s book had me listening to my own advice. I really struggled writing this review. Yet, I think the tension that I felt while writing this blog is the entire point of reading this book.
My year of reading women around the world started off with a bang with my January book, Wayétu Moore’s She Would be King. Thus, I jumped into February with equal tenacity, excited to delve into yet another work that would help me explore more traditions, more cultures, just . . . more.
February’s book is Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s One Amazing Thing. This book seemed to come to me almost by some divine inspiration, as it was given to me by a close friend before I had told anyone about this project.
At the end of 2018, I was dreading the thought of the new year. For whatever reason, New Year’s Eve has always been my least favorite holiday, probably because new year’s resolutions are the bane of my existence. My perfectionist self can’t handle the thought of purposefully guaranteeing that I will begin every new year with an inevitable failure.
But, at the end of 2018, beaten down by the exhausting cycle of bad news and plagued by the realization that, according to the Screentime app on my iPhone, I’d spent on average over three hours PER DAY mindlessly scrolling through the internet, I decided to commit myself at least to read something other than Twitter in 2019.