Sunday, May 22, 2016

The Reader

“All books reveal perfection, by what they are or what they are not.”
Christopher Moore, Lamb

Selfishly, one of the things I was most looking forward to when preparing to leave for my Peace Corps service was the amount of time I could dedicate to reading over the course of two years. Honestly, I was sort of hoping that they’d put me in a village with no electricity so I wouldn’t have any distractions from the hundreds of books I imagined myself reading. Though I’ve been a stereotypical introverted library-bound nerd since the age of six, studying literature at university only made me hyperaware of the sheer number of works I hadn’t yet read, so in the weeks leading up to my departure, I scoured Amazon for inexpensive and essential books to load onto my Kindle, hoping to fill in certain gaps in my education (Anne Frank’s diary was one of the first books I read in Cameroon) and sample genres I had heretofore avoided (science fiction, for instance).

I can’t claim to have read an astonishing amount here; another volunteer has read 50 books in the last eight months, whereas I read that number in all of last year. I do wish that I’d read more over the course of the last two years, but there were a number of days when, after teaching or correcting tests, re-watching The X-Files just seemed so much more comforting than reading a pre-Columbian history of the Americas. (Update: After nearly three months, I finally finished Charles Mann’s 1491.)

Has this attempt to read a book a week made me a better or more intelligent person? Probably not, though I certainly have more fun facts to drop into conversation at cocktail parties. I do it partly out of fear of intellectual stagnation: It’s now nearly five years since my formal education ended, and while I no longer have somewhat-easy access to brilliant professors, I want to try to recreate that sensation of having a conversation which forces its participants to dissect their own thoughts. This desire for ongoing education is probably what has driven me to stray from fiction, leaving me feeling as though I’m cheating on my literary background as I try to ground myself in the “real”. As I reach the end of my service, I’ve finally devised a compromise: At any given time, I’m reading at least two books, one fiction and one non-fiction. One keeps me factually attuned to the world around me; the other, I like to think, forces me to practice a certain level of empathy with the characters I encounter.

I’m certainly in no position to make recommendations, as I’ve barely scratched the surface when it comes to masterpieces of the written word, but here, in no particular order, are a few books I’ve particularly enjoyed in the last two years. These are beautifully written works of prose, all of which enchanted me and some of which put words to feelings I hadn’t adequately described to myself.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
Just Kids, Patti Smith
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver

Contact, Carl Sagan

Although I only have two months of service left, I plan to spend much of that time reading, and hope to keep reading a book a week when I return to the States, so feel free to leave recommendations in the comments.

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