Books are Rare

When my father first went to Africa, he taught in a secondary school. Once some students were writing sentences with vocabulary words, and one, assigned to illustrate the word "rare," wrote, "Books are rare." My dad thought the student didn't understand the meaning of the word, but it turned out that in that place at that time, books were rare. It was unusual to own even one.

There are many places in the world today where books are rare. And while perhaps this lack isn't in the same category with malnutrition and disease, it still makes me sad that people don't have books. In my life, books are essential.

Yesterday, we visited the International Book Project. For forty years, this wonderful organization has been giving books to countries where books are rare. In Tecwil, the percentage of the population who can use English books is small, but the students at our school will benefit from IBP's generosity. I was able to get lots of novels for my classroom library and I'm looking forward to sharing them with my kids.

My students aren't the most book-deprived you could find, but many of them don't have the richness of choice that I had as a child. I hope that they will be among those who will work to make books available in the other languages spoken in Tecwil, and that they will work against illiteracy in Tecwil or other places. Sure, there are other needs in this world, but knowledge flows through books. And people who are illiterate can't read a medicine bottle, or a lease, or God's word.

Books are rare! Please donate to the International Book Project - you can send them the books you're finished with or you can give them money. Follow the links on their website to find out how.

Of Clothes and Books and Having Too Much

Last night I read that my friend Alana is going to try something new. She's been interested for a long time in simplifying her wardrobe and she's written before about her attraction to a "uniform." Then the other day she read an article about a woman who wore the same dress every day for a month. She started exploring the idea and found that several people had tried similar experiments. But I'll let her tell you about it.

Let me say up front that I have no intention of trying such a thing. I live in a very hot, humid climate, and often my clothes don't make it through a whole day, let alone more than one day. One of the women Alana linked to wrote that she washed the dress that she wore for a year "after every two or three wearings." Nothing lasts two or three wearings for me. Also, I don't have reliable enough water and/or electricity to be doing a load of laundry every single night just so that I can streamline my clothing choices. I think I would be using resources incorrectly.

And then, of course, there's the fact that I wore a school uniform for eight years of my life - four different school uniforms, in fact, including one supremely ugly one which included a tie.

However, all that said, I do find the concept fascinating. Here are some great quotes I gleaned from Alana's links:

"I challenged myself to reject the economic system that pushes over-consumption, and the bill of goods that has been sold, especially to women, about what makes a person good, attractive and interesting. Clothes are a big part of this image, and the expectation in time, effort, and financial investment is immense... [so] let's stop agreeing that the best way for women (in particular) to 'express themselves' is by purchasing new wardrobe items and putting together daily outfits." (from LittleBrownDress.com.)

"Perhaps, on a larger scale, we would waste less of the world’s resources if we were captured in wonder by the curve of a carefully crafted cup; the joyful noise of a neighborhood waking up in the morning; the blessed figure of a human being beside us at the kitchen table. We would no longer be animated by a surface curiosity, a desire to entertain ourselves when we get restless. Aliveness to reality in the active knowing of the God-given character of a thing can satisfy us. It is how we can relate to it on a human level, lovingly." (from The Dress Project.)

Wow. Clearly this goes beyond clothing.

I don't think I have a problem with owning too much clothing (though my husband might disagree), but I do buy way too many books. I should cut back on that. And I would if I lived somewhere with a nearby public library.

But it's about more than how many books I own. It's about how I read. Recently I read The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, by Sven Birkerts. Among many fascinating facts, I learned, in an essay called "The Owl has Flown," about the history of the way people read. People used to read "intensively." Up until about 1750, anyone literate who owned books would only own a few. These would be read over and over and over; they would be memorized. I don't read much this way, with the exception of the Bible, which I have read many times. Mostly I read "extensively." Birkerts describes it this way: "Newspapers, magazines, brochures, advertisements, and labels surround us everywhere - surround us, indeed, to the point of having turned our waking environment into a palimpsest of texts to be read, glanced at, or ignored. It is startling to recall the anecdote about the philosopher Erasmus pausing on a muddy thoroughfare to study a rare scrap of printed paper flickering at his feet."

I read like a starving person - gulp, gulp, gulp, and on to the next book or article or website. I have a huge pile of books I am going to read. Maybe it would benefit me to read less, but more intensively.

Hmm.

It's the same concept: we have so much - and that includes me, living in a third world country as I do and constantly aware of how much more I have than so many around me - that often we don't stop to appreciate and fully enjoy what we do have.

I'll be following Alana's project with interest.

Reading Update

Book #19 of the year was a non-fiction title, The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century, by Kirk W. Johnson. This story introduced me to a world I had no idea even existed, of people who make fishing flies, and seek feathers from rare birds to do so. It's a story of true crime. You just couldn't make it up. I couldn't put the book down.

Book #20 was one I read because it was in the anthology I was using with my eighth graders. It was In Search of Honor, by Donnalynn Hess. The book is set in the French Revolution, and I learned a few things I didn't know about that time period. I liked it way more than the kids did. To be fair, that is sometimes the case when I read books with middle schoolers!

Book #21 was The Love of My Life, by Rosie Walsh. I really enjoyed this book, which should have the tagline, "Keep reading. It's not what you think!" The ending was just wonderful. 

Book #22 was Princess Academy: Palace of Stone and book #24 was Princess Academy: The Forgotten Sisters. Both of these were sequels to Princess Academy, which I read aloud to my seventh graders once back in 2007. I hadn't fully realized there were even sequels, but some kids in the library were asking about them, so I downloaded them from my US library to preview. I enjoyed these. They are firmly in the middle grade range, in spite of the subject matter which involves a bride being chosen for a prince. It could have gone in a very "The Bachelor" direction but never does. There's romance but it's extremely tame. What I did really appreciate about these was the social consciousness, something you don't find often in fairy tale type stories. There's a whole plot about the "shoeless" of the kingdom, the people who are neglected and living in poverty. I would definitely purchase these for a library.

Book #23 was Pride: A Pride and Prejudice Remix, by Ibi Zoboi. (I reviewed another book by Zoboi here.) Somehow, in spite of my radar being keenly attuned to YA books with Haitian themes, I had missed this when it came out in 2020. It's one of those few truly successful Jane Austen retellings. Zuri Benitez is a Haitian-Dominican girl living in Brooklyn with her parents and four sisters. When the Darcy family moves into the neighborhood, sparks ensue. It's a story of gentrification, life in New York, and cultural mixtures. Some of my readers might be surprised by the vodou/santería subplot. It's not a huge part of the story but definitely there. Check out the link earlier in this paragraph for evidence that that's something Zoboi has explored before. These things are part of the subculture she's writing about, but some won't like them. 

Book #25 was Passing, by Nella Larsen. This book, set in the 1920s, was first published in 1929. The "passing" of the title refers to the practice of light-skinned African-Americans living as white people. In some cases, even those closest to them didn't know the secret. This book is short but packs a huge punch.

Book #26 was Crying in H Mart: A Memoir, by Michelle Zauner. Zauner is the daughter of a Korean American mother and a white American father. This book is about her fraught relationship with her mother, and especially her mother's last illness and death. It's also about being mixed-race and, most of all, about Korean food. H Mart in the title is a Korean grocery chain in the United States. This is good, but heart-rending. Maybe not the best read in times of stress.

Reading Update

Book #2 of 2011 was Night Over Water, by Ken Follett. This was my first book by this author. It's the story of an assortment of travelers on the Pan American Clipper, a combination airplane and boat that really existed, and a transatlantic flight in 1939. I had never heard of these planes and there are a lot of interesting details in the story about what they were like.

Book #3 was The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway. Set in Sarajevo in the early 90s, this book tells the story of four characters who are trying to survive the war. The cellist of the title sets out to play Albinoni's Adagio after a mortar attack on his neighborhood. "He'll do this every day for twenty-two days, a day for each person killed. Or at least he'll try. He won't be sure he will survive. He won't be sure he has enough Adagios left." The other characters are a man who works in a bakery, a father who spends large amounts of his time making sure his household has enough water, and a sniper, Arrow. Here is Arrow before the war: "She felt an enveloping happiness to be alive, a joy made stronger by the certainty that someday it would all come to an end. It overwhelmed her, made her pull the car to the side of the road. Afterward she felt a little foolish, and never spoke to anyone about it. Now, however, she knows she wasn't being foolish. She realizes that for no particular reason she stumbled into the core of what it is to be human. It's a rare gift to understand that your life is wondrous, and that it won't last forever." Arrow is assigned to protect the cellist as he plays his music. This was a horrifying book, describing as it does life in Sarajevo, where a sniper's bullet could hit you at any moment as you went about your business. However, it was also a beautiful one, showing how human beings can survive.

Book #4, Fire, by Kristin Cashore, was not really my kind of book, and yet I enjoyed it immensely. I don't read a lot of fantasy, and I found the plot had some big holes in it. But I loved the characters in this book. As in Graceling, to which this book is billed as a "companion," there is a lot of mind-reading, and Cashore does it expertly, with Fire, the main character, picking up feelings and impressions from people around her, even those who shield their minds, which in this world it is possible to learn to do. Fire is a "monster," meaning she has special abilities and irresistible beauty. The beauty is more of a liability than anything else, and Fire struggles to deal with the effect she has on others. The range of relationships Cashore describes is so much fun to read about, and there's romance, but not at all in a stereotypical way. The one concern I have about this book, as I did with the other one, is the attitude of the young women protagonists towards sexuality; both Katsa (in Graceling) and Fire are extremely resistant to marriage, though not to sex (which isn't described explicitly but is very obviously happening). This book is supposed to be for kids my students' age, but I'd give it to older teenagers. Cashore does such a beautiful job telling her story, and I'm not entirely sure why, but reading this book made me happy. (I'm expecting my literature degrees to be revoked immediately after that last sentence.)



Book #5 was Bittersweet: Thoughts on Change, Grace, and Learning the Hard Way, by Shauna Niequist. Katie texted me Sunday night and said "I have a book for you!" She gave it to me in our staff meeting on Monday morning. She said she thought of me the whole time she was reading it. I'm not quite sure why she did (I'll ask her next time I see her), but she was right to think that I'd love this book. It reads like a blog between covers, and sure enough, the author blogs. (I added her to my Blog List yesterday.) Niequist tells, in short essays (posts, really), about a difficult time in her life, when she lost a job, had a baby, had a miscarriage, and lost friends who moved away. I enjoy her voice. Here's a sample, from her description of grace:

"If arithmetic is numbers, and if algebra is numbers and letters, then grace is numbers, letters, sounds, and tears, feelings, and dreams. Grace is smashing the calculator, and using all the broken buttons and pieces to make a mosaic.

Grace isn't about having a second chance; grace is having so many chances that you could use them through all eternity and never come up empty. It's when you finally realize that the other shoe isn't going to drop, ever. It's the moment you feel as precious and handmade as every star, when you feel, finally, at home for the very first time.

Grace is when you finally stop keeping score and when you realize that God never was, that his game is a different one entirely. Grace is when the silence is so complete that you can hear your own heartbeat, and right within your ribs, God's beating heart too."

This post is linked to today's Saturday Review of Books.

On the iPod

Today I spent most of the day shelving books in the school library. I finished the 800s in the high school section and made a lot of progress on the junior fiction in the elementary section. I plugged myself into my iPod and got into my Dewey Decimalizing, alphabetizing zone. There are still books spread about the room, but the library is looking so much better than it did two weeks ago.

Out of all the podcasts I listened to, I thought the best was a Rob Bell sermon called Matthew 5: Jesus and Divorce. (You can download it at that link.) It's a difficult subject, and I think Bell does a beautiful job. He talks about what Jesus said about divorce in Matthew 5 and its historical context - this is information I had never heard before, and very helpful for an understanding of the passage. Bell acknowledges that we live in a broken world and sometimes marriages end; his take on this is realistic and compassionate, and he also maintains a very high view of marriage and how it is ideally supposed to be. This is one of those rare sermons on marriage that has something in it for everyone. It's going in my Favorite Sermons folder.

Slice of Life Tuesday: Rare Bird

 

This past weekend we went on an adventure. For the first time in almost a year, we slept away from home, two nights as the only guests at a guesthouse run by a former student and her parents. I was so excited to go somewhere, to be somewhere else, somewhere not home or school or our outdoor church that we’ve cautiously started having again since October. I packed my binoculars and my new hiking shoes, my bathing suit, and books to read. My husband loaded his bicycle into the car. My son emptied his school backpack of textbooks and filled it with weekend supplies.

The guesthouse is minutes from full-on city, but it’s in an area that is still wooded. I recently read that Haiti is the most deforested country on the planet, so an area with lots of trees is a true treasure. For everyone, but especially for people like me who love to look at birds.

The birding was almost too much for me. Instead of my city yard with about seven trees (I count the visible ones from neighboring yards as part of my territory), I had a quarter mile of path, with possibilities for off-path exploration too. Countless trees overwhelmed me. Sometimes I’d turn from one bird I’d been trying to bring into focus and start trying for another, only to get distracted from that one too. Instead of ones and twos like at home, the birds were in flocks.

I saw three lifers, meaning birds I’d never seen before: an American Kestrel (actually two of them on two different days), a noisy treeful of Village Weavers (the Madame Sara bird, which gave its name in Haitian Kreyol to the gatherings of market women, full of chattering just like a group of Village Weavers), and Hispaniolan Parrots. The parrots flew over in a flock of a dozen, squawking raucously, and we watched them, passing the binoculars back and forth, for about half an hour until it finally got too dark to see their gorgeous green, blue, and red plumage. It was one of those perfect experiences that I will remember the rest of my life. I also saw Palm Crows, White-necked Crows, and at least eight black Smooth-billed Anis with their floppy tails. Plus loads of colorful little warblers, Bananaquits, and hummingbirds. And Hispaniolan Woodpeckers! Once I saw three on one branch.

On Saturday afternoon, giddy from all the birds I’d seen, I followed a loud bird voice on a nearby tree, and spied someone who looked familiar: my beloved Hispaniolan Lizard-Cuckoo. But maybe not exactly. The more I looked at him, the more I thought his breast was darker, redder than the bird I was used to seeing in my yard. This wild and crazy word came into my head: bay-breasted.

The Bay-breasted Cuckoo is very similar to the Hispaniolan Lizard-Cuckoo, but the latter is smaller and lighter in color, with a slightly different beak. And the Bay-breasted is much, much rarer. While the distribution map for the Hispaniolan shows the whole island shaded blue (blue indicates a place where this bird can be found), the Bay-breasted has just a few blue dots, almost all of them completely in the Dominican Republic.

What are the odds of seeing this bird in the location where I was on Saturday afternoon? Pretty small. And soon cooler scientific heads prevailed. I got two messages from people acting on behalf of eBird. One asked for a photo. Do you take a photo when you see a unicorn? No, I didn’t have one. And even if I had, based on my previous experience with taking bird photos, it would probably not have helped my case much - most of my efforts show empty branches or, at best, a vaguely bird-shaped blur. The other message suggested that I go look at pictures of the Bay-breasted online, because it was really nearly impossible that that’s what I had seen.

Chastened, and feeling my low status as an ignorant beginning birder, I went to the website and changed my identification. Not Bay-breasted, but Hispaniolan Lizard-Cuckoo.  

Why did my heart sink a little bit? How could I think of the Hispaniolan Lizard-Cuckoo as a non-special bird, when I’ve been loving seeing its elegant long tail, black with white circles, and its graceful, curved beak, since before I even started taking all of this seriously? My brother Andy told me once about a birding mentor of his, who said (in the plummiest English accent imaginable, flawlessly imitated by Andy), “If you can’t see all the birds you want to see, you have to learn to enjoy the birds you do see.” In wishing for something just a bit more exciting, I’m like the children of Israel getting tired of manna, God’s amazing gift of food falling from the sky just for them.

And yet. Maybe it really was a Bay-breasted Cuckoo. Maybe he was a celebrity on vacation, incognito, with other birds coming shyly up and saying in their bird way, “You know, maybe it’s the light, but you really look bay-breasted. Could I have your autograph?” Unlikely? Sure. But it’s still entertaining to imagine. 

Hispaniolan Lizard-Cuckoo (Source: eBird.com)

 

Bay-breasted Cuckoo (Source: eBird.com)