Book Review: A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

I'll start by saying it's been a while since a book got so into my head that it made me lose sleep and sometimes forget to distinguish between the fictional story and my real life. That's a feat, and to me the mark of a talented author. This book keeps you constantly in a state of emotional suspense, riding on a figurative rollercoaster with amazing highs and then very scary downward trajectories that bring you to some very low lows. It is a long book, but 100% worth the journey.

Disclaimer: Books like these are difficult to read, especially if you have any abuse trauma in your past, or are close with someone who experienced it. But. For this very reason, I think for anyone wanting to understand what trauma really is and how it can have far-reaching effects into your adulthood (oftentimes even in spite of any personal success), this book gives you the ability to almost truly empathize for the first time, and the first book to have helped me do that.  I say almost because I would never want to discredit someone who's been through abuse and pretend I could ever truly understand. But this book brought me closer than anything ever has. The author crafts a solid story line with effortless composition and literary choices, making it an easy book to float through. And sometimes very difficult to keep going because it's too easy to sink into the story it becomes too real.

Aside from helping me understand abuse and trauma, this book also had beautiful passages that really tackled and nailed some fundamental journey into adulthood themes we all go through: the awkwardness of your 20s and 30s where, inevitably, friends all begin choosing life paths that are hard to consolidate anymore; the loneliness of feeling like good friends become casual acquaintances; the sadness of realizing some friends never caught up in the life game; the realization that marriage and relationships are a different beast than you were taught all your life and no one's doing it quite right; the despair of feeling like something is off decades later when looking back at your life. It felt like a journey through life (you watch the characters grow from college 20-something-year-olds to well-established, successful 50-year-olds), and not an easy one to witness, but hauntingly beautiful. All wrapped into one book.

That being said, the only negative parts of this book were more literary writing choices--one being the fact that this author went to an ivy league school and lived in New York City, and she makes it PLAINLY evident that she knows every fine wine, niche foodie restaurant, refined composer, trendy artist and basically she needs you to know she is ever-so-refined in her tastes. She throws in casual esoteric references to food and culture every other page and can't help herself. It's off-putting.

The second negative aspect of the writing in this book is the author's deliberate choice to overdo every intensely physical, traumatic or abusive scene. I read interviews with the author, and she explicitly states that she wanted everything to be "a little too much." In some ways, I understand this choice. I do think part of the goal of this book is jarring you as a reader into understanding what abuse and trauma feel like, but I also thought it was too gratuitous and there were TOO many sad things the main character goes through. Is anyone really likely to experience so much bad luck in one lifetime? Seems unlikely and mildly threatened the validity of the story, which could have felt more authentic without this.

Lastly, 800 pages was just too long for what the book sought to accomplish. In the interviews with the author, she mentions that her publisher had to fight with her to get her manuscript from roughly 1000 pages down to 800+. As the book stands, it could have been shaved down another 150-200 pages and been a more complete, intact book this way.

All said and done, I think this book was incredibly worth a once-time read. Again, the goal of books is to help you as a reader experience emotions, thoughts and perspectives you may never experience except through the eyes of a fictional character. And this one nailed it in this aspect. You feel changed in some way once you're done. The hallmark of a 'good' book.

Raising Money for People Devastated by Quarantine in Lake Atitlán, Guatemala

This past weekend, what started off as an opportunity to alleviate ourselves from the oppressiveness of the quarantine, see friends near and far, and have some drinks to a wacky time, turned into a small fundraising opportunity. With the help of our generous friends, we managed to raise $295 to send to Guatemala. Why Guatemala, and how?

Trevor and I had the opportunity (as is well-documented in our too-detailed instagram) to travel for a year through Latin America in 2019. We got to spend one of those months in the area of Lago de Atitlán, Guatemala. It was a surreal experience in every way possible. Atitlán is the deepest lake in Central America of azure blue, surrounded by three volcanoes and nine villages of mayan populations, some of which are only accessible by boat. Boats in fact, are the main form of transportation in this area. Each of the villages has its own character and flair, and you can spend countless days traveling to each one and seeing new sights.

This area has become a popular place for ex-pats in the last few decades, and has drawn a lot of tourism to the area. The people here are generous, small-town folk who take pride in taking care of each other, and keeping the area safe for everyone. And they love their lake and consider it sacred. As did, interestingly enough, Aldous Huxley and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who wrote The Little Prince and used the Atitlán volcanoes as inspiration for the Little Prince's volcanoes.

Last year, we stayed in the village of San Pedro in a cute little house (built by Clemente, our amazing host) up on a hill where we had the most amazing views of the lake. Any time we wanted groceries, we had to go to the markets in main town by walking by the lakeside on the sand and taking the small 10-minute path into town. It was dreamy. The Pedranos were incredibly nice and by the end of that month, we had so many familiar faces to say hi to on walks through town. Small town life, ya know?

Anywho, the quarantine. The sad thing about this situation for the people of Atitlán is that they depend heavily on tourism to keep afloat. These are humble, simple-living villages, often subsisting on what they grow in the area, and tourists for income. With the closure of the borders, tourism has been really affected. And this past week would have been the biggest year for tourism, semana santa, a week in which the whole country is swept up in religious festivals that take up all the streets. This video shows a bit of what this week is like in Guatemala, but it is mystical, beautiful and really hard to put into words. Because of the quarantine, they lost their biggest income-generating week of the year. It's a tough reality.

I got in contact with a young American female entrepreneur who lives in the area of Atitlán and asked if she would be willing to help me get money to the local people for donations. She runs her own business empowering mayan people to sell their crafts, and her work over seven years in Guatemala is awe-inspiring.

And she graciously agreed to help. So we'll be sending her a Venmo for her to buy food and donate to the local firemen, who are in charge of gathering food, putting it in packages, and distributing to families.

And that's where this money is going. Many people in this area live purely off what they can sell each day, oftentimes simple things like mangos, bread, tortillas, handicrafts. Whatever they can find to make a couple of dollars for the day to feed their family. With everyone under quarantine, this turns an already-desperate-situation into one of likely starvation. While we here in the U.S. are a little bored, yes, and also feeling our own kind of anxiety about this pandemic, we are incredibly lucky that a lot of us won't have to worry about making a meager $5 in earnings for the day to buy some food.

From the Catholic Sentinel

Thanks to our Chicken Shit Bingo efforts, and some gracious friends, we raised $295, which while not a whole whole lot, is $295 worth of food going to Guatemalan families. And that's a happy thing to know during these difficult times. And we feel returning some of the generosity the people of this area showed to us when we were there is the least we can do.

Special thanks to Mike, Irina, Zita and Randy, Nicole and Eric who all contributed individually beyond buying bingo spots. You guys are wonderful.

Get Out of Your Mind: How the process of learning a language makes you a better educator

      Picture, for a moment, yourself doing something you consider a huge weakness . For example, let’s say you’re not the best skater. Imagine being set up on a stage in front of hundreds of people, your very own skating rink on it in the deadpan silence. You acutely hear each gasp and “ohh” each time the audience watches you fall, crash and slip. After all, this isn’t exactly your forte. Feeling that embarrassment burn on your cheeks? That is exactly the feeling I lived with the summer of 2015. Willingly.
      When I was twenty years old, I decided that for whatever reason, the main goal I had for myself in life was to learn five languages by the time I was thirty. I grew up in a Guatemalan household in which we were taught to respect the boundary between our “home” language and our “school” language. Home was Spanish, school was English. My mom believed that keeping this boundary would help us develop concrete fluency in both languages. Thanks to my parents’ philosophy, I grew up a fully bilingual Spanish/English speaker. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was given an amazing gift because true bilingualism is something that is hard to create. More often it happens through a collision of fortuitous circumstances.
      When I was eighteen, I decided to embark on another language by my own choosing. Learning french was an incredibly gratifying experience and is what I consider to be my first true learning experience, as I was painfully aware of every minute mistake, hesitation and awkward slip. I vividly remember struggling to make my mouth wrap around their (to me) foreign phonetic system. I remember my throat being sore for days after a 1.5-hour session on just the french “r.” I remember learning vowel teams that made no sense to my Spanish/English brain. I remember learning french syntax, then slowly blending in colloquial expressions, which opened a new uncharted territory of my brain in which I could no longer tie new concepts to familiar Spanish/English ones. Learning a new language as an adult was not easy or painless. It took many tiresome repetitions of conjugation tables. It took many repetitions of writing sentences in a particular syntactical structure until it stuck. It took learning complex sentence structures and adding in even more complex tenses. All in all? Six semesters of college, one summer in France and countless “language practice nights” to really get the hang of it.
So it was that at 25, I decided it was time for lingua numero quatro: Portuguese. I took six months of Portuguese in Austin, then two years later booked three weeks of intensive Portuguese classes, an apartment with two Brazilians and their bulldog, then hopped on a plane to the city of Porto Alegre in Rio Grande do Sul. I relived each agonizing moment of the anxiety you’re faced with in what are usually normal, mundane daily moments. You would think that after a decade of dealing with banks, entering a bank wouldn’t be such an ordeal requiring the guard on the other side of the glass door practically yelling at you because you don’t have the vocabulary to understand that the metal detectors won’t allow the door to open if you don’t put all metal objects and your cell phone aside before entering. And let me tell you, it sucks getting stared at like an idiot by a sixteen-year-old cashier at a grocery store because they’re quickly mumbling acronyms of Brazilian systems you didn’t know existed, and you just shrug because you don’t know what they want from you. It’s equally embarrassing to order a plate of food for dinner, getting a skeptical look in exchange,, only to realize you basically ordered a huge plate of cubed cheese, nothing else.
     And it was worth every moment. Now, having learned a new language with five years experience as a high school English teacher under my belt, it made me realize that learning a new language is quite possibly one of the most beneficial things I could have done for my educator self. As we age, we tend to get into our routines and comfort zones. We know (for the most part) what life offers us, and we become more selective about the experiences we want. Fully immersing yourself in a different language is like plunging into a deep, cold pool. The first few seconds are abysmally shocking, and it’s only after you start forcing your muscles to tread water, breath steadily and get into a groove that you start feeling ok about being submerged in this foreign matter. Learning a language is exactly like that. There are few moments you aren’t painfully aware of how you sound to other people, aware of how much much brainpower it’s taking you to recall, craft and pronounce every word and sentence. It takes weeks of “treading” to start feeling like you’re getting the hang of it.
     As teachers, we forget what that process was like--being asked and forced to do things daily that push us past our natural limits. It is exhausting and it does take a certain amount of bravery to repeatedly do things in which we are very likely to fail. That month speaking Portuguese with Brazilians presented many moments to me in which all I could think about was how these situations were likely the ones my students experienced daily. It was certainly embarrassing to have to speak out loud days I wasn’t feeling on my game. I imagined my listener questioning how mentally proficient I was, much how my students probably feel when I ask them to read or answer critical questions out loud in class. Reading in Portuguese was often frustrating when I’d get to a phrase where a combination of vocabulary and foreign syntax forced me to stop, look up a word, try to figure out what the sentence was saying, and then realizing I’d forgotten what the paragraph was even about because it’d taken so long to do all that. That is probably what my students go through when confronted with any text slightly beyond their reading level.
And here’s the insane thing: I CHOSE to experience that awkwardness. Our students don’t have that choice. Education, after all, is compulsory in our country. Our students are asked daily to put themselves in the most humbling situations a person can experience, yet we become frustrated with them when they aren’t giving us their best every day, when they’re “too tired,” when they don’t provide us beautiful, thought-out responses. We don’t, however, stop and ask them to reflect on how they’ve grown day-to-day, why they don’t feel comfortable answering things out loud, reassuring them that “to err, is human.”
     If nothing else, learning a new language will render you a more empathetic being, and will equip you to better to support your students with varying perspectives. You’ll have the presence of mind to know when you should be breaking things apart more for students, when to give more time, when to assist students with building confidence. As researchers of a study on multilingualism at the University of London, Birbeck concluded: “To speak a second language authentically is to take on a new identity. As with empathy, it is to step into a new and perhaps unfamiliar pair of shoes.” To further this analogy, walking in someone else’s shoes enables you to fully understand and reach that person better. As educators in an increasingly multicultural world, isn’t this one of our largest challenges? If many educators chose to undergo the process of learning another language, I get the feeling we’d have many more students being reached, helped and pushed beyond limits ever before seen.

Book Review: The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

"Are you a good book, or a bad book? "

Were this book able to talk, it would have said, "Oh, well I'm not a book at all. I'm a piece of trash, from hell."

I don't really mean that. But I do feel like it sent me through six out of the nine levels of hell.  Let me open by saying that last year I embarked on Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cien Anos de Soledad, or, One Hundred Years of Solitude. I have yet to finish it--I really will, someday. When I'm ready. I stopped reading it because it took so much thinking juice what with the purposely misleading writing style. When half your characters share the same name, span several decades and the writing is very cut and dry, it becomes a bit of a struggle, not unlike trudging through metaphorical quicksand.

So when I realized about thirty pages into Faulkner's masterpiece it felt like that same journey all over again, I knew the road would be long.

The pros: I have an innate respect for southern writers. I love folk talk and dialect and humor. There were many lines that thoroughly tickled my fancy. The story involved and developed very deep characters whom you get to know, one perspective at a time. It was broken into four parts, each part by a different character through their recollection of the accounts. The first was incredibly disjointed and confusing as all get out, until you realize that's intentional because the subsequent three parts shed light on what was taking place (the first character is a 30-year-old mentally challenged man, so it's told through his limited perception of events around him). I also have immense respect for authors who are able to intertwine and develop plotline in a way that takes an ordinary tale and keeps you intrigued, giving you the full story in short insights that gradually pull into full awareness. It's a talent.

The cons: What isn't a talent is completely disregarding written conventions because you consider yourself above them. I read several interviews with Faulkner, in which he explicitly and smugly states that it will take the average reader three or four times of rereading his novel to piece it all together. I'm sorry, since when is accomplished writing supposed to be a basic-reading-level test trying to sort through your disheveled thoughts? It reeks of pretentiousness to me.

I can't say I'd recommend this as a fun reading. If you enjoy a challenge, and want to get something a little different from the usual tale, then maybe take a gander.