As my vacation continues on, I'm finding it filled with little adventure, or those that hold much promise but little reality. I'm trying my hardest to relax and do nothing, as one is supposed to with a good vacation. The closest I can get to this is reading. I've stumbled across a series of books that manage to transport me to different times and places, each in their own way.
The last school I worked in had a reading room, apart from the school library, lovingly created by one of the reading teachers. It was a great collection of books designed to support the curriculum. I appreciated it thoroughly then, as the true resource it was, and continue to remember it fondly from my distance.
There was a section that connected fiction and nonfiction books in an effort to provide a multilayered perspective of a topic. I think of it now as I have just completed two very different books that seem intimiately related. This has happened only one other time in my adult life. I was still in the U.S and part of a book club. We had just finished a book for the club when I happened across the perfect fictional companion. It was such a thrilling expereince, I tried, in vain, to convince the others that I had found the next book. I wanted desperately to discuss, compare and contrast the unique perspectives of a similar subject.
It is especially poignant to me because of my method for choosing books. It is more of a system where they choose me. And it becomes easy for me to think there is a message in every one.
Finally, and simply, the pairs.
From the long but not forgotten book club days- Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver should always be read with The Camel Bookmobile by Masha Hamilton. One is an autobiography of a man building schools across Afghanistan. The other, fictional but based loosely on a real enterprise, is a fascinating drama of a woman delivering books to remote villages in northern Africa with an ending I adore (only my students know what that means.)
Most recently, Till The Sun Grows Cold by Maggie McCune should always be followed closely by The Testament by John Grisham. Maggie McCune writers an autobigraphy of her life that blends into an odd but powerful story of her daughter who fell in love with Africa and eventually married a Sudanese war lord. In the story by John Grisham, which is completely different but somehow related (perhaps only the relevance is sensed by me?) a missionary in the remote forests of Brazil inherits eleven billion dollars and the race is on to find her.
And all of these reads should be followed by a strong game of futbol, a meal of foufou with mbisi and chocolate cake... happy birthday Nabih.
