2017 Recommended Reading

The recommendations I can make based on my reading this year may be even more eclectic than usual this year.

Theology: I try to pick one major work of theology a year to read, and then others pop up along the way.

 The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright - I haven't read any of Wright's other main works, but this was a powerful book that was worth all of the time that I invested in it. Highly recommend! (related post)

Jonathan Edwards on the Atonement by Brandon Crawford - This was a book that dealt with the biblical matters of 'honor' and 'shame' from an entirely different context than most of my other reading on the topic. It also held interest as the work of a friend. (related post)

 Sharing Abraham? by George Bristow - This book discusses the similarities and differences between biblical and kuranic views of Abraham, particularly in their narratives and how those narratives are used. It provides a great guide to what the Kuran and Bible say about Abraham.


Fiction: I read lots of fiction; here are the best two from this year's new reads.

 San Andreas by Alistair MacLean - I've read his books for years, but somehow I seem to have missed this one.

 Sandworms of Dune - Brian Herbert & Kevin Anderson - a worthwhile read, written with Frank Herbert's notes, it did not disappoint.

BONUS: Children's Fiction
 The Book with No Pictures - This book was an instant classic in our house. I had to make the kids listen to it the first time (by command: "Sit"). The instant it finished, they begged for me to read it again... and then kept making any guests who spoke English read it to them, too, for days. (Really, it has NO pictures!)

English Teaching - I started an MA in English Teaching this year, and there are tons of good resources out there. However, most of my favorites so far have been journal articles.

  Techniques and Principles in Language Teaching by Larsen-Freeman and Anderson - This book is an exception to my general preference for articles on TESL. It clearly shows a way through the various methods that are, or have been, in vogue. I find myself referring back to it when I need clarity on things I want to try or methods I want to experiment with.

Biography/History

  Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman - This was required MA reading about culture and language learning at the experiential level. It was beautiful; my copy is highlighted throughout. It resonates deeply with me as a TCK. Eva is a child when she moves from her home in a Communist land into the vast capitalism of Canada and the USA. Language and culture shake the worlds in and around her, resolving slowly, but never quitting. (3 post related to this: one, two, three)

 1948 by Benny Morris - It was recommended to me as a book, written by an Israeli professor, that someone inclined towards a Palestinian point of view would recommend to a friend inclined towards an Israeli point of view, who would then recommend it to others. It was insightful and informative from many perspectives.


Favorite new music for the year:

 Stirling EQ Afrikaans, the Prince of Egypt soundtrack, anything by JJ Heller, and This Christmas Time by Take no Glory


Recommendations from years past: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011

excerpts on "Language" from Lost in Translation

No, I’m no patriot, nor was I ever allowed to be. And yet, the country of my childhood lives within me with a primacy that is a form of love. It lives within me despite my knowledge of our marginality, and its primitive, unpretty emotions. Is it blind and self-deceptive of me to hold on to its memory? I think it would be blind and self-deceptive not to. All it has given me is the world, but that is enough. It has fed me language, perceptions, sounds, the human kind. It has given me the colors and the furrows of reality, my first loves.

***

The very places where language is at its most conventional, where it should be most taken for granted, are the places where I feel the prick of artifice.

***

Telling a joke is like doing a linguistic pirouette. If you fall flat, it means not only that you don’t have the wherewithal to do it well but also that you have misjudged your own skill, that you are fool enough to undertake something you can’t finish – and that lack of self-control or self-knowledge is a lack of grace.

***

So each language has its own distinctive music, and even if one doesn’t know its separate components, one can pretty quickly recognize the propriety of the patterns in which the components are put together, their harmonies and discords.

***

When I speak Polish now, it is infiltrated, permeated, and inflected by the English in my head. Each language modifies the other, crossbreeds with it, fertilizes it. Each language makes the other relative. Like everybody, I am the sum of my languages – the language of my family and childhood, and education and friendship, and love, and the larger, changing world – though perhaps I tend to be more aware than most of the fractures between them, and of the building blocks.

Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (p. 74, 106, 118, 123, 273). 

And, a thought from this immigrant child, concerning writing "home"...

There is no way, I know, that I can convey the nature of my new life to her, and besides, she is one of the many affections that are only causing me the pain of nostalgia, and that I therefore try to numb or extract from myself like some gnawing scruple, or splinter lodged in a thumb.

Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (p. 23). 

Consumerism, Zen, and this TCK

 Ewa Hoffman's Lost in Translation is assigned reading for my MA class; overall, it is excellent, but Part 2 "Exile" has been especially poignant to me, as a TCK who rejected the torturing consumerism of American culture when he was ten. (Technically, the author is a CCK, cross-cultural kid, not a third culture kid, but that's beside the point.)

 She also describes many of the feelings of lostness within and disengagement from a culture graphically. Yet, it was at the point where she began describing her response to materialism that the book really grabbed me. I don't recall having read anything so near to my own feelings about materialism. Finally, she speaks of being alone in a dorm over the holidays in a way that vividly recaptured that experience for me.

Concerning Her Reponse to Materialism and Consumerism:

  After battering myself again and again on the horns of lust and disgust, I begin to retreat from both. I decide to stop wanting. For me, this is a strange turn: my appetites are strong, and I never had any ambitions to mortify them by asceticism. But this new resolution is built into the logic of my situation. Since I can’t have anything, if I were to continue wanting, there would be no end to my deprivation. It would be constant, like a never-ending low-level toothache. I can’t afford such a toothache; I can’t afford to want. Like some sybarite turned monk who proves his mettle by placing himself in seductive situations, I can now walk between taffeta dresses and silk lingerie without feeling a shred of temptation. I‘ve become immune to desire; I snip the danger of wanting in the bud.   By the same sleight of consciousness, I’m becoming immune to envy. If I were to give vent to envying, there would be no end to that either. I would have to envy everybody, every moment of the day. But with my new detachment, I can gaze at what my friends have as if they lived in a different world. In this spatial warp in which I have situated myself, it doesn’t make any difference that they live in big houses with large yards and swimming pools, and cars and many skirts and blouses and pairs of shoes. This way, I can be nice to my friends; I can smile pleasantly at their pleasures and sympathize with their problems of the good life. I can do so, because I’ve made myself untouchable. Of course, they might be upset if they guessed the extent of my indifference; but they don’t.

[...]

 In my lush Western Sahara, I’m confronting a tantalizing abundance that doesn’t fill, and a loneliness that carves out a scoop of dizzying emptiness inside.

Concerning Eastern religions in American culture:

Two decades later, when the Eastern religions vogue hits the counterculture, I think I understand the all-American despair that drives the new converts to chant their mantras in ashrams from San Francisco to Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The gospel of detachment is as well suited to a culture of excess as it is to a society of radical poverty. It thrives in circumstances in which one’s wants are dangerous because they are surely going to be deprived – or because they are pulled in so many directions that they pose a threat to the integrity, the unity of one’s self.

[...]

...America is the land of yearning, and perhaps nowhere else are one’s desires so wantonly stimulated...

Concerning lonely breaks:

...in my nearly empty dorm during a holiday break, I forget my ascetic techniques, and the desire for the comfort of being a recognizable somebody placed on a recognizable social map breaks in on me with such anguishing force that it scalds my spirit and beats it back into its hiding place.

Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (pp. 136-140). Plunkett Lake Press. Kindle Edition. (Emphases added.)

Dreaming in English - a Turkish author's ponderings on writing in English

 At the end of print copies of her novels, Turkish author Elif Shafak has a short piece on why she writes novels in English; it's called "Dreaming in English." She has a slightly adjusted version of this piece posted on the English Pen. It is beautiful and well worth the read, especially if you are interested in the lives of global nomads and TCKs. Shafak expresses that sense which children of multiple cultures may have of being able to be true to each of their cultures in various ways, without betraying or abandoning any of them. She expresses the sense of belonging and connecting and loving, indeed, the sense of identity, which is felt deeply and yet somehow at a distance. I'd love to have posted the whole thing, but I'll leave these tidbits, with the hope that you will go read the whole thing for yourself (here, emphases mine).

I never thought I had to make a choice between my two loved ones: English and Turkish. In truth, perhaps even more than writing in English or writing in Turkish, it is the very commute back and forth that fascinates me to this day. I pay extra attention to those words that cannot be ferried from one continent to the other. I become more aware of not only meanings and nuances but also of gaps and silences. And I observe myself and others. Our voices change, even our body language alters as we move from one language to another. At the end of the day, languages shape us while we are busy thinking we control them.

Sometimes, the presence of absence strengthens a bond and distance brings you closer.

Rather than a pre-given, fixed, monolithic identity, we can have multiple and fluid belongings. We can even love more than one person. Our hearts are wide and deep enough to do so. And yes, we can also dream in more than one language.

 Incidentally, for reasons she hints at in the article, Shafak is often not well regarded here in Turkey. Unfortunately, the reasons for that here (as with other authors in their own homelands) are political rather than literary. I am interested, however, in the experience she is expressing - not in either the literature itself or the politics thereof.

TCK Olympics

 I am a TCK; for those of you who might not know what that means, it means that I spent a significant part of my formative childhood years in a country (Suriname) other than my passport country (the USA). However, TCK stands for Third-Culture-Kid... in other words, kids like me grow up odd: we don't quite fit either country or culture, but are a mix of both. There's all sorts of stuff that I 'should know' from high school, as an American, that I simply missed. Anyways, all that's important because otherwise it becomes odd to say, 'I love America' in the next, related post.  I, also, love Suriname, as well as my country of adoption, Turkey. They have taught me much that I'd never have known if I'd only been American.

 I'm watching the Olympics, for example, and my past gives me a variety of countries to root for; and mostly their areas of competition don't overlap too much, so I can root for all my countries. While I love watching Americans win medals (especially swimming), probably my favorite experience in the Olympics is watching someone earn a gold medal for the first time ever for their country! Most of my life in Suriname was lived with the banknote below as part of the national currency.  Who's that? ANTHONY NESTY: first ever Surinamese Olympic medalist and, four years later, first ever gold medalist! Hero!

This year, at least four countries have won their first medal, and I got to watch Hoang Xuan Vinh win a gold medal as the first medalist for Vietnam! Great experience! What could be more fun to watch than this?

Is it any wonder he's emotional?

2015 Book Recommendations

As my focus on language learning decreased this year, for the first time in several years I was able to read in a number of other areas that answered some questions I had or provided lots of new food for thought. Below I will give some of the top books I benefited from or enjoyed this year.

Biographical:  Letters Never Sent was a beautiful expression of a TCK's growth and struggles; I deeply appreciated it.  The biography, You will see Hoopoes, was an interesting account of other Christians who have lived in Turkey. And, Seabiscuit was a fascinating look about a great racehorse, but also about the entire time period that he lived in - very well written! 

Fiction: The Dune Chronicles were by far the most significant new work works of fiction that I read this year. They made for a great expansion of my fictional universes. The only time I remember encoutering another universe quite this complete is the Tolkien's Middle Earth.

Khaled Hosseini's  A Thousand Splendid Suns was also of great interest giving a perspective on Afghanistan over the course of decades.

Theology: Both Platon's A Summary of Christian Divinity and Chesterton's Orthodoxy were insightful, expressing the basic truths of the Bible from perspectives I've not heard before.
(Previous posts about these: my project, Scripture pointing to Christ,  mercy and justice,  'The reason to be progressive'.)

Also, Wu's Saving God's Face was filled with thought-provoking ideas regarding ways to formulate Christian theology so it will be fully expressed for all of life and all of humanity.

Devotional: A Gospel Primer had been recommended to me for years; and having finally read it, I understand why so many love it. It was good, especially the first part.

History: The Pope's Turkey Unveiled was an insightful and familiar account of Turkish history by two who lived here for many years.  (previous post)

English Teaching: Along with other briefer readings, Revell's Teaching Techniques for Communicative English and Harmer's How to Teach English provided useful suggestions and guidance along the way.

Those were definitely the reading highlights of the year. My top listening for the year was Billy Boyd's 'The Last Goodbye' from The Hobbit, beautiful stirring music and lyrics.

Recommendations from years past: 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011

Dreams from my Father

 This evening, I started reading Dreams from My Father, the autobiographical book by the young lawyer Barack Obama.  It has been startling good so far, and I think it's the best book that I've read dealing with cross-culturedness or TCK's since Third-Culture Kids, which I also loved.  It is a book that is rather frank and very open and reminds me again why the President's story speaks to so many people, even those who disagree with his policies.

 A few brief thought-excerpts that struck me in my personal journey and the journey I see others in:
 "...the fluid state of identity- the  leaps through time, the collision of cultures- that mark our modern life." (vii)
 "... [my past] speaks to those aspects of myself that resist conscious choice and that- on the surface, at least- contradict the world I now occupy." (xiv)
 "I enjoyed such moments [of companionship]- but only in brief.  If the talk began to wander, or cross the border into familiarity, I would soon find reason to excuse myself.  I had grown too comfortable in my solitude, the safest place I knew." (4)