Reading from a different perspective in Comoros

Living in Comoros has also given me a different perspective in a lot of ways, especially in terms of life without functional infrastructure. I read a lot here because there are few other options when the power is out, but I also read differently. There are great many stories, both fictional and historical, that change dramatically when you can no longer take for granted that all the complex and unseen activity that undergirds modern life automatically “just works”. Some books don’t hold up as well in that light, but in general my reading this year has been enriched by this new perspective.

The cliche of Peace Corps volunteers reading a lot has a solid basis in reality, though I generally read a lot no matter where I am. I’ve found that having a Kindle here in Comoros has been especially useful. I prefer ink and paper books, but there aren’t many of them here, and I’ve noticed that the quality of my reading material here has been much higher than it was in Kyrgyzstan, where there seemed to be dozens of copies of “Three Cups of Tea” but none of the books I was most interested in. I have read 51 books in the ten months that I’ve been here in Comoros, and thanks to my Kindle and careful preparation before I left the US, I’ve been able to read quite a few big books and series that have been on my mental to-read list for a while now. Here are few that have been especially interesting in the context of living on a little island on the margins of the modern world.

The Path to Power, Means of Ascent, Master of the Senate (the first three volumes of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson)

This biography of Lyndon Johnson is a masterwork (I list only the first three because I just recently finished the third volume, and I’m just starting the fourth and final book), and Caro doesn’t just tell the fascinating story of one unique individual, but also the story of American government in the twentieth century. There are so many outstanding elements to these large volumes that it’s hard to do justice with a summary, but there were some aspects that were especially resonant for me reading them in Comoros. For example, living here made me respond much more emotionally to the situation of the families in the Texas Hill Country in the early twentieth century, who were left behind by the rest of the country because they had no electricity and no hope that the private utilities or the laissez-faire government would ever change it. Johnson’s achievement in overcoming the combination of opposition and institutional inertia shines that much brighter when you can look outside and see first-hand what it looks like without such leadership. Caro’s brilliance lies in his ability to make you see the brutal, manipulative man who was tirelessly driven to dominate, but who used the power that his ambition drove him to amass to make the government actually work to help people (as long as helping people didn’t conflict with his ambition). In a place where the government doesn’t really work, it’s especially poignant to see what it takes to get things done.

You’re Never Weird on the Internet (by Felicia Day)

Felicia Day’s memoir is about how she created a path for herself in life by following all of the passions that made her weird by many people’s standards, and it especially resonated with me because I keep making choices in my life that are not normal but that allow me to do the interesting things that I want to do. The books is full of very funny moments, but it also shows how much of the challenge of following your heart about figuring out just what the heck it is that you want. While I am not on the sort of creative path that she is, I have long admired Felicia Day for her ability to carve out a successful life without any model to follow, and I found myself very moved by many of difficulties that she overcame both externally and internally. I was great to read about someone else who is happiest when she’s doing good work that she finds interesting, and a career is really just the story we tell to fit that good work into form that we can talk about to others.

Dead Aid (by Dambisa Moyo)

I have seen first-hand how many aid funded projects not only fail to achieve anything of value but actually make things worse. Moyo’s analysis of the problems with direct foreign assistance to African governments is incisive, and she paints a sharp picture of the way that aid bolsters corrupt elites, delays substantive reform, and protects leaders from the consequences of their incompetence in a way that ensures further incompetent leadership. I was with her through her condemnation of aid as terrible for true development, but it’s always easier to identify a problem than to solve it, and I had a lot more doubts about her plans for how to build a “world without aid”. Having lived in Central Asia and seen that economic assistance from China comes with very heavy strings attached, I found her uncritical embrace of such help for Africa more than a little disconcerting, and there seemed to be a lot of overly optimistic assumptions behind the idea that cutting aid and relying on the international bond market and remittances will magically lead to booming African economies (which criticism of course benefits from the advantage of hindsight about the effects of the global financial crisis). Ultimately, the flaws of her suggested solutions don’t take away from the power of her analysis of the fundamental problems with aid, and the book crystallized a lot of the misgivings from my here in Comoros and elsewhere that I’d felt but hadn’t fully articulated.

Hyperbole and a Half (by Allie Brosh)

I can’t pass up a chance to enthusiastically recommend this book, as it made me laugh more, harder, and longer than anything else in recent memory. There isn’t any special Comoros connection, but it does deal a lot with the challenges of being functional adult-ish person, which surely contributed to how powerfully it struck a chord with me as I deal with important questions like “What the heck am I doing in life?” and “Should I eat nutella on cookies for dinner?”.

Station Eleven (by Emily St. John Mandel)

Post-apocalyptic stories have become their own narrative category, and one that I quite enjoy, but often the narrative function of stripping away the world as we know it seems to be to create space for grand or brutal adventure and a big message about humanity and the meaning of life. What I loved about this was how beautiful, dark, and lyrical this story was even as it unfolds an active and compelling narrative. Great fiction shows rather than tells, and the story of the intersecting lives of the various survivors shows how ordinary people in an extraordinary situation (which like everything in life becomes the new “ordinary” with time) reveal their individual humanity through the decisions that they make. I loved the way that the novel explores the fact that art is not an expendable luxury of comfortable life, but rather a core part of what makes us human, to be treasured all the more profoundly in the midst of a struggle for survival. I feel and see first-hand how precious art is when everything else is a mess, even though the conditions of hardship in Comoros are only a faint shadow of the shattered world of the novel.

 

The full list of my reading in Comoros is here.