To carry across

Excerpt from Babel by R.F. Kuang

Photo by Ugur Akdemir on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book Babel by R.F. Kuang.

Professor Playfair’s introductory class to Translation Theory met at Tuesday mornings on the fifth floor of the tower. They’d barely been seated when he began to lecture, filling the narrow classroom with his booming showman’s voice.

‘By now you are each passably fluent in at least three languages, which is a feat in its own right. Today, however, I will try to impress upon you the unique difficulty of translation. Consider how tricky it is merely to say the word hello. Hello seems so easy! Bonjour. Ciao. Hallo. And on and on. But then say we are translating from Italian into English. In Italian, ciao can be used upon greeting or upon parting – it does not specify either, it simply marks etiquette at the point of contact. It is derived from the Venetian s-ciào vostro, meaning something akin to “your obedient servant”. But I digress. The point is, when we bring ciao into English – if we are translating a scene where the characters disperse, for example – we must impose that ciao has been said as goodbye. Sometimes this is obvious from context, but sometimes not – sometimes we must add new words in our translation. So already things are complicated, and we haven’t moved past hello.

‘The first lesson any good translator internalizes is that there exists no one-to-one correlation between words or even concepts from one language to another. The Swiss philologist Johann Breitinger, who claimed that languages were merely “collections of totally equivalent words and locutions which are interchangeable, and which fully correspond to each other in meaning”, was dreadfully wrong. Language is not like maths. And even maths differs depending on the language – but we will revisit that later.’

Robin found himself searching Professor Playfair’s face as he spoke. He was not sure what he was looking for. Some evidence of evil, perhaps. The cruel, selfish, lurking monster Griffin had sketched. But Professor Playfair seemed only a cheerful, beaming scholar, enamoured by the beauty of words. Indeed, in daylight, in the classroom, his brother’s grand conspiracies felt quite ridiculous.

‘Language does not exist as a nomenclature for a set of universal concepts,’ Professor Playfair went on. ‘If it did, then translation would not be a highly skilled profession – we would simply sit a class full of dewy-eyed freshers down with dictionaries and have the completed works of the buddha on our shelves in no time. Instead, we have to learn to dance between that age-old dichotomy, helpfully eludciated by Cicero and Hieronymus: verbun e verbo and sensum e sensu. Can anyone—’

‘Word for word,’ Letty said promptly. ‘And sense for sense.’

‘Good,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘That is the dilemma. Do we take words as our unit of translation, or do we subordinate accuracy of individual words to the overall spirit of the text?’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Letty. ‘Shouldn’t a faithful translation of individual words produce an equally faithful text?’

‘It would,’ said Professor Playfair, ‘if, again, words existed in relation to each other in the same way in every language. But they do not. The words schlecht and schlimm both mean “bad” in German, but how do you know when to use one or the other? When do we use fleuve or rivière in French? How do we render the French esprit into English? We ought not merely translate each word on its own, but must rather evoke the sense of how they fit the whole of the passage. But how can that be done, if languages are indeed so different? These differences aren’t trivial, mind you – Erasmus wrote and entire treatise on why he rendered the Greek logos into the Latin sermo in his translation of the New Testament. Translating word-for-word is simply inadequate.

That servile path thou nobly dost decline,’ Ramy recited, ‘of tracing word by word, and line by line.’

Those are the laboured births of slavish brains, not the effect of poetry, but pains,’ Professor Playfiar finished. ‘John Denham. Very nice, Mr Mirza. So you see, translators do not so much deliver a message as they rewrite the original. And herein lies the difficulty – rewriting is still writing, and writing always reflects the author’s ideology and biases. After all, the Latin translatio means “to carry across”. Translation involves a spatial dimension – a literal transportation of text across conquered territory, words delivered like spices from an alien land. Words mean something quite different when they journey from the palaces of Rome to the tearooms of today’s Britain.

‘And we have not yet moved past the lexical. If translation were only a matter of finding the right themes, the right general ideas, then theoretically we could eventually make our meaning clear, couldn’t we? But something gets in the way – syntax, grammar, morphology and orthography, all the things that form the bones of a language. Consider the Heinrich Heine poem “Ein Fichtenbaum.” It’s short, and its message is quite easy to grasp. A pine tree, longing for a palm tree, represents a man’s desire for a woman. Yet translating it into English has been devilishly tricky, because English doesn’t have genders like German does. So there’s no way to convey the binary opposition between the masculine ein Fichtenbaum and the feminine einer Palme. You see? So we must proceed from the starting assumption that distortion is inevitable. The question is how to distort with deliberation.’

He tapped the book lying on his desk. ‘You’ve all finished Tytler, yes?’

They nodded. They’d been assigned the introductory chapter of Essays on Principles of Translation by Lord Alexander Fraser Tytler Woodhouselee the night before.

‘Then you’ll have read that Tytler recommends three basic principles. Which are – yes, Miss Desgraves?’

‘First, that the translation conveys a complete and accurate idea of the original,’ said Victoire. ‘Second, that the translation mirrors the style and manner of writing of the original. And third, that the translation should read with all the ease of the original composition.’

She spoke with such confident precision, Robin thought she must have been reading from the text. He was very impressed when he glanced over and saw her consulting nothing but blank space. Ramy, too, had this talent for perfect recall – Robin was beginning to feel a bit intimidated by his cohort.

‘Very good,’ said Professor Playfair. ‘This sounds basic enough. But what do we mean by the “style and manner” of the original? What does it mean for a composition to read “easily”? What audience do we have in mind when we make these claims? These are the questions we will tackle this term, and such fascinating questions they are.’ He clasped his hands together. ‘Allow me again to descend into theatrics by discussing our namesake, Babel – yes dear students, I can’t quite escape the romanticism of this institution. Indulge me, please.’

His tone conveyed no regret at all. Professor Playfair loved this dramatic mysticism, these monologues that must have been rehearsed and perfected over years of teaching. But no one complained. They loved it too.

‘It is often argued that the greatest tragedy of the Old Testament was not man’s exile from the Garden of Eden, but the fall of the Tower of Babel. For Adam and Eve, though cast from grace, could still speak and comprehend the language of angels. But when men in their hubris decided to build a path to heave, God confounded their understanding. He divided and confused them and scattered them about the face of the earth.

‘What was lost at Babel was not merely human unity, but the original language – something primordial and innate, perfectly understandable and lacking nothing in form or content. Biblical scholars call it the Adamic language. Some think it is Hebrew. Some thing it is a real but ancient language that has been lost to time. Some think it is a new, artificial language that we ought to invent. Some thing French fulfils this role; some think English, once it’s finished robbing and morphing, might.’

‘Oh, no, this is easy,’ said Ramy. ‘It’s Syriac.’

‘Very funny, Mr Mirza.’ Robin did not know if Ramy was indeed joking, but no one else made a comment. Professor Playfair ploughed ahead. ‘For me, however, it matters not what the Adamic language was, for it’s clear we have lost any access to it. We will never speak the divine language. But by amassing all the world’s languages under this roof, by collecting the full range of human expressions, or as near to it as we can get, we can try. We will never touch heaven from this mortal place, but our confusion is not infinite. We can, through perfecting the arts of translation, achieve what humanity lost at Babel.’ Professor Playfair sighed, moved by his own performance. Robin thought he saw actually tears form in the corners of his eyes.

‘Magic.’ Professor Playfair pressed a hand against his chest. ‘What we are doing is magic. It won’t always feel that way – indeed, when you do tonight’s exercise, it’ll feel more like folding laundry than chasing the ephemeral. But never forget the audacity of what you are attempting. Never forget that you are defying a curse laid by God.’

Robin raised his hand. ‘Do you mean, then, that our purpose here is to bring mankind closer together as well?’

Professor Playfair cocked his head. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I only…’ Robin faltered. It sounded silly as he said it, a child’s fancy, not a serious scholarly query. Letty and Victoire were frowning at him; even Ramy was wrinkling his nose. Robin tried again – he knew what he meant to ask, only he couldn’t think of an elegant or subtle way to phrase it. ‘Well – since in the Bible, God split mankind apart. And I wonder if – if the purpose of translation, then is to bring mankind back together. If we translate to – I don’t know, bring about that paradise again, on earth, between nations.’

Professor Playfair looked baffled by this. But quickly his features reassembled into a sprightly beam. ‘Well, of course. Such is the project of empire – and why, therefore, we translate at the pleasure of the Crown.’

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

Babel – Summary

Here is the book summary:

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. The tower and its students are the world’s center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver-working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as the arcane craft serves the Empire’s quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide . . .

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?

Copyright © 2022 by R.F. Kuang.

More details can be found here on Goodreads and on Storygraph.

Do they have souls?

This is a quote from the book The Friend by Sigrid Nunez.

Quote by Sigrid Nunez, “Tempted to put too much faith in the great male mind, remember this: It looked at cats and declared them gods. It looked at women and asked, Are they human? And, once that hard nut had been cracked: but do they have souls?”

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

The Friend – Summary

Here is the book summary:

A moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.

When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.

While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog’s care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.

Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.

Copyright © 2018 by Sigrid Nunez.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

Read your sentences out loud

Excerpt from The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

Photo by Oleg Tamino Illenberger on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book The Friend by Sigrid Nunez.

Advice often given to writers: read your drafts out loud. Advice I am usually too lazy to follow. But I will try anything these days that might keep me longer at my desk. I pick up the pages I’ve just printed out and start reading. Behind me I hear Apollo, who has been sleeping behind the couch, heave himself to his feet. He trots to the desk (we are about eye to eye when I’m sitting) and stares at me as if I’m doing something remarkable. Or maybe, though we’ve had one long walk already today, he wants to go put again.

When I reach the bottom of the page I pause, thinking Apollo pokes me with his nose. He barks, very low, just once. He takes a step forward, a step to the right, a step back, all the while cocking his head from side to side: his way of saying WTF.

He wants me to keep reading! True or not, that’s what I do. But soon I stop.

Read your sentences out loud, goes the advice, and you’ll hear what doesn’t sound right, what doesn’t work. I hear, I hear. What doesn’t sound right, what doesn’t work. I hear.

No different from when I read the sentences to myself.

I fold my arms on the desk and hide my face in them.

Poke. Woof. I turn my head. Apollo’s gaze is deep, his mis- matched ears look sharp as razors. He licks my face and does the cha-cha thing again. He wags his tail, and for the thousandth time I think how frustrating it must be for a dog: the endless trouble of making yourself understood to a human.

I move from chair to couch, Apollo watching, forehead creased. Once I’m settled, he comes and sits down in front of me. Eye to eye. What do dogs think when they see someone cry? Bred to be comforters, they comfort us. But how puzzling human unhappiness must be to them. We who can fill our dishes any time and with as much food as we like, who can go outside whenever we wish, and run free-we who have no master constantly needing to be pleased, or obeyed–WTF?

From the stack of books on the coffee table, I pick up Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet, an assigned book for one of my courses. I open it and start reading out loud. After a few pages Apollo assumes the half-open-mouthed smile seen all the time on other dog faces but with worrying infrequency on his. As I keep reading he lowers himself to the floor, covering my feet and pressing against my shins. He relaxes his head onto his paws, tipping his eyes at me each time I turn a page. The position of his ears shifts in response to my vocal inflections. I am reminded of my pet rabbit hunched by the stereo speaker. But Apollo never appeared to enjoy the music I played for him, was never soothed— not by music, not by massage—as he appears to be soothed now.

So I read on-as clearly and with as much expression as l would to someone who could understand every wond. And I too find it soothing: the lyrical prose in my mouth, the great warm gently heaving weight on my legs and feet.

I know this little book well: ten letters addressed to a student who’d written to ask Rilke for advice when Rilke himself was just twenty-seven years old. Letter eight contains his famous vision of the Beauty and the Beast myth: Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest existence, something helpless that wants or love. Words often quoted, or paraphrased, including recently in an epigraphy to the film White God. Everything terrible is something that needs our love.

Beware irony, ignore criticism, look to what is simple, study the small and humble things of the world, do what is difficult precisely because it is difficult, do not search for answers but rather love the questions, do not run away from sadness or depression for these might be the very conditions necessary to your work. Seek solitude, above all seek solitude.

I have read Rilke’s advice so often I know it by heart.

When I read the letters for the first time—at around the same age as Rilke when he wrote them—I felt that they had been written as much to me as to their addressee, that all this wonderful advice was meant for any person who wished to be become a writer.

But now, though the writing might strike me as more beautiful than ever, I cannot read it without uneasiness. I cannot for get my own students, who do not feel at all what the Young Poet must have felt when he received them in the first decade of the last century. They do not feel what we felt when you assigned this book to us, three-quarters of a century later, along with Rilke’s autobiographical novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. They do not feel that Rilke is speaking to them. On the contrary they accuse him of excluding them. They say it’s a lie that writing is a religion requiring the devotion of a priest. They say it’s ridiculous.

When I tell them the myth about Rilke’s death, how it came to be said that the onset of his fatal disease occurred after he pricked his hand on the thorn of a rose—that flower that obsessed him and was such a significant symbol in his work—they groan, and one student can’t stop laughing.

There was a time when young writers—at least the ones we knew—believed that Rilke’s world was eternal. I agree with my students that that world has vanished. But at their age it would not have occurred to me that it could vanish, let alone in my lifetime.

Nothing brings more anxiety than Rilke’s avowal that a person who feels he can live without writing shouldn’t be writing at all. Must I write? is the question he commands the student to ask himself in the most silent hour of your night. If you were forbidden to write, would you die? (Words taken to heart by Lady Gaga, or at least to biceps, which is where she had them, in their original German, tattooed.)

We must love one another or die is how another poet once ended a stanza of what was to become one of the world’s most famous poems. But the author of “September 1, 1939” came to despise that poem and was so bothered by the obvious falsehood in that particular line that, before allowing the poem to be reprinted in an anthology, he insisted it be revised: We must love one another and die. And later still, qualmish still, correction notwithstanding, he renounced the whole poem—irremediably corrupted, to his mind—altogether.

I think of this story about Auden.

I think about how there was a time when you and I believed that writing was the best thing we could ever hope to do with our lives. (The best vocation in the world. Natalia Ginzburg.)

I think about how you had started telling your students that if there was anything else they could do with their lives instead of becoming writers, any other profession, they should do it.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

The Friend – Summary

Here is the book summary:

A moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.

When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building.

While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog’s care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them.

Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion.

Copyright © 2018 by Sigrid Nunez.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

She loved this tree

is is a quote from the book Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor.

Quote by Nnedi Okorafor., “She rested her head against the tree’s trunk and shut her eyes. She loved this tree so much and every so often, it seemed to love her back, too, its leaves looking greener in the sunshine than any other tree.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

Remote Control – Summary

Here is the book summary:

The new book by Nebula and Hugo Award-winner, Nnedi Okorafor.

“She’s the adopted daughter of the Angel of Death. Beware of her. Mind her. Death guards her like one of its own.”

The day Fatima forgot her name, Death paid a visit. From hereon in she would be known as Sankofa­­–a name that meant nothing to anyone but her, the only tie to her family and her past.

Her touch is death, and with a glance a town can fall. And she walks–alone, except for her fox companion–searching for the object that came from the sky and gave itself to her when the meteors fell and when she was yet unchanged; searching for answers.

But is there a greater purpose for Sankofa, now that Death is her constant companion?

Copyright © 2021 by Nnedi Okorafor.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

Five short books to get you out of a reading slump

Are you in a reading slump? Are you looking for short books to reach your reading goal or just take a break from big books?

Short books are a great way to help get yourself out of a reading slump. Similar to reading short stories, short novels are easy to finish and give you that feeling of accomplishment that makes you want to keep reading.

I love reading short novels. They can act as a palate cleanser in between big books, or help you ramp up into reading other books. Sometimes you just want to read a book that you can finish quickly.

Whatever the reason, I’ve put together a list of five short books. Each of these could easily be finished in a weekend, or maybe a day if you’ve got lots of time to read.

They’re all relatively easy to read and a good way to jump back into reading if you’re in a slump. I tried to include a bit of variation from classics up to some recently released books, hopefully, with a book that might interest anyone.

Photo by Paige Cody on Unsplash

Five short books

Here’s a list of five short books to get you out of a reading slump or just finish quickly.

  1. The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy (1886)
  2. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952)
  3. Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (2015)
  4. All Systems Red by Martha Wells (Murderbot Series – 2017)
  5. Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor (2021)

Keep reading to find out more about each one. I’ve order them from the oldest published to the newest.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886)

by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Anthony Briggs

  • Year Published: 1886
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, classics, literary, dark, reflective, sad, medium-paced

By the time he dies, Ivan Ilych has come to understand the worthlessness of his life. Paradoxically, this elevates him above the common man, who avoids the reality of death and the effort it takes to make life worthwhile. In Tolstoy’s own words, “Ivan Ilyich’s life had been . . . most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”

Links:

The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

by Ernest Hemingway

  • Year Published: 1952
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, classics, literary, adventurous, reflective, slow-paced

This short novel, already a modern classic, is the superbly told, tragic story of a Cuban fisherman in the Gulf Stream and the giant Marlin he kills and loses—specifically referred to in the citation accompanying the author’s Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.

Links:

Before the Coffee Gets Cold (2015)

by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, translated by Geoffrey Trousselot

  • Year Published: 2015 (English version in 2019)
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, literary, magical realism, emotional, hopeful, reflective, medium-paced

What would you change if you could go back in time?

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer’s, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.

But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?

Links:

All Systems Red (Murderbot Series – 2017)

by Martha Wells

  • Year Published: 2017
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, science fiction, adventurous, funny, fast-paced
  • This won both the Hugo and Nebula Award.

“As a heartless killing machine, I was a complete failure.”

In a corporate-dominated space-faring future, planetary missions must be approved and supplied by the Company. For their own safety, exploratory teams are accompanied by Company-supplied security androids. But in a society where contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, safety isn’t a primary concern.

On a distant planet, a team of scientists is conducting surface tests, shadowed by their Company-supplied ‘droid–a self-aware SecUnit that has hacked its own governor module and refers to itself (though never out loud) as “Murderbot.” Scornful of humans, Murderbot wants is to be left alone long enough to figure out who it is, but when a neighboring mission goes dark, it’s up to the scientists and Murderbot to get to the truth.

Links:

Remote Control (2021)

by Nnedi Okorafor

  • Year Published: 2021
  • Storygraph Categories:
  • fiction, science fiction, adventurous, dark, mysterious, fast-paced
  • The author is a Nebula and Hugo Award winner

The new book by Nebula and Hugo Award-winner, Nnedi Okorafor.

“She’s the adopted daughter of the Angel of Death. Beware of her. Mind her. Death guards her like one of its own.”

The day Fatima forgot her name, Death paid a visit. From hereon in she would be known as Sankofa­­–a name that meant nothing to anyone but her, the only tie to her family and her past.

Her touch is death, and with a glance a town can fall. And she walks–alone, except for her fox companion–searching for the object that came from the sky and gave itself to her when the meteors fell and when she was yet unchanged; searching for answers.

But is there a greater purpose for Sankofa, now that Death is her constant companion?

Links:


Final thoughts

I hope you found something of interest in this list of books.

I’m always looking for more suggestions of books to read. I’d love to know which short books you love or that you would recommend. Let me know in a comment below!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of it?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below.

Then came that day…

Excerpt from Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor

Photo by niko photos on Unsplash

This is an excerpt from the book Remote Control by Nnedi Okorafor.

Then came that day, the day she unknowingly stepped onto the path to becoming the infamous Sankofa. She’d drawn one of her “sky words” in the large area of dirt beside the tree and then climbed up to look down at it. The constellation that her grandfather called Sagittarius had guided her hand. But tonight, a playfulness had made her see it differently. Like new. Writing it upside down, it made more sense. And then she’d added the flourish from the part of the constellation that had never been there until tonight. She giggled, delighted by her work. The sky words looked like a Sankofa bird! She looked back into the sky to make sure she’d gotten the design right. And that’s when she saw what her brother Fenuku later called a “meaty shower.”

A minute later, Fenuku dashed out the back door and Fatima saw him gather with his friends nearby to watch it. She’d climbed higher in her tree for a better look. Even her parents came outside to watch. The whole village would talk about it for weeks because not only were there beautiful green streaks decorating the sky, but one could actually hear the “shower” hitting the shea tree leaves like rain. One had even zipped down and hit the dirt at the base of the tree, right at the end of the swirl of one of her sky words.

Fatima climbed down to see if she could find it. there it was, like a tiny Sankofa bird egg or …seed. It glowed a bright green like a star. She paused for a moment, wondering about the “sky words,” then she giggled, rushed forth and grabbed it. It wasn’t hot to the touch, but as she’d held it to her eyes, she could see that its light was seeping from it like oil. She cupped it in her hands and the light pooled in her palm and seemed to absorb into her skin. It burned and she hissed. Maybe it was hot. She dropped the thing and it sank right into the soil like a stone into water. She got to her knees, saying, “No no no, come back! I’m sorry! Come back, little see!” But it was gone.

Fatima never told her parents or her brother because she was sure none of them would believe her. About a year later, maybe even exactly a year, that afternoon, when she was five years old, bothered with malaria-caused fever and aching muscles, she’d still managed to climb into the tree and sit on one of the top branches. It had been a while since she’d drawn “sky words.” He grandfather had passed away months ago and she no longer looked at the sky so much, and so she no longer drew what she saw. Now she spent her time playing with her dolls in the tree or just hanging from its branches.

She rested her head against the tree’s trunk and shut her eyes. She loved this tree so much and every so often, it seemed to love her back, too, its leaves looking greener in the sunshine than any other tree. A cool breeze blew and being up here, she felt it directly. She was supposed to be in bed, but her mother was talking to her best friend, Auntie Karimu, on the other side of the house and Fatima had taken her chance.

She’d giggled because on the other side of the tree, she saw the red-furred animal curiously looking at her as it rested on a thick branch. The fox who’d escaped from the zoo two weeks ago and had in the last few days decided to make this tree its home. He was another reason she spent time in the tree. She’d been sitting between her mother’s knees having her hair braided when the brief news story played on her mother’s tablet. She and her mother had giggled about it because the news story had described foxes as craft. “They’ll never find that thing,” her mother had said.

The breeze blew harder, rustling the fox’s fluffy coat and feeling wonderful on her hot sweaty skin. Something below caught her eye. When she saw the soil churning, Fatima wondered if she was having one of the visions she often had when her malaria fever got high. Her furry friend on the branch across from her whined and moved further up the tree. Fatima, however, climbed down to investigate.

Maybe it’s a mole, she thought. Or a spider. She hoped it was a spider; she liked spiders. Whatever it was, if it was coming up at the base of the tree, it had to be something good, for this was where the seed from the sky had fallen. Because of the seed from the sky nothing bad or scary could ever come close to this tree, at least that was how Fatima understood it. Even her father knew this tree was a good good tree; sometimes he even laid his prayer mat right on the spot where the thing was ascending.

What she immediately noticed as her bare feet touched the ground was the smell. Her parents had been traders until they acquired a small shea farm years before she was born. Today, their small farm extended a quarter of a mile from the house and Fatima was quite familiar with the tree’s fresh scent, but this one always had a stronger nuttier aroma than the others. And now it smelled as if a whole truckload of sliced shea fruit had been dumped at her feet. Even in the strong breeze, it was powerful and heavy.

She wiped sweat from her brow as she stared down. the red soil was churning as if small hands beneath it were stirring and kneading the earth. The soil sank down and a hole about the size of both of Sankofa’s five-year-old hands appeared. Then something flat and brown was pushing through it. She stood there fascinated. A wooden box. About six inches long and four inches wide and two inches deep. There was no latch, no lock, and it was a rich brown like the tree’s trunk, though the wood was smooth, not the spongy rough of the shea tree.

“Oh!” Fatima whispered as she bent down to pick it up. “Is it for me?” Of course it was. She claimed it immediately, or maybe it claimed her. It was something valuable, or maybe it saw the value in her. It was beloved like something she’d lost a long time ago and just found, or maybe it had found her. It was like something she would own in a future life. Yes, oh yes, it was definitely hers.

She picked up her box. It was surprisingly heavy and she had to cradle it to her chest. She froze, staring at the hole. The box had been resting on a tannish-white root about as thick as three of her fingers put together. “Thank you,” she said to it.

She sat down, Then she pushed up the box’s thick lid. A hearty scent of crushed leaves rushed out and her eyes began to water at the sight of what was inside. Oblong in shape, it was just a little larger than her Father’s big toe and it had a smooth almost tooth-like surface. It was no longer leaking the glowing green light, but it was definitely the seed that had fallen from the sky and sunken into the dirt. “You’ve come back to me!” she said to the seed. And as if it had been waiting for these words, the root that had presented it glided back into the soil.

When she picked the seed up, her fingers went numb and she felt a warmth spread all over the rest of her body. She held it to her eyes as a green mist like incense smoke wafted from it. She laughed, blowing at and sniffing the mist; it too was warm. When she opened her mouth she found she exhaled the green mist a bit, too. After a minute, the mist disappeared and the smell went away. Fatima giggled, cupping the seed in her hands, imagining it to be delicate and alive like a baby mouse.

“Hello,” she whispered to it. “I’m Fatima. Maybe you like the heat from my hands. I have a fever from malaria, so I’m not feeling very well.” She set the seed back in the box and shook out her hand until the feeling returned. Then she shut the box and got up. She used her sandal to push soil over the hole the root had left and took the box and its seed inside. By the time she stepped into her bedroom, her fever was gone. She simply didn’t feel it anymore. The next day, even her parents were sure that her bout with malaria had passed.

As the days rolled on, her parents and brother came to know of the wooden box she liked to keep in her room. Her father would joke about the box with his friends, saying his imaginative daughter said the tree gave it to her. Her mother would talk about it at the market, saying her daughter treated everything like a person, even things she dug up from the ground. Her brother only rolled his eyes when he saw his sister plying with it. Fatima told the seed stories, she climbed into the tree with it, she snuck it to school in her pocket. “It doesn’t have a face or a name,” her mother had jokingly said one evening as she tucked Fatima into bed. “What is it with you and that old thing?”

“It’s my thing,” Fatima said importantly. “A nice thing that listens.”

Nevertheless, though she didn’t know it then, finding that seed in the box was the beginning of so much. She loved her favorite tree, shared its space with a fox who didn’t belong in Ghana, and because her bouts with malaria had passed, she was a happier child. No matter how late she stayed in that tree, mosquitoes no longer bit her. She was well enough to make friends and go with them to watch her older brother Fenuku play football on the nearby field. Life was nice and fun and happy for Fatima that year.

Her parents didn’t ask where she’d gotten the seed in the box. To them, it was just a thing. Maybe it was just a petrified palm tree seed she’d found somewhere in the shea tree farm and polished up. Maybe a teacher at her school or someone in the market dropped the box. Maybe it was an old jewelry box; her parents had lived in their small house since before both Fatima and her brother’s births and there were certainly many forgotten random things in that house. It was all possible and normal. Her brother wasn’t interested in the seed either. It was a thing that you didn’t plug in, a thing that couldn’t connect to the internet. To him it was a boring thing.

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

Remote Control – Summary

Here is the book summary:

The new book by Nebula and Hugo Award-winner, Nnedi Okorafor.

“She’s the adopted daughter of the Angel of Death. Beware of her. Mind her. Death guards her like one of its own.”

The day Fatima forgot her name, Death paid a visit. From hereon in she would be known as Sankofa­­–a name that meant nothing to anyone but her, the only tie to her family and her past.

Her touch is death, and with a glance a town can fall. And she walks–alone, except for her fox companion–searching for the object that came from the sky and gave itself to her when the meteors fell and when she was yet unchanged; searching for answers.

But is there a greater purpose for Sankofa, now that Death is her constant companion?

Copyright © 2021 by Nnedi Okorafor.

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

To write well

For a little bit of writing inspiration, here is a quote from the book The Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver.

Quote by Mary Oliver, “But, to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

A Poetry Handbook – Summary

In case you’re interested, here is the book summary:

“Mary Oliver would probably never admit to anything so grandiose as an effort to connect the conscious mind and the heart (that’s what she says poetry can do), but that is exactly what she accomplishes in this stunning little handbook.”
— Los Angeles Times

From the beloved and acclaimed poet, an ultimate guide to writing and understanding poetry.

With passion and wit, Mary Oliver skillfully imparts expertise from her long, celebrated career as a disguised poet. She walks readers through exactly how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, to sound and sense, drawing on poems by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others. This handbook is an invaluable glimpse into Oliver’s prolific mind—a must-have for all poetry-lovers.

Copyright © 1994 by Mary Oliver.

More details can be found on Goodreads and on Storygraph

Five books worth the hype

Have you gotten caught up in the booktok or booktuber worlds?

Do you wonder which books are really worth the hype from the book influencers?

I’ve gotten back into reading a lot in the past few years. I’ve always loved reading, but haven’t always made it a priority. And I have to admit that book influencers have definitely helped me fall back in love with reading.

I love that so many people are reading more and starting conversations about books. I love how much more mainstream reading has become and that people are able to craft careers around talking about books. I think it’s a lovely gift that social media has given us.

But that being said, there are a lot of books that get hyped up but may not live up to the hype, or may not be our personal taste.

I’ve put together some of the big books that I believe are genuinely worth the hype.

Photo by Laura Kapfer on Unsplash

Five books worth the booktok hype

Here’s a list of five books from booktok that I believe are worth the hype.

  1. Babel by R.F. Kuang
  2. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin\
  3. Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
  4. Upstream by Mary Oliver
  5. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Keep reading to find out more about each one. I’ve order them from newest to oldest by publication date.

Babel (2022)

by R.F. Kuang

  • Year Published: 2022
  • Storygraph Categories: fiction, fantasy, historical, literary, challenging, dark, emotional, medium-paced
  • Talks about the difficulties and nuances of translating literature

Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.

1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel. The tower and its students are the world’s center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver-working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as the arcane craft serves the Empire’s quest for colonization.

For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide . . .

Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence?

Links:

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022)

by Gabrielle Zevin

  • Year Published: 2022
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, contemporary, literary, emotional, reflective, sad, medium-paced
  • Important to note, there have been some criticisms of how the author portrays a physical disability and uses it during the story.

In this exhilarating novel by the best-selling author of The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry two friends–often in love, but never lovers–come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.

Links:

Piranesi (2020)

by Susanna Clarke

  • Year Published: 2020
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, fantasy, literary, adventurous, mysterious, reflective, medium-paced
  • Winner of the 2021 Women’s Prize for Fiction

Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

Links:

Upstream (2016)

by Mary Oliver

  • Year Published: 2016
  • Storygraph Categories:
    nonfiction, essays, literary, nature, inspiring, reflective, relaxing, slow-paced

Comprising a selection of essays, Upstream finds beloved poet Mary Oliver reflecting on her astonishment and admiration for the natural world and the craft of writing.

As she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, finding solace and safety within the woods, and the joyful and rhythmic beating of wings, Oliver intimately shares with her readers her quiet discoveries, boundless curiosity, and exuberance for the grandeur of our world.

This radiant collection of her work, with some pieces published here for the first time, reaffirms Oliver as a passionate and prolific observer whose thoughtful meditations on spiders, writing a poem, blue fin tuna, and Ralph Waldo Emerson inspire us all to discover wonder and awe in life’s smallest corners.

Links:

The Song of Achilles (2011)

by Madeline Miller

  • Year Published: 2011
  • Storygraph Categories:
    fiction, fantasy, lgbtqia+, literary, adventurous, emotional, sad, medium-paced
  • Winner of the 2012 Orange Prize (now The Women’s Prize for Fiction)

Achilles, “the best of all the Greeks,” son of the cruel sea goddess Thetis and the legendary king Peleus, is strong, swift, and beautiful, irresistible to all who meet him. Patroclus is an awkward young prince, exiled from his homeland after an act of shocking violence. Brought together by chance, they forge an inseparable bond, despite risking the gods’ wrath.

They are trained by the centaur Chiron in the arts of war and medicine, but when word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped, all the heroes of Greece are called upon to lay siege to Troy in her name. Seduced by the promise of a glorious destiny, Achilles joins their cause, and torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows. Little do they know that the cruel Fates will test them both as never before and demand a terrible sacrifice.

Links:

Final thoughts

I hope you found something of interest in this list of books.

I’m always looking for more suggestions of books to read. I’d love to know which booktok/booktube books you think are worth the hype. Let me know in a comment below!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of the book?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below.

The Professor and Root

Excerpt from The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa

This is an excerpt from the book The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa, translated by Stephen Snyder.

WE CALLED HIM the Professor. And he called my son Root, because, he said, the flat top of his head reminded him of the square root sign.

“There’s a fine brain in there,” the Professor said, mussing my son’s hair. Root, who wore a cap to avoid being teased by his friends, gave a wary shrug. “With this one little sign we can come to know an infinite range of numbers, even those we can’t see.” He traced the symbol in the thick layer of dust on his desk.

Of all the countless things my son and I learned from the Professor, the meaning of the square root was among the most important. No doubt he would have been bothered by my use of the word countless—too sloppy, for he believed that the very origins of the universe could be explained in the exact language of numbers—but I don’t know how else to put it. He taught us about enormous prime numbers with more than a hundred thousand places, and the largest number of all, which was used in mathematical proofs and was in the Guinness Book of Records, and about the idea of something beyond infinity. As interesting as all this was, it could never match the experience of simply spending time with the Professor. I remember when he taught us about the spell cast by placing numbers under this square root sign. It was a rainy evening in early April. My son’s schoolbag lay abandoned on the rug. The light in the Professor’s study was dim. Outside the window, the blossoms on the apricot tree were heavy with rain.

The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what he called the “correct miscalculation,” for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers. This gave us confidence even when our best efforts came to nothing.

“Then what happens if you take the square root of negative one?” he asked.

“So you’d need to get – 1 by multiplying a number by itself?” Root asked. He had just learned fractions at school, and it had taken a half-hour lecture from the Professor to convince him that numbers less than zero even existed, so this was quite a leap. We tried picturing the square root of negative one in our heads: . The square root of 100 is 10; the square root of 16 is 4; the square root of 1 is 1. So the square root of – 1 is …

He didn’t press us. On the contrary, he fondly studied our expressions as we mulled over the problem.

“There is no such number,” I said at last, sounding rather tentative.

“Yes, there is,” he said, pointing at his chest. “It’s in here. It’s the most discreet sort of number, so it never comes out where it can be seen. But it’s here.” We fell silent for a moment, trying to picture the square root of minus one in some distant, unknown place. The only sound was the rain falling outside the window. My son ran his hand over his head, as if to confirm the shape of the square root symbol.

But the Professor didn’t always insist on being the teacher. He had enormous respect for matters about which he had no knowledge, and he was as humble in such cases as the square root of negative one itself. Whenever he needed my help, he would interrupt me in the most polite way. Even the simplest request—that I help him set the timer on the toaster, for example—always began with “I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but …” Once I’d set the dial, he would sit peering in as the toast browned. He was as fascinated by the toast as he was by the mathematical proofs we did together, as if the truth of the toaster were no different from that of the Pythagorean theorem.

The Housekeeper and the Professor – Summary

Here is the book summary:

He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem–ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory.

She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him.

And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them.

Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes), the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son. The Professor is capable of discovering connections between the simplest of quantities–like the Housekeeper’s shoe size–and the universe at large, drawing their lives ever closer and more profoundly together, even as his memory slips away.

The Housekeeper and the Professor is an enchanting story about what it means to live in the present, and about the curious equations that can create a family.

Copyright © 2003 by Yōko Ogawa.

Translated by: Stephen Snyder

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

A thing in motion

This is a quote from the book Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft.

Quote by Olga Tokarczuk, “Standing there on the embankment, staring into the current, I realized that—in spite of all the risks involved—a thing in motion will always be better than a thing at rest; that change will always be a nobler thing than permanence; that that which is static will degenerate and decay, turn to ash, while that which is in motion is able to last for all eternity.”

Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!

If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from the book here.

Flights – Summary

Here is the book summary:

From the incomparably original Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, Flights interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer.

Copyright © 2007 by Olga Tokarczuk.

Translated by: Jennifer Croft

You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.

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