Books of 2018

Outbox - only the latest editions here.

Before I came to Peace Corps, everything I read talked about how I would have so much time that I wouldn't know what to do with myself, and that when I came back to America I would miss that. I don't believe that will be case. Peace Corps Georgia seems to lend itself to overwork by volunteers, and between my lessons, English Club, collaborations with regional groups, my work writing grants for GLOW, my English Cabinet renovation grant, language learning, Peace Corps trainings and meetings and tasks, personal writing projects, community relationship building, grad school applications, and general life (and fun things like exploring all ends of Georgia and showing visitors around and growing plants), I'm busier here than I ever was in the U.S. - I never got home from work there and then sat at my computer to work for another 4 or 5 hours, but that has been the case here on many more than one occasion.

Nonetheless, my remote location has provided me with some time to read, in the form of excessively long public transit journeys - 9 hours to Tbilisi, 2 hours just to my closest city. But I am blessed to be able to read on marshutkas, and so here we have it: a list of what was read in 2018. Not quite a book a week, but not terrible. The good, the bad, the dumb:

1. Red Journeys: Inside the Thai Red-Shirt Movement - Claudio Sopranzetti - first week of January: This was a long time ago. I know almost nothing about Thai history or politics (ok, a lot more than the average American, but a lot less than the average Thai), so this slice of life/protest experience book was a little confusing, but still interesting. Plus! It was a book in English, which is much more common on the island (I was visiting my dad in Thailand) than it used to be, but pickings are still slim.
2. Stalin - Unknown Author - early January: Another random island book, this time a Soviet biography of Stalin published in 1947 or 1949 (I gave it away so I don't have any of the details). A simplified depiction of events, no famines, almost nothing about Georgia that I recall 11 months later. 
3. Confronting the Classics - Mary Beard - late March: A gift from a wetland ecologist friend, who was reading it and then no longer wished to carry it. My classics education has been somewhat slim, not much beyond some early childhood acting as Hestia, goddess of the hearth, some books of Greek myths for kids, and AP Art History in senior year of high school, so while this book presented some intriguing perspectives on the study of classics, I feel like I have quite a bit of reading to do before I can have any of my own ideas on these topics. Reading this before reading the "classics" does provide some good background and a large pile of salt to consume while reading.
4. The Far Away Brothers - Lauren Markham - sometime in spring: My mom's cousin's book about the lives of two Salvadoran students at the immigrant and refugee high school she works at, that I also volunteer taught at for the summer before I came to Georgia. A timely and empathetic insight into the refugee experience, and something I think more Americans should read, especially in this time of caravan scares and border walls.
5. The Iliad - "Homer" - finished in the first week of May: See above for explanation, the first "classic" I found in the Peace Corps library. An easier read than I was expecting because I always get it confused with The Odyssey and then I confuse that with Ulysses. Probably better in Greek or if I knew what dactylic hexameter is. I'll get there eventually.
6. The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger - first week of May: Fruits of the Keda Center for English Education library. If only I had read this during the angsty high school years. It was fine. Made me miss America a little bit.
7. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess - first week of May: Another Keda library hit. I distinctly remember trying to read this in 9th or 10th grade and being so frustrated with the "made-up" words that I stopped after a few pages, a rare thing for me. Now that I've finally read this, all that's left on that list are the Bible and Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown (a failed attempt at reading what my mom was reading in middle school). Anyway, after a year of college Russian the fake words make much more sense, and it was a fun, occasionally cringe-inducing read. I've never made it to the end of the movie either (it's something that people always seem to put on at the end of the night & then I immediately go to sleep), so I have no idea how it compares.
8. Salvage the Bones - Jesamyn Ward - end of June: Another book that I think all Americans should read, this one about the experiences of one family during and after Hurricane Katrina. Despite being aware of news coverage at the time and then living in New Orleans for college, I don't think I have ever come as close to understanding what it's like to live through a hurricane and its attendant devastation as I did while reading this book. Thanks mom for sending me books to keep up with the literary world outside of the Peace Corps library :)
9. Redbreast - Jo Nesbo - first week of July: I have a soft spot for Nordic thrillers ok?
10. Sindbad the Sailor - Unknown Author - last week of July: A book found on the free table in the Peace Corps office and foraged for my school's library. Charming, short, reminded me that I should read the whole One Thousand and One Nights.
11. The Valkyries - Paulo Coelho - 9 August 2018: Another free pile salvaged book, not my style at all, but the western desert settings reminded me of happy road trips through the Eastern Sierra, and Death Valley and so on. Put it in the school library but I don't anticipate any of my students reading it any time soon. 
12. The Possessed - Fyodor Dostoevsky - sometime in August: At this point I think I have read almost all of the English language novels in the Keda library. I am usually a fast reader, but this put me to sleep every time I read a few pages, so it took months. I carried it to Tbilisi and back home, from Mestia to Ushguli on foot, and a lot more places. I assume it's better in Russian. Someday...
13. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides - sometime in October: Probably my favorite book this year, and one that I have no idea about going in, except that other people also thought it was good. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of life in Turkey in the early 1900s and the Greek diaspora, though I asked a former professor of mine who studies the Ottomans and World War I and also happens to be from Izmir (which is mentioned in the book in its Greek name, Smyrna) about the depiction and he said to keep the 19th and 20th century British mindset in mind while evaluating accuracy. A great story about the 20th century American experience, covering so many aspects of life while still staying utterly engaging. I was sorry to reach the end. 
14. Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol - early November: Brought back traumatic memories of the Performance class I was forced to take in college back when I wanted to be a lighting designer. We had a Russian visiting professor in the department that year, and spent an excessive amount of time on Gogol short stories, which was fun until we had to do performance activities in response to them. For the record, I got an A though the professor said he had never had a student who hated his class so much. Anyway, it was fine, though not as funny as some of the short stories, an interesting look at 19th century Russian life. More importantly, after reading it I started noticing regular references to "dead souls" that wouldn't have meant anything to me before - "dead souls" rumored on Georgian voter rolls, "Dead Souls" as the title to a song on my favorite Joy Division album (Les Baines Douches, obviously), and it's a book I can refer to in conversation with older Georgians (i.e. my Georgian tutor). Valuable for it's influence for sure. 
15. The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkein - early November: Somehow never read this during my high fantasy days (aka like every day from 4th through 9th grade), despite reading all of the Lord of the Rings books. A delightful one.
16. The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein - mid November: You know.
17. The Fellowship of the Ring - J. R. R. Tolkein - 18 November 2018: See above. 
18. The Return of the King - J. R. R. Tolkein -  19 November 2018: #3.
19. The Picture of Dorian Gray and Three Stories - Oscar Wilde - 23 November 2018: Oscar Wilde is insufferable and so are most of his characters, but still a fun read. I enjoyed the filler stories more than The Picture of Dorian Gray. 
20. Dissolution: Sovereignty and the Breakup of the Soviet Union - Edward W. Walker - early December 2018: Another one that took me over a year to read because I kept opening it and promptly falling asleep. I started reading it before coming to Peace Corps because it was one of two books about Georgia (in part) that I could find at my local used bookstore before coming here (I went every week for a few months and asked if they had anything about Georgia, they thought I was insane, love you Moe's). Glad I finished it though, I feel like through school and other stuff I've learned a lot about the Soviet period, and through living in Georgia I learned a lot about the post-Soviet experience, but while reading I found that a lot of the assumptions I had made about the break-up were wrong, and filled in some very large gaps in my knowledge, especially regarding the Abkhazian and South Ossetian conflicts, even though not much space in the book was devoted to them specifically. 

*Also a wide variety of books for young children, abridged versions of classics, etc. for classroom purposes & because they're what I have in the village...

In progress...

I am currently very slowly reading:

1. A Reader of Modern Arabic Short Stories - Edited by Sabry Hafez and Catherine Cobham: (Arabic & English) Kill me.
2. Amirani and Hanzel da Greteli: Georgian children's stories, shouldn't be taking as long as they are.
3. Hari Poteri da Pilosofiuri Qva - J. K. Rowling: The Georgian translation obviously. Gonna learn some useful words!
4. Persepolisi - Marjane Satrapi: A graphic novel in Georgian! Easy, right? No.
5. Backpacking: One Step at a Time - Harvey Manning So many details about methods of waterproofing clothing! Wau!
6. Deda Ena - Iakob Gogebashvili: The classic first grade text. Also the reason I know a million animal names but nothing else in Georgian.
7. The Real Thief - William Steig: A children's book about a goose. I keep leaving it weird places so I still haven't finished it even though the student I was supposed to be asking about it returned their copy long ago.

Also, shout-out to my reference books. 

Finally, I spent a lot of time with A Field Guide to Birds of the USSR, the Lonely Planet Guide to Georgia, Armenia, & Azerbaijan, my dictionaries & Georgian textbook, and Forsman's The Raptors of Europe and the Middle East: A Handbook of Field Identification.

Wish me luck for 52 books in 2019, and as much learning as I did in 2018!

Coming up next...

Batumi Raptor Count

Sunrise in Sakhalvasho

This summer and autumn I had the opportunity to work with the Batumi Raptor Count, a monitoring project that counts birds of prey as they migrate through Batumi. Birds from northern Europe and Russia fly through, headed to anywhere from Sub-Saharan Africa to Turkey, and birds that don't like to fly over the sea congregate in a narrow area near Batumi, west of the mountains and east of the Black Sea. The BRC counts certain migratory raptor species as they fly through every autumn, and has been doing so for 11 years, collecting data for scientific research, educating the public, and working on various other projects. They count over a million raptors every year, a hard-to-imagine number, even having witnessed a lot of it!

Casual morning views from Shuamta

Because of my school schedule, I couldn't make it for the required two-week stay all at once, so I volunteered to count for a week at the end of August, a weekend in September, and then a few days in October. While this isn't the standard counter experience, it was nice for me to see the different types of birds (lots of honey buzzards in August, eagles in September, steppe buzzards in October), and to meet almost all of the other counters, who come from all over Europe, plus another American and one from Mexico. Due to a preponderance of counters and coordinators from the Netherlands, in addition to learning a lot about birds, I also learned much more than I ever knew about Suriname. It was fun to be in a group of people from so many different places, and with so many people so passionate about birds. There was a conversation entirely made up of funny stories about gulls.

A Chinese Screw Orchid, a native orchid species on the stairs to the Shuamta station.

The BRC counts from two hilltops just outside of Batumi, in the villages of Sakhalvasho and Shuamta. Counters stay with families in the villages and eat breakfast and dinner there, with packed lunch to eat on the station. The families I stayed with were both very sweet, and delighted to have someone that spoke Georgian around. Sakhalvasho is across from the Mtsvane Kontskhi (Green Cape), a lush bit of the coast that contains the Batumi Botanical Garden, and overlooks the sea. The hills are full of terraced mandarin orchards, and at night, despite the proximity to the city, the sky is alive with bats and birds and you can hear the jackals howl. Shuamta is deeper into the mountains, up a windy road past old tea plantations, and the house we stay in is basically at the end of the road - no traffic, just trees and cows.

Shuamta's inexplicable coffee shop.

Tourists birdwatching from the cafe in the middle of nowhere, Shuamta.

A typical count day begins with pre-dawn breakfast (I can't eat that early, so I would take breakfast to the station, where some sneaky station animal would try to steal it), and then a 15 or 20 minute uphill trek to get to the station for sunrise. In August the count ran from about 6 am to 6 pm, which was brutal, but the days were significantly reduced by the middle of October, when the count ended. The first hours were often slow, but beautiful enough that no one minded staring at the empty sky for a while. This was a good time to pet the dogs or cat that often joined us in the morning. As the day warmed up birds would begin streaming by, including massive groups of buzzards, lines of Black Kites, more solitary eagles, falcons, Chaffinches, European Rollers, and my new favorite bird, the European Bee-Eater. Bee Eaters are a lovely colorful bird with the most cheerful, burbling call. Some days were full of birds, with over 100,000 birds counted on a least one day, and some days were much slower - just a few hundred birds, with 7 people counting for 8 hours or something like that. Lots of time to think your thoughts and admire the sea then. I got my first sunburn in a few years, since I showed up to stand in the sun for about 72 hours with no hat, sunglasses, or sunscreen. I came a little better prepared for my next two visits. Days ended with a beer, a review of who saw what at which station, a delicious dinner, and then either everyone going to sleep immediately, an educational session (in case you want to learn about Egyptian Vulture conservation in Bulgaria or whatever), or everyone going to the "bar" in Sakhalvasho, for strawberry chacha and beer drunk while sitting on tree stumps.

Station dog, Sakhalvasho.

The actual counting is more or less what you'd expect. There's an imaginary line running from the mountains to the coast, and counters count birds as they cross it. The BRC mostly counts migratory birds that don't really have resident populations in the area, so the chance of counting the same bird multiple times is reduced. Walkie talkie communication and distance codes and other techniques help ensure that birds aren't counted by both stations, and coordinators at each station assign roles to make sure everything goes smoothly. Most of the birds are very far away, birds that I on my own would probably have written off as "some bird," but the more experienced counters and the people with fancy equipment, are very good at identifying things that look to me like fleas hopping on distant clouds. The BRC does do some evening sessions on how to ID different types of birds, but a lot of those were beginning at a level slightly beyond mine - like how to differentiate harrier species, while I needed to learn what a harrier was. I tried. Sometimes they would ask for someone to just click numbers of birds flying by while someone else did the species (and sometimes also the age and sex and color). That I could do, especially if the birds were near enough to be seen with the naked eye, and I always felt quite accomplished after counting even a small stream of birds. Just as I was beginning to feel like I could ID a few of the most common species though, the count was over. I understand why they ask for a two-week commitment.

Right before it starts burning your eyes out, Shuamta.

Volunteering with the BRC also gave me several opportunities to teach Georgian students about birds, conservation, and the BRC project. I brought a group of students from my school to Shuamta, visited the Sakhalvasho school for some guest lessons, and even visited Kolkheti National Park with a group of young falconers, though in that case I think I learned more from them. I also attended a presentation entirely in Georgian on the topic of sturgeon conservation, which I actually understood most of, a nice feeling for sure.

The Kolkheti Wetlands reminded me a lot of New Orleans.

Not a lot of birds in the middle of the day, but I saw three kingfishers, Kolkheti National Park.

Dock dog, Kolkheti National Park.

The school that I teach at, in the mountains of Adjara about 2.5 hours from Sakhalvasho, is very small, with only 40 pupils, and does not have a lot of resources, especially with regards to their science curriculum. Almost all of their learning is from textbooks, with few opportunities for fun and hands-on experience. Because of that, being able to visit the Batumi Raptor Count was a very exciting experience for my students and the two Georgian teachers that came with us. While there were not so many birds in early October, they were happy to use the binoculars and scopes to look out at Kobuleti and Batumi, and see some familiar places from a new vantage point. There was one distant kettle that had some of my students fighting each other for scope time though! They also learned about the different types of birds that fly through Batumi, why Batumi is such a unique place, and about why the BRC monitors migration, while admiring the view from Ruslan’s lovely yard. Despite the long drive, everyone who came was awed by the beauty of Sakhalvasho and Shuamta, places almost none of them had ever visited, and delighted by some strange mushrooms we saw, the struggle of our marshutka heading up to Shuamta, and the few birds we did see.

Does everyone look like they're having fun? (Sakhalvasho)

The lesson: bird parts, what birds, a bird word crossword, Sakhalvasho. 

I also had the privilege of working with Sakhalvasho English teacher Elza, who invited me to visit her 3rd, 7th, and 11th grade classes. Most of the older students were at least somewhat familiar with the BRC, so I took the opportunity to play “Bird Jeopardy” with them, a fun way to practice their English vocabulary and bird knowledge, and hopefully more entertaining than a slideshow lecture on migration. While everyone could answer “Where does a cuckoo build its nest?” the question “What do bee-eaters eat?” completely stumped two entire classes of 7th and 11th graders. I didn’t bother trying to teach a group of 3rd graders about migration flyways and the different types of buzzard, so instead we sang some silly songs about birds and looked out at a small kettle that had formed outside their classroom window.

3rd grade bird song time in Sakhalvasho.

11th grade group pic, Sakhalvasho.

These experiences help develop students’ appreciation for and interest in birds, nature, and conservation, and hopefully some of them will go on to become Georgia’s future scientists, teachers, and BRC counters. And hopefully I can join the count again someday, if not this spring then in some future year. I spent this whole experience trying to cram new information into my brain, and I want to have the chance to use it again!

Beqa lookin' for birds in Shuamta.

Reading about raptors on the ride over from Keda.

My counterpart Nineli & I, with 5th grade Lizi.

Last day party, with counters & Georgian hosts (I'm behind the camera), Sakhalvasho