Travels with Tavish

 Here are some book reviews from January and February: The Last Juror I listened to this on audiobook, and while I did finish it, I found myself rolling my eyes a lot throughout. I really enjoyed some of the John Grisham I read in Senegal (with minimal eye-rolling at the cheesiness of some of the lines), but this thriller was almost too much for me. The characters that exactly fit their racial stereotypes, the narrator's short fling with an attractive woman who just happened to cross paths with him, and a plot that was good but not great made this novel not worth recommending. If you are going to read Grisham, pick something else. The Last Great Road Bum This was a fantastic book recommended to me by a family member. The story follows Joe Sanderson from his home in Illinois to a myriad of destinations around the world. Joe travels around the world, sometimes living off of modest savings, sometimes getting a job, sometimes living off of the generosity of others. His story ends with

N.B. Kalabante = jokester, trickster, troublemaker (used among friends in a loving fashion) It is noon, three hours after today’s rays of direct sunlight have become unbearable for more than five minutes. I am sitting under the disintegrating shade structure in front of Baba’s hut as he prepares attaya. One of the six posts—which used to be living trees in the nearby bush—holding up the bamboo-and-straw roof is listing slightly toward the center of the yard, and another is leaning twice as much. Baba attributes the problem to termites chewing up the underground portions of the posts. The former trees are no longer stable in their new jobs. “I’ll fix it,” he says, though we both know this means “I’ll fix it when it falls down.”   I reposition my chair, itself made from the wood of a palm-like tree gathered from the seasonal river that flows by my village, so as to dodge the new shaft of sunlight piercing through the patchy straw above me. There is no sense in replacing the shade-creatin

I am walking through the cornfield to greet my host father in the morning, him bent over picking up a piece of split bamboo that he will weave to make a fence. Corn will be planted next month; the field sits fallow, a dead wasteland of dry soil and two lonely mango trees that have just shed their final fruit of the season. It has not rained in seven months.  Baba is wearing a pair of work-torn dark grey pants and a navy blue suit jacket with no shirt. His short salt-and-pepper curls of hair give away his receding hairline; it has been three weeks since he last shaved his head. A Guinean cigarette dangles out of the corner of his mouth, the smoke dissipating quickly in the morning breeze. The sun is bright and the air around me is beginning to heat up already. “Baba!” I say three times with steadily increasing volume. At my third call, Baba turns around and straightens up, saying “Hmm?” Then softly, in his deep baritone, he says “Mamadou, naamansii” in mumbled greeting, a warm grin shin

Here are some book reviews from the last couple months:  Alchemy I flew through Sutherland's audiobook on a long drive. When I reached my destination I almost wanted to keep driving around for another hour so that I could finish it. Sutherland's thesis is that our society would benefit greatly from increasing the amount of non-logical thinking that we do. This applies to business, personal happiness, and all other facets of life. He provides copious examples of how non-logical thinking (not necessarily anti-logical, just "non-sense," as he calls it) has greatly improved lives and examples of how our logic-obsessed culture has failed to do so. There are some problems that can be solved with logic--and should continue to be solved with logical thinking--but there are far more problems which resist being solved with such a method. Despite the obvious resistance of some issues to this way of thinking, we continue to hold logical thinking in the highest regard as we try to

Hello Blog Readers, I am offering math tutoring services via Zoom for grades K-12 this winter. I am interested in working with students who need extra math help, students who enjoy math, and students who want to go above and beyond the math they are studying in school. I have been tutoring via Zoom for two months and am pleasantly surprised with how quickly I have been able to establish personal connections despite the lack of in-person interaction. If you or any families you know are interested in tutoring, please email me. I will provide my resume and scheduling and rate information via email. Here is a bit of background information about me that you can pass on to any families that may be interested: I grew up in Seattle and participated in math competitions such as Math Is Cool and MathCounts from grades 4-12. I then attended Northeastern University in Boston and graduated in 2018 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. I recently spent 18 months in the Peace Corps in Senegal doin

I am aware that I never got around to writing Part 2 of my July 2020 Books update. In the spirit of not leaving myself a list of backlogged book reviews to write, I am listing here all the books I have read since my quarantine in the basement ended. I have chosen to write about a select few books instead of writing about all of them. As the literary-minded of you may notice, I am indeed on a long quest (which will take years) to read all of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels. The Overstory This novel is on a higher plane than the average novel that I pick up. It thoroughly deserves its Pulitzer Prize. It is about trees. More specifically, it is about nine characters whose lives interact and overlap, but the central force in each of their individual and collective stories is the trees in their lives. Some have reverence for trees to begin with, others know nothing about them. Either way, trees slowly, irreversibly, become the driving, motivating factor in each of their lives and bring th

When I was evacuated from Senegal in March, there were still quite a lot of things I wanted to do before returning to the US. In addition to my work and spending with time my host family, I had a few personal projects that I was working on. I had a list of books that I wanted to get through before my service was over, a sewing project, some biking goals, and a project born out of my curiosity about winning percentages in various forms of solitaire.  During my down time for the first 9 months of my service, I either read a book, napped, called another volunteer, listened to music, or listened to a podcast. Those were just about the only forms of entertainment I had in my hut for the hot afternoons. Then, one day, I "discovered" a "new" form of entertainment: solitaire! After just a few days of playing, I decided to make a project out of this and record how many games I won or lost each day on my calendar. Then, after playing 100 games or so I would have a general id