I've been reading a lot of Middle East-centric stuff lately,
trying to understand more of the world we're in. I think we've talked before
about how strange it is that we read so much, like, Japanese lit in IB, but
never did anything that would help us understand the issues that were shaping
our lives. Like maybe they stuck to choices made sometime around the founding
of the program--and the Cold War--and didn't adapt post-2001.
My roommate gave me Mary Doria Russell's Dreamers of the Day
for my birthday last year. I've read it
once and listened to the audiobook. It's set in 1921, told from the perspective
of an American woman who takes a trip to Egypt and ends up making friends with
the figureheads engaged in the discussions that would shape the Middle East--Churchill,
Lawrence. There were themes in it that would have ignited discussions in Theory of Knowledge,
history, world lit... And there we were reading Life of Pi and Thousand Cranes,
like it mattered if the tiger existed or what the birthmark symbolized in the
face of the world we actually lived in.
But maybe that wasn't the point, exactly. I know I didn't
feel mature enough to understand a lot of what we read then. Maybe it just
matters that we read a variety of things, so that when we were older we'd still
seek out the variety--that we'd engage with current events when we were
actually able to affect them?
I just think I might have understood more, been more
engaged, with books that made sense in the contemporary global context rather
than in a post-1984 world that still thought 1984 was possible.
