This is my first draft of these show notes but I am planning to add links and photos when I have more time but just want to get something posted before I pick up my kids from school.

10. Guarana Antartica – my new favorite soda!

9. The colors! People warned me that São Paulo is grey but that was not my experience. Yes, there’s plenty of concrete as one would expect from the fourth biggest city in the world, but I’ve never seen so many murals packed into a city.

8. The music, especially while visiting Avenida Paulista on Sunday.

7. Biblioteca Parque Villa-Lobos, an absolutely gorgeous vibrant library that was a wonderful gathering place and teeming with life on a Sunday.

6. Ibirapuera Park

5. The museums! Especially the Jewish Museum, the Portuguese Language Museum, and MASP.

4. Getting the chance to really practice my Portuguese. Brazilians are so encouraging and they did not make fun of my redneck accent.

3. The food, oh my god, the food.

2. The literature of course! Brazilian literature is the side quest for my Read Around the World project and with every book I read, I fall in love with it even more deeply.

1. THE PEOPLE. Brazilians are warm, friendly, enthusiastic, and just ridiculously awesome. The world can learn so much about being human from Brazil.

Am I really famous in Brazil? Despite the hundreds of messages I’ve received from Brazilians insisting I am, I still don’t believe it. It’s just too surreal for my brain to process. This surely must be a highly ambitious prank pulled by several bored teenagers in South America.

Here’s the abbreviated version of how I became “famous???” in Brazil:

• I posted a roundup of all the books I was reading for the B countries on my Read Around the World quest.
• I had decided to read The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Machado de Assis for Brazil.
• TONS of Brazilians responded with comments like, You are going to love that! and Best book ever!
• By the time I got to Brazil, I worried that the book had been overhyped and I would be disappointed.
• I started the book.
• Within a few pages, I was OBSESSED. Best. Book. Ever.
• With only 100 pages left, I felt inspired to make this video:

And then that video went viral–and I didn’t even realize the scope of what was happening at the time, because it had been shared on X and then effected Amazon sales and then it was reported by the Brazilian news. I think I finally realized that Something Big was happening in my life when a journalist at Brazil’s CNN contacted me for a television interview.

At first, I was completely and utterly overwhelmed by the response, but as I explain during this episode, the experience of going viral in Brazil has opened my heart to a flood of love and made my soul sparkle like a disco ball. Because did you know Brazil is the most loving corner of the internet? My siblings were reading the comments on my videos and could not believe that they were 99.9% positive. I was pleasantly surprised because when I saw that there were thousands of comments, I assumed that folks would be trashing my review/project/face/etc. because that’s how American trolls operate.

Americans could learn a thing or two from Brazil.

In the viral video, I joked that I now had a side quest to learn Portuguese. Many Brazilians took this literally, and tons of people offered to give me free Portuguese lessons. I freaked out again. Me? Learn Portuguese? It’s supposed to be an incredibly difficult language to learn! Besides, I’ve been using Duolingo to learn French for several years now. If I really wanted to learn Portuguese, I could do that after I became fluent in French,.

And yet, the idea of learning Portuguese became as intriguing and persistent as my call to embark on this Read Around the World quest, so I took Duolingo’s first Portuguese lesson. And then another and another until I was hooked, and had abandoned French completely, and after I was invited to speak at a literary festival in São Paulo, I found an app called Preply and signed up for one-on-one Portuguese lessons with a lovely Brazilian lady.

Agora eu falo português como um bebe.

But I’m learning and I’m obsessed with this side quest. My fifteen minutes of Brazilian fame has lasted much longer than I could have ever predicted, and at the beginning of my quest, I never thought one of my book reviews could go viral in such an exuberant and effervescent way. I’m loving this new twist to my Read Around the World adventure and shimmering with excitement for my trip next week to São Paulo! And no matter how this goes, I’m obsessed with the Portuguese language. But that’s another episode.

For Côte d’Ivoire, I read Aya, a graphic novel by Marguerite Abouet (writer) and Clément Oubrerie (illustrator). It was translated from French by Helge Dascher with lettering by Tom Devlin.

Growing up, I never had a comic book phase, but I LOVE graphic novels. Before I talk about Aya, I’d like to list some of my all-time faves:

• Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (and anything else by Bechdel)
• Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (a long time ago, in an apartment far far away, I picked this for my book club)
• Blankets by Craig Thompson  
• Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli
• Nimona by N.D. Stevenson
• The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick
• Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened by Allie Brosh (I will read anything this woman writes)
• The Prince and the Dressmaker by Jen Wang
• Relish: My Life in the Kitchen by Lucy Knisley (and literally everything else she has ever written)
• Pumpkinheads by Rainbow Rowell (if you want a cozy fall read, get this! I regret giving this book away and might buy myself a new copy for October.)

(Technically, the books above are not all graphic novel. A few are memoirs, but if Goodreads classifies them as graphic novels, who am I to argue?)

I loved Aya as much as any of the books on my list above. It’s the story of the post-adolescent romantic adventures of three women, about age 19, who live in post-colonial Côte d’Ivoire when the country was flourishing (late 1970s). Alicia Grace Chase, PhD wrote Aya’s preface and summarized it much more eloquently than I can:

The amorous hi-jinks narrated in Aya seems so familiar, so nearly suburban in their post-adolescent focus on dance floor flirtations, awkward first dates, and finding just the right dress for a friend’s wedding, that to many western readers it may be difficult to believe that they take place in Africa.

Preface to Aya, by alisia Grace Chase, Phd

So far, the overwhelming majority of the books I have read for Africa deal with heavy, weighty topics like government corruption (Angola, Cameroon, Central African Republic), extreme poverty and famine (Cabo Verde), and genocide (Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo). In my pick for the Comoros, the narrator is lost at sea, clinging to a fuel tank for dear life, with very bleak prospects. In my pick for the Republic of the Congo, the narrator Broken Glass is an alcoholic relating the tragicomic lives of the patrons of a bar.

After all the picks that preceded it, Aya was a breath of fresh air. I’ve been enjoying my African picks for my Read Around the World quest, and it’s important to grapple with these important issues, but Africa is not all genocide and government corruption. It’s also music and dancing and flirting and fighting over boys with your girlfriends. It’s sibling squabbles and teens drinking too much alcohol and making out with the cute guy you met at midnight and choosing schoolwork over sleazy guys because damnit, you want to be a doctor. Africa is so much more than the American media suggests, and Aya expanded my literary experience with Africa in a delightful and enchanting way.

If I had to describe Aya in just a sentence, I’d say it’s Sex in the City: The Côte d’Ivoire edition. If you ever enjoyed the hijinks of Carrie, Miranda, Samantha and Charlotte, then you’ll adore Aya, Adjoua, and Bintou.

I’ve already ordered Aya’s sequel and I’m impatiently awaiting its arrival.

For Costa Rica, I read Where There Was Fire : A Novel by John Manuel Arias. I don’t always share the covers for the books I read, but let’s take a moment to admire this one:

Bravo to the cover designer! This cover perfectly captured the book’s energy, story, and themes. I’ve designed the covers for three of my four published books, and damn, I really need to hire a cover designer for the next one. (Although I have a feeling my next book will be published traditionally… just putting that vibe out into the Universe.)

Although Spanish is the official language of Costa Rica, this book was written in English; but the author used the inverted question mark (¿) in the dialogue to remind the reader that the character would have been speaking Spanish. In a comment on my TikTok post for this book, someone raised an objection:

Hi! I’m Costa Rican and I love this series but I wish you had done better research before choosing this as the book from my country. It wasn’t originally written in Spanish nor was it published here…

I see the point this TikToker was making, but I also stand by my choice. I’m on a quest to read a book by an author from every country in the world in alphabetical order, because my muse/inner voice/intuition would not stop nagging me to do this project. Since my muse is the instigator of this whole epic endeavor, I’m doing my best to lean into my intuition when I pick the book for each country. That means I’m not ticking off boxes of imaginary criteria to please the masses and critics. Instead, I’m listening to suggestions, reading tons of book descriptions, and then choosing the book that screams, “Me! Me! Me!” For Costa Rica, that was Where There Was Fire.

And I’m so glad I read this book!

It was lush and vibrant and saturated with magic. The story alternates between 1995 during an epic hurricane and 1968 when a banana plantation burnt to the ground. The third person narrative shifts amongst characters, both major and minor, in a way that deepens the reading experience (and makes me, as a writer, intensely jealous). John Manuel Arias is also a poet, and the way he chose words and manipulated language made my skin tingle.

This novel is in the tradition of magical realism, and I could tell Arias was influenced by Allende and Márquez, but he also owned the genre and made it his own. Towards the novel’s end, he even tipped his hat to Márquez in a description of San José:

A lottery ticket vendor whose wife has cancer smiles with every piece sold, every cólon that will go toward her treatment. A café owners named Shakespeare recites lines from The Comedy of Errors; his patrons munch on croissants with their eyes closed, content. A stout, devout woman flits from passerby to passerby, quoting the good book–not the Bible but One Hundred Years of Solitude, she says.

Where There was Fire pg. 264

What a lovely ode to Gabo! And if you like magical realism, then you should definitely run and get a copy of Where There Was Fire immediately if not sooner. Although be warned: you’ll never look at a banana quite the same way again.

For the Republic of the Congo, I read Broken Glass: A Novel by Alain Mabanckou which was translated from French by Helen Stevenson.

Broken Glass is the name of a 64-year-old former schoolteacher who frequents a bar called Credit Gone West. The owner of the bar gives Broken Glass a notebook and urges him to write, so Broken Glass fills the notebook with the stories of the patrons of Credit Gone West, eventually leading to his own tale.

The novel is written in the voice and style of a drunk, with no periods and sporadic capitalization. For example, here’s the opening line:

let’s say the boss of the bar Credit Gone West gave me this notebook to fill, he’s convinced that I–Broken Glass–can turn out a book,

Broken Glass at pg. 1

I picked a random spot to end that opening line because it just keeps going, a rambling run-on sentence of drunken chaos, but there are also references to literary classics sprinkled throughout the book, reminding the reader that Broken Glass was once a schoolteacher, and beneath the inebriation and despair, there’s a really intelligent man lost to alcoholism.

The book takes place in the town of Trois-Cents in the Republic of the Congo, but this is a universal story about alcoholism and addiction. The patrons of Credit Gone West are addicted to alcohol (for Broken Glass, it’s all about the red wine) but they are also desperate to have their stories recorded in Broken Glass’s notebook.

I do have to give one warning about this book: it discusses in excruciating detail some scenes that involve excrement and urine. I’ve been exposed to a lot of scatological humor by way of reading Day Pilkey with my son Julian, but there were a few scenes that would shock even my eight-year-old boy. I LOVED THIS BOOK and it made me think a lot about alcoholism, but if you are enjoying a quiet lunch and want some reading material… chose something else.

I’ll definitely be reading more books by Alain Mabanckou. Just maybe not while I’m eating lunch.

I did it! I recorded a podcast episode!

I know, I know, it’s been over a half year. Where have I been? READING AROUND THE WORLD.

At the end of 2023, I started a quest to read a book by an author from every country around the world in alphabetical order and I embarked on that journey with lots of trepidation, hesitation, and reluctance. My muse had been nagging me for over two years to start this quest, but I had excuses and concerns. (For example, there are too many countries. Also, the books would probably be boring. p.s. Did I mention how many countries there are? 197!)

But my muse would not relent, and as my new quest built momentum, I stopped podcasting and instead shared my journey on TikTok. That was a new endeavor and it took a lot of bandwidth to get used to filming and editing videos. I didn’t have the time or inclination to podcast while I was doing that. Besides,I was already talking a lot on Tiktok–what more could I possibly say during a podcast episode? How much talk from Courtney Henning Novak does the world actually need?

Yet I missed podcasting, and once my Read Around the World quest had sufficient momentum, my muse nagged me to resurrect Adventures With My Forties. I told my muse I needed to clean the bathroom. She told me to hire cleaners. I told my muse that the people who enjoy my TikToks would not be interested in my podcast episodes. My muse rolled her eyes and told me to stop whining and record an episode already.

So here I am.

Why did I start my Read Around the World quest? Because my muse would not leave me alone.

And now why I am podcasting again? Same damn reason.

My muse is a relentless diva who gives zero figs about back to school nights and errands and cluttered countertops, but she was right about the Read Around the World quest. DID I MENTION I’M GOING TO BRAZIL IN TWO WEEKS??? Since my muse knows how to generate some interesting adventures, I’m going to lean in again and answer the call to podcast.

Hello. How’ve you been??