To be honest, I should have recorded this episode a few weeks ago before Halloween but hey, better late than never. Ever year, as I head into the cozy chaos of the holiday season, I like to give myself a pep talk so I don’t lose my mind over gingerbread houses and gift wrap. The key message for this year’s pep talk is encapsulated in the episode title: How to Sleigh YOUR Holidays and Deck FAKE holidays.

Because it’s easy to forget, but these are YOUR holidays.

And much of the stress that surround your holidays? FAKE! FAKE! COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY F-A-K-E FAKE!

First, let’s remember that these are YOUR holidays:

• We all holiday differently, because we have different interests, passions, traditions and histories. So how do YOU holiday? It’s not about what someone on social media does. Or your neighbor. Or that movie or that Pinterest board or whatever. What makes the holidays truly special for YOU? 
• Don’t get sucked into the vortex of comparing your holidays to someone else’s. Those other folks? They are doing what works for them for their unique reasons, and they have all sorts of private drama and issues going on that we don’t even know about, and if we want to get really cynical, we don’t even know if what they are doing is working for them. Just because they look like they enjoy creating a thousand crochet gifts does not mean they actually enjoy creating a thousand crochet gifts. They might be having the time of their life or they might be secretly miserable.
• Don’t get hijacked by someone else’s agenda. Most importantly, remember: companies are looking to make money! Do you really need brand new matching stockings, pillows, and Christmas tree skirt, or are you just being influenced by the ads that assault us every time we log onto social media? Likewise, do you really want to spend weeks turning your front lawn into a winter wonderland or are you just competing with the neighbors?

Second, pay attention to whether stress is real or FAKE.

• Beware of the word “should” because it gets thrown around a lot, but there’s a huge difference between “I should get eight hours of sleep” and “I should bake twenty different types of gourmet cookies and then stay up all night addressing holiday cards.”
• Think about your values and what you really want out of the holidays. When you are getting stressed about something, ask yourself, Does this align with my values? Or am I getting sucked into someone else’s values or agenda?
• Remember: holidays bring out our innate human weirdness. Emotions get heightened. Please please please, give yourself space and grace for your feelings. But remember: the world will not end if your kid accidentally pees on Santa’s lap while taking holiday photos.

Note to self: when I get whipped into a frenzy and start to panic over really dumb things (it’s inevitable), I need to listen to this episode (even if it is really weird to listen to my recorded voice!)

Another note to self: Pippa and Julian love making gingerbread houses but BUY THE KITS AT WALMART and embrace the fact that this tradition will end in architectural chaos. No snowman will actually be harmed when the gingerbread roofs collapse beneath the weight of gumdrops.

I embarked on my Read Around the World quest on October 24, 2023 and as of the one year anniversary of my quest, I’ve read 49.75 books – which puts me at just over 25% done with my quest, since I’m using a list with 197 countries. I do believe that deserves a “HELL YEAH!!!!!!” in all caps with a series of wild exclamation marks.

To commemorate this milestone, I’m reflecting and ruminating on the magic of reading around the world for this week’s episode of Adventures With My Forties.

• It is just incredible how much has happened in one year. When I started this quest, I honestly thought it would be a dud and would fizzle out after a few countries because the books would be dreary and tedious and feel like homework. NOPE. Overall, the books have been amazing, and this project has turned into a bonified adventure. I now have a Brazilian side quest and I’m taking Portuguese lessons and oh, I’ve been to BRAZIL for a literary festival. I’ve gone from 300 followers on social media to over 44K on IG and over 60K on TikTok. I thought there was no way I’d want to write a memoir about this quest, but now, I don’t know how I can fit this entire experience into a single memoir.
• I love this quest’s ripple effect. I can only really evaluate the impact this project is having on MY life but sometimes I hear about its ripple effect. On a recent post, someone commented that because of my project, they read Wild Swans, became really interested in China, and now they are going to China next year. And who knows how that person will inspire others? I’m just in awe of the ripple effect.
• Listen to your muse, folks. Or your inner voice. Or your curiosity. Because the universe can imagine things we don’t even know we should be dreaming. Did it ever occur to me to be a bookfluencer? Or that people would be interested in my project? Or that I would get to go to Brazil? 
• We need to leave time for the magic. I’m going to go into this deeper in an upcoming episode but long story short, I was spending so much time volunteering for my kids’ school and activities that I did not have time for my muse to work her magic.
• Don’t let other folks hijack your agenda. I discussed this in Episode 35 but bottom line, I’ve learned to hit the pause button before accepting a new commitment, and question, Is this for me or is this for someone else? 
• Just start already to build your momentum. This is a big project. Obviously. But when I kept thinking about how long it would take, I got scared. I had to finally just start, not knowing how long it would take, or what I would read, or even whether I’d be able to find and gather books for every country. I had to just start to create momentum. Now, this might not work for every big ass project. e.g. might want to do a ton of planning if you are going to sail around the world. (Please do a ton of planning if you are going to sail around the world!) But if your dream is to renovate your house all by yourself, then just go for it. Start with the project that is shouting at you. You don’t have to budget everything or have the perfect Pinterest board or gather all the supplies. Just get going. 
• This project has triggered a lot of my people pleaser/perfectionist tendencies. I think that’s an issue of mine that is going to keep popping up in my life in different contexts but I’ll get better at spotting it and managing it. But this has been such a great arena to work on my people pleaser tendencies because I believe it is important to read what you feel called to read. Not what will impress your friends. Or what the bookstore says you should buy. Or what you think you “should” read. But with reading, holy shit, people have strong opinions and sometimes, folks get upset/disappointed with my pick for a country. In the past, my concerns about annoying people would have paralyzed me, but I am committed to reading around the world and so through this process, I’ve grown immune to comments on social media. Now I can pick what I want and share what I read and accept that when folks criticize my picks, that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person or have failed. Besides, how can I fail? This is my project!!!
• I have learned to accept love. I have received so much love from Brazil. At first, that love was overwhelming because there was some part of me that didn’t feel worthy of so much love and support. This is something that I want to stay curious about. I am still reflecting on this and learning from it and letting it open my heart and make me a better person. I wish I could wave a wand and give everyone the love I have felt from Brazil. 
• I am embracing adventure! I am showing up and keeping an open mind. I’m so lucky to have a husband who fully supports this. When the Jewish Museum invited me to speak at their festival in São Paulo, I hesitated but he immediately said, YOU HAVE TO GO. 

I’m so excited to see what happens with the next year of my Read Around the World quest. Onward!

Confession: I made this episode as a pep talk for future Courtney. In the not so distant future, my Read Around the World quest will reach the I’s, and the I’s include Israel, and folks on social media have some strong opinions about Israel. People have already suggested I should skip Israel. I won’t be skipping Israel because (1) I’m Jewish and (2) that really defeats the purpose of the project. I’m trying to expose myself to new voices, not limit those voices based on political beliefs; and if I start eliminating countries based on political beliefs, what will be left? Maybe Luxembourg? 

Long story short: when I reach Israel, I’m bracing myself for a deluge of hateful comments.

So for this week’s episode, I gave myself a pep talk about how to handle the hate that shows up in the comments section of my social media posts. I reflect on what I’ve learned so far, so that when the hate shows up in my posts, I can be resilient and not get scared away by some nasty trolls. 

Books/teachers I mentioned during this episode:

(1) Don Miguel Ruiz and The Four Agreements, one of my favorite books.

(2) Byron Kate and The Work – I’d suggest reading one of her books first, and then trying The Work for yourself. It’s been incredibly healing and productive for me.

For Cyprus, I read Selfie and Other Stories by Nora Nadjarian. Nora Nadjarian is an Armenian–Cypriot poet and short story writer who writes in English, Armenian, and Greek. I didn’t find any information about a translator in my edition, so I’m guessing she either wrote this in English or wrote it first in another language and then translated it herself.

When I was picking a book for Cyprus, I found two authors who were born there and have books available in English: Nora Nadjarian and Alex Michaelides. I had already read two of Michaelides’ novels: The Maidens and The Silent Patient. I LOVED both of those books and will eventually read The Fury, but in the interest of broadening my horizons, I picked Nadjarian for my quest.

Selfie and Other Stories was a short, fast read which I really appreciated because it was the seventeenth of eighteen books for the C countries, and I was eager to cross the C’s off my list. There’s just something so satisfying about being able to say I’ve finished the ABC countries. Like,I now truly believe that I will finish this quest in the foreseeable future. I was committed to this quest long ago, back when I was reading a collection of short stories for Afghanistan, but now that I can say I’m on the D countries, I feel like I can speak about this project with more authority and confidence.

But I digress!

I enjoyed Selfie and Other Stories but it did not leave much of an impression on me. As I read it, I enjoyed the overlapping, sometimes mingling stories, but I’m struggling to write about it now because I don’t remember much of what happened. Partly that’s my fault, because I finished the book a month ago, but mostly it’s because the stories were a bit gauzy and hazy. When a story is truly memorable, then I can recall its contours years later.

But perhaps that was the point of this collection. Maybe it was meant to be hazy and gauzy, like handfuls of sand falling through your fingers. Or, maybe I just had “literary short story fatigue,” which is obviously not a medical condition but should be. Before Cyprus, I read My Favorite Girlfriend Was A French Bulldog for Cuba, which was a literary novel that felt like a string of short stories, so perhaps after all the shifting perspectives of My Favorite Girlfriend, my brain was craving something a little more concrete.

Outside of my Read Around the World quest, I consciously vary the types of books I read so I do not burn out on a particular genre. These are the last five audiobooks I read:

• How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu: A blend of sci-fi, speculative fiction, dystopia, and fantasy
• The Last Devil to Die (Thursday Murder Club #4) by Richard Osman: Murder mystery
• The Grace Year by Kim Liggett: Another blend of sci-fi, speculative fiction, dystopia, and fantasy
• Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold: Sci-fi
• The Overstay by Richard Powers: Literary fiction

Aaaaaand now I’m laughing at myself, because I have obviously not been following my own advice. Clearly I’ve been on a sci-fi bender in recent months, but I did squeeze in a murder mystery to spice things up and I’m currently reading Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell which is very much NOT sci-fi.

OKAY. I believe that is enough rambling for one post. Can you tell I am supposed to be revising my novel-in-progess as soon as I hit publish on this post? Or maybe I just feel guilty for not having more to say about my book for Cyprus…

For Cuba, I read My Favorite Girlfriend Was A French Bulldog by Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, translated by Megan McDowell. It’s a novel told in fifteen stories that are linked together–and that’s where I’m going to stop. The book cover’s blurb explains how the stories are linked, but I think I would have enjoyed the book even more if I had less information going into it. I’m going to omit any potential spoilers if you are the sort of reader who skips the book description (I’m looking right at my bookworm friend Katelin right now).

This book is a novel but it felt like a collection of wildly different short stories. One chapter was like a Biblical parable while another was a dystopian episode from 1984: The Cuba Edition. There’s a chapter written in verse about a marriage gone wrong and another chapter that feels like a fever chapter. The stories grapple with loneliness, family, immigration, and identity.

For me, the book was more about mood than story. If you only like traditional novels that follow the hero’s journey with clearly developed characters, My Favorite Girlfriend Was A French Bulldog is not for you. But if you like poetry, or you want to ruminate upon the human experience, or you just want a divisive pick that will stir up debate for your book club, then holy crap, do I have a book for you!

My Favorite Girlfriend Was A French Bulldog is not the sort of book I would have read before embarking on my Read Around the World quest. I was a genre fiction girl, alternating between mystery, fantasy, sci-fi, romance and the occasional thriller. I thought I loathed literary fiction and avoided it at all costs. When my muse suggested this project, I partly resisted the idea because I suspected that for many countries, the only books I would find translated into English would be literary. And I was right! For whatever reason, the literary works are more often than not the ones that are translated and made available to English-speaking audience.

Except it turns out that I enjoy literary fiction. In fact, I might be falling in love with literary fiction–but that’s another post (or podcast episode!) all together.

Maybe I won’t enjoy ever work of literary fiction that I encounter on my quest, but I thoroughly enjoyed My Favorite Girlfriend Was A French Bulldog, even when it was obscure and felt like I was looking through a kaleidoscope at a painting, catching glimmers of truth, shattered glimpses of the human experience.

I continued my Brazilian bender this week, but I swear, I HAD to. Mother Gaia will soon be releasing The Posthumous Investigation, a video game inspired by four of Machado’s works– The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubás, Dom Casmurro, Quincas Borba, and The Alienist– and I had to finish Quincas Borba and The Alienist so I can play the game.

This week’s episode was inspired by Quincas Borba, a novel about a man who suddenly comes into a fortune and moves to Rio de Janeiro, where he is swindled by social climbers and avaricious leeches. What follows is a scathing satire of Brazil in the 1800s that dives into lots of interesting themes, engaging the reader in thought-provoking questions about sanity, friendship, wealth, and politics.

Of all those questions, I was most drawn to the theme of friendship, because I have been dealing with Friend Drama for the past year. As I discuss in this week’s episode, I had to distance myself from a friend because our friendship had become a source of stress and anxiety. It was toxic, but I still felt guilty drawing my boundaries.

I recorded about twenty minutes of this episode and then deleted it and started over. Then, when I had to finished episode, I almost decided to just not post an episode this week. That’s a sign that for whatever reason, I really need to share this work I’ve been processing. If it helps someone who is struggling with a friendship, amazing; but I think publishing this episode was of vital importance to my soul. It helped me release some lingering grief over a friendship that had to end even though I will always love that friend and wish her the best.

p.s. Yes, I struggled with hitting publish on these show notes as well. Big breath–here I go!

For Croatia, I read Baba Yaga Laid An Egg by Dubravka Ugrešić, translated from Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Celia Hawkesworth, and Mark Thompson. Although I don’t speak Croatian, I can tell the translators did a first class job because they included a lot of rhyming verse that flowed beautifully in English. How did the translators capture the spirit and language of this book and also get the verses to rhyme in English??? Obviously someone struck a deal with the devil.

Or maybe they struck a deal with Baba Yaga.

I only recently became acquainted with Baba Yaga when Pippa and I read The Door By The Staircase by Katherine Marsh and wow, that mythical character is WILD. Baba Yaga is a crone/hag/witch who lives in the woods in a hut with chicken legs. Sometimes she is childless but sometimes she has a daughter and still other times she has forty-one daughters. She might be helpful to children or hapless heroes searching for their princess loves. Or she might cook the children in a stew.

She also flies around in a mortar.

When I was searching for my Croatian book, and this title came to my attention, I thought, Ooooh. I love witch stories. When I read a little more about the book, and learned that it is part of The Myth series, which challenges authors to retell a myth in a contemporary and memorable way, and that this particular Baba Yaga retelling had a feminist bent, I was 110% in because I am obsessed with feminist retellings of old mythical stories.

The story is structured as a triptych. In part one, the story is told from the first person by a character who is the author of the book. She is dealing with her aging mother and then goes on a trip with Aba Bagay, a young folklore graduate student who annoys the crap out of the author. In part two, there is a story of three older women who visit a spa turned wellness center. Finally, the third section is a letter from Dr. Aba Bagay to the editor of the book, explaining the symbolism and imagery of the story in Part 2.

This was a chewy intellectual read that would make for the subject of a very interesting college essay. If I had encountered this book during my college days, it might have tempted me to abandon my history major and find a way to study folklore instead. Perhaps as a minor in our women’s studies department? (At the time I attended Dartmouth, we were not allowed to major in women’s studies.) (And as you can see, I’m giving this tangent a lot of serious thought, as if in an alternate dimension, there is a Courtney who pursues graduate studies in folklore.)

But as I was trying to say in the last paragraph, this book would make for an interesting discussion in a college essay, but it’s hard to pin it down in a blog post. I feel as if I should be explaining all the imagery and symbolism and the way Ugrešić put the reader on high alert because the novel is called Baba Yaga Laid an Egg but we are immediately thrown off balance by the absence of an obvious Baba Yaga, so we become determined to spot Baba Yaga’s appearance, not quite certain if the author’s mother is an iteration of Baba Yaga, or if the three older women at the wellness center combine to be a single Baba Yaga, or if they each stand alone as her own version of Baba Yaga. Then, in regards to the final part of the triptych, I kept flip-flopping between thinking (1) the author is taking the piss out of academia and (2) the author is deadly serious and this analysis is sincere and intended to challenge our understanding of folklore. In the end, it was probably a bit of both.

At least I can make this point: this book made me think and ponder and ruminate, especially about the ways that folklore influences our sense of self and culture, and how the stories of hags lurking the woods were told to tame women into dutiful wives and mothers. I’m still thinking about it weeks later as I try to tame its plot and characters into a blog post. But perhaps I’m missing the point. Instead of trying to tame Baba Yaga Laid An Egg into a concise analysis, I should let it be the wild creature it is. Let the story trample the woods, evade an easy analysis, and be gloriously wild and free as all women should be.

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.