This has been quite the semester – there are three main things that I’ve learned that I will carry forward into next semester and the rest of my life. 

Slow down and balance. During high school, I was a control freak about time, scheduling every minute of every day. When I skated, when I did homework, when I read, when I wrote, were all laid out in google doc where I planned ahead for days. If I didn’t finish something in time, I sacrificed sleep. But this semester, I started college apps early and took early dismissal, and loosened my grip. During this “time off,” I learned that I’m not and never will be cut out for 16-hour days, and no one should be expected to. I also learned that I was sacrificing my health and quality of life to get work done that I was scheduling for myself – and that doesn’t make me better or more capable; it just means I’ve gotten tunnel vision, and my priorities are off. Getting a text asking to hang out the next day and feeling stressed because I had wanted to finish a book that day and then immediately wondering if I could stay up to do both and how little sleep was enough so that I could still get up early the next day to skate – that isn’t normal. I love studying and reading and discovering new worlds through documentaries and podcasts, but there’s so much more to life than what I can do on my own and the tangible things I can squeeze out of every second. There are times when I just need to sit down and get it done, but there is also infinite value in slowing down and regaining perspective and balance. Life demands both mindsets. To my fellow seniors, give yourself a break. Especially after this semester. 

Find your people. As someone who consistently scored about 90% introverted on 16personalities since 8th grade, I never had many friends in high school, and until this semester, a part of me was never really okay with that. I had a number of romantic endeavors that failed before they ever got off the ground and a number of friendships that seemed promising at first but then sizzled because one of us never texted back. This semester though, I’ve come to terms with that. I learned to see every “failed” endeavor at a (romantic or platonic) relationship as another experience, a chance to see how the other person handled the relationship and to see what their life is like for the brief time that I’m on its fringes. I’ve spent more time hanging out with my closest friends, and made a lot of online friends from summer camps that I can bond with over shared interests. I learned that not every relationship has to work out – most won’t. I shouldn’t force anything, and if it’s not working, it’s probably not me, and it’s probably not them either. It’s just both of us together, and it’s too bad, but there are people for almost everyone, so I shouldn’t stop trying to meet new people from different backgrounds and interests, and I shouldn’t be scared it won’t work out – it doesn’t need to in order for it to mean something.

Books are more than their plots. It was difficult to put this idea into words, but AP Literature made the shift from analyzing the characters within the context of the plot (as we’ve been doing throughout high school) to trying to extract a larger meaning from the plot that the author was trying to convey. I liked to consider historical context and the author’s life/intent whenever I read a book, but this went way deeper. I realized that the question we were answering was, what was the author trying to say about the world using the plot, the characters, and the events? Connecting fictional events in a book with an author’s larger meaning totally outside of the plot was a new concept for me, and my difficulty with this concept returned to me in the form of an unfortunate grade on the Summer Reading Timed Writing. As I looked over my rubric, I thought: I clearly misunderstood the assignment. I am still working on writing a better analytical essay and connecting the plot with a larger meaning. This ongoing effort provoked thought and opened doors for me in my independent reading and in the two books we read this semester; it’s helped me view fictional writing in a different light. 

As for advice for incoming seniors, I would recommend starting college applications early for those who are applying. Just start. Starting is always the hardest. Set aside an hour or two on a weekend to get a feel for which colleges you want to apply to, how much time it will take you, and when you’ll do what you have to do. Having a plan offers a lot of peace of mind. Sometimes, it can get harder to start the later it gets in the semester as excuses become normalized, so just gather up your willpower and do it. 

Also, I would advise incoming seniors to really sit down and read these two assigned books (As I Lay Dying and Beloved), word for word, twice or three times if they are inclined. I would argue that AP Literature is as much about life as it is about literature, and about how the two intersect. These two books come from very different corners of America and each say different things about life; there’s so much to learn from them about history and human nature. It’s an amazing opportunity to have the resources provided by Mrs. Trowbridge and the thoughts/ideas of your peers with you as you discuss and explore these wonderful books.

This week, I’m jumping back into reflecting on some of the books I’ve had the chance to read this year. Again, these tidbits are by no means critical viewpoints, summaries, or book reviews; mostly, they are just a conglomerate of the feelings and thoughts that come to mind when I think of each book. Here are the last six books on my list, in no order of preference. 

Erik Larson: The Splendid and the Vile

I picked up this book from the library after stumbling upon the Mass Observation archive of the letters and diaries of those who lived through the London Blitz in World War II. A story of Churchill and his family during World War II, this book promised an intimate telling of what it was like to be under the spotlight of history — to feel the splendid and the vile parts of humanity that were just as overwhelming and inexplicable when it concerned one family as when it concerned millions. It delivered on this expectation, and also turned out to be something I never anticipated: a page-turner. By telling stories, from Churchill’s sudden outbursts of boyish joy, to his long days of brooding, to his unshakeable, contagious resolve to resist Nazi Germany, Larson captured Churchill’s contradictions and complexities: the man of a moment like no other. 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: My Own Words

As both a feminist and a follower of the Supreme Court myself, Ginsburg’s life and career fascinate me. From litigating for gender equality before the law in the 1970s, to penning concise and pithy dissents from the bench during the 2010s, Ginsburg displayed a deep respect and understanding of her colleagues and the justice system that they served. Her life spanned decades of efforts towards equity and inclusion that transformed the fabric of US society. When she graduated first in her class at law school in 1959, she struggled to find a job at a law firm because she was a woman; six decades later, three women serve on our Supreme Court. When she was appealing to a 1970s Supreme Court consisting of nine men, she cleverly focused on how assumptions about gender roles in society negatively affected men as well as women; she often argued cases, such as Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld and Frontiero v. Richardson, where the law prevented men from obtaining certain protections or benefits because they were seen as the breadwinners of society. I believe that this idea – that gender inequality is about both men and women – continues to be relevant today.
(Fun fact: Ginsburg was one of Vladimir Nabokov’s students at Cornell University, and she cites him as one who changed the way she reads and writes.) 

9/11 Commission Report

This book caught my eye while perusing through the library a few days after 9/11. Although I will never fully understand what it was like to live through 9/11, I wanted to gain insight into an event that is so deeply ingrained into the American psyche and is a shared experience for so many of my fellow citizens. Exploring the information “wall” between the law enforcement and intelligence agencies of our government and trying to juggle the names of an endless list of organizations in my mind, I began to understand how large, complicated, and interwoven our government agencies and the problems they face are. Among countless fascinating ideas within the pages of this book, one is how globalization, which deeply changed the world from culture to trade to information, also transformed terrorism. How do we go after a terrorist agency that has no expensive equipment, no vulnerable attack locations, has hierarchies upon hierarchies of members who vary in the degree of their loyalty in every corner of the world, and cannot even be considered a nation under international law? Traditional warfare between great armies and powerful heads of state is no longer the only norm; the FBI estimated that the entire 9/11 operation cost Al Qaeda $400,000-500,000. How do we protect ourselves in an age where it takes so little resources by so few people bound by nothing but belief to cause so much damage? 

Erika Sanchez: I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter

The spunk and ambition of the main character in this book, a girl on the verge of going to college, resonated with me deeply. Julia reaches for books to travel beyond her home. She refuses to adhere to her parents’ conception of womanhood and is determined to go after life loudly, flamboyantly, and unapologetically. “I want to see the world. I want so many things sometimes I can’t even stand it. I feel like I’m going to explode.” Through her, I also met someone who, were she real, would have lived an hour away from me with her undocumented parents in a low-income Chicago neighborhood filled with gangs. I had spent so much time reading about the racial inequality and gun violence in neighborhoods of Chicago just over an hour’s drive away from me; but Sánchez brought that world to life and defined it in a way that we rarely see on the news. 

Anthony Doerr: All the Light We Cannot See

Winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2015, All the Light We Cannot See tells the story of World War II from the perspective of a German boy who became a Nazi and a blind French girl who lives with her great-uncle during the occupation of France. Slowly, ubiquitously, Doerr lets the reader into the inner life of his characters. Their social circumstances and their opinions shrink in importance as we learn what it feels like to be Marie-Laure LeBlanc, who loves natural history and her father and books and the world around her; we learn what it feels like to be Werner Pfennig, who loves radios and science and has dreams of greatness and state-of-the-art technology. For me, their stories are a reminder that heroes and villains are more complicated than they seem. One of my favorite quotes from this book is, “Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever,” because it speaks to the ephemerality of life that is ever more acutely evident during wartime. 

Sheryl Sandberg: Lean In

What is feminism? What is gender equality? What is the right way to work towards them? These questions have inspired considerable debate and thought for centuries, and in Lean In, Sandberg, as the COO of Facebook, tells her story and explains her view on how women can claim their agency and achieve satisfaction in the workplace and in the home. I questioned her ideas on certain things, such as the complex, often theoretical, question of whether it is better to use methods that pander to traditional stereotypes to make it to the top yourself and then affect change for others, or to band together with your peers and make your voice heard (as part of a grassroots movement, if you will). Her advice given along the former lines contrasted with Charles Yu’s stance on how to dismantle oppression: “Working your way up the system doesn’t mean you beat the system. It strengthens it. It’s what the system depends on.” Nevertheless, as a girl who aspires to go into a STEM-related field where the gender gap persists, more so the higher you look on the corporate ladder, I felt inspired by Sandberg’s story.
(Fun fact: After reading this book, I wrote a column as a guest on the North Star called “Gender Inequality in the Workplace.” Check it out! ;D)