When I was seventeen, I spent a summer living with a large extended family in a poor, rural village in Honduras. I went through Amigos de las Americas, a sort of mini-peace corps I’d trained for all year long. When I first got to the village, I was dropped off at a huge dinner. Doña Angela, the matriarch of the extended family, welcomed me in and asked my name, in Spanish, obviously.
“Carlos!” I answered her. Carlos is the Spanish form of Charles.
She pointed to a 10 year old boy sitting on the floor, and totally earnestly—with the few dozen family members present watching—said, “we already have a Carlos. Do you have another name?”
“Miguel,” I said. Miguel is the Spanish form of Michael.
She smiled huge and shouted “Miguel!” then everyone else shouted it, too. She gave me a huge hug, then I ambled around the room and each of the 30 or so other people there did the same thing, hugging me, beaming, “Miguel!”
I had a great time and learned so much that summer. Everywhere I went was like the bar in Cheers. People would smile and shout, “Miguel!” or occasionally “Carlos Mi-gue-el” in a sing-songy way. It was awesome except for one fact: my name isn’t Michael. It’s never been Michael. Nobody has ever called me Michael. I had never wanted to be called Michael or considered changing my name to Michael. There are no Michaels in my immediate family and at the time there were no Michaels in my friend group.
But in the moment when Doña Angela asked if I had another name, I panicked and said Miguel. I’ll never know why I panicked and gave them a random name, but it’s something I’ve been thinking (and laughing) about a lot lately.
🍌Quote of the Week
“The precision of naming takes away from the uniqueness of seeing.”
-Pierre Bonnard
🍌In the Newsletter This Week
Original Writing: Patrick Collison’s Favorite Books
On My Mind: Naming vs. Knowing
My Favorite Things: All Quiet on the Western Front
Crowd Work: Book Recommendations
Original Writing
🍌Patrick Collison’s Favorite Books
(This is not an essay or story per se.) I love to read, and I love to collect other people’s reading lists. Patrick Collison is the founder of one of Silicon Valley’s most exciting and rapidly growing companies, Stripe. He is also a renowned bibliophile with his own publishing house. He publishes all the books he owns on his website, but they’re jumbled and it’s hard to tell which one he likes the most, so I un-jumbled the list and added some commentary.
Click here to read the whole thing.
On My Mind
🍌Naming vs. Knowing
This began as a short update on my writing centered around a big conflict I’ve felt lately, but grew long enough that I decided it should be its own essay.
Lately, I am really happy with where this newsletter is going. It is still early and small, but I am connecting with more readers than ever, and I am happy with the quality and quantity of what I have been able to put out. However, I still feel a tension when someone asks me how the writing is going.
Click here to read the rest of the essay.
My Favorite Things
🍌All Quiet on the Western Front
I taught English and SAT prep in China for three years. The company I worked for had a very specific competitive advantage. Most of the enormous Chinese tutoring industry was still built around the “memorize as many words as possible as fast as possible” approach to learning English. Our company instead had the students read compelling, age-appropriate novels so that they would learn words in context.
In our company, for students to read a novel, a teacher had to pick it out, get it preliminarily approved, develop a study guide complete with Chinese translations of difficult or important words, and then get the final approval again. Once this process was complete, any teacher could reuse that novel as often as they got a new groups of students.
One of my colleagues developed a guide for All Quiet on the Western Front, but for some reason it did not appeal to me for the first year I worked there, despite it being every other high school teacher’s first choice. After resisting for months, one day I was bored and I picked up an office copy of the novel and study guide on the way out the door. I started reading it on the subway, and I couldn’t put it down until I finished it after 2:00am that night. It is relatable but gripping, beautiful but horrifying—a true underappreciated classic.
So I was excited to see the below trailer from Netflix (that would have fit perfectly into my essay from last week about how trailers are an art form unto themselves). The movie looks great and is part of a great film tradition–as the 1930 film adaptation of the novel was the first book adaptation to win the Oscar for Best Picture. (Warning: it’s a film about the horrors of war, so even the trailer is a bit distressing.)
Crowd Work
In standup comedy, crowd work is when the comic speaks directly with the audience. This section is a place for us to directly engage one another.
Who do you go to for book recommendations? I want to explore other people’s reading lists—do you have a favorite?
That’s all for now—see you next week!
Thanks to everyone who edited, proofread, and gave feedback on the writing in this issue. And thanks for reading Thought Bananas!
When I was studying in Istanbul, I worked as an English teachers in a language school (so I mostly tutored adults). One of the exercises I had developed then was based on this book - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/665157.A_Concise_Chinese_English_Dictionary_for_Lovers. The book is actually written in "broken" English (the protagonist/narrator is learning English as the plot evolves), so students had to rewrite passages, correcting the many quirks and mistakes.