Conversation with Will Anderson
#Scurf205: On the tradition of reading on family holidays, finding community on Goodreads and what reading can mean to us
For this edition of Conversations, I chat with Will Anderson, a colleague from one of my previous organisations, the World Resources Institute (WRI). He lives in Washington, D.C., where he reads voraciously and hangs out in parks with his friends. At WRI, he finances local organizations that restore the world’s degraded land.
X (formerly Twitter): https://x.com/WW_Anderson
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/18911104-will
What is the most satisfying part of your job as the Senior Portfolio Manager, TerraFund, Global Restoration Initiative at WRI?
It’s the chance to connect local organizations that restore degraded land – and the communities that they represent – with grants, low-interest loans, and equity investments. Every day, I get to work with real salt-of-the-earth people, experts in finance, project management, monitoring and evaluation, and communications that live across five continents. That global team has made more than 200 investments worth $60 million in under three years, enabling the world’s “restoration champions” to grow more than 55 million trees, restore 215,000 hectares, and pay 154,000 people to work. That’s pretty neat, and we’re just getting started.
You also read a lot. How do you decide on your to be read book list?
I’ll tell you how I found some new books today. After work, I stopped by Capitol Hill Books, an eclectic used bookstore in my neighborhood. I was scanning the shelves, and the name Edwidge Danticat caught my eye. Her 1994 début Breath, Eyes, Memory, a favorite of mine, is an emotional story of a young Haitian immigrant struggling to live in the United States, caught in a cycle of abuse. In a time when racist vitriol against Haitians is at an all-time high and the island nation struggles with overwhelming everyday violence, I wanted to sit with stories about Haitian people written for and by a Haitian author. So, I picked up Krik? Krak!, a short story collection by Danticat, and I’m eager to celebrate the resistance and power of this freedom-loving people as I read it.
Then, on my walk home, I stopped by a Little Free Library to check out the selection. The gems that I find make me think that my neighbors are the most voracious and generous readers in the world. I’ve been looking for a copy of Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary General of the U.N., for quite some time. When this book was published after he tragically died in a plane crash in 1961, the reading public found a man struggling with the weight of the job and his own spiritual drive to make the world a better place. So, I felt a little thrill when I opened the Little Free Library door, and there it was in a beautiful hardcover edition. I teach Sunday school to kids at my church, and I’m always looking for creative new ways to bring out their spiritual lives without boring them. I hope Hammarskjöld has something new to teach me.
How would you define your idea of a perfect reading nook/corner?
I have a massive leather chair that my parents bought 30 years ago and then gave me to furnish my first bare apartment in D.C. It sits right in the corner next to a bookshelf, facing a window that looks out onto the treetops of my leafy neighborhood. I like to open the window, pour myself a glass or wine or a cup of tea, and pick up my reading. Sometimes, I’ll turn the radio on and listen to the commercial-free classical music station while I read. Shout out to WETA Classical!
I know it's a little bit corny to ask, but can you share what reading has meant to you over the years?
It’s made my whole world. When I was a kid, I had to entertain myself because I was an only child. My dad read to me every night, and my house was full of books, ranging from tomes about Eleanor of Aquitaine, a favorite of my mom, to space odysseys, thanks to my dad’s fifty-year obsession with Star Trek. On vacation when I was a little kid, my parents and I would post up at the beach; we would each reach for our book and tune out the world. The typical schedule was: Eat, read, make a sandcastle, swim, eat, read, swim, read, eat, read, snooze. To be honest, it’s still what we do when we go on vacation together, and it’s pretty great.
When I was in middle school, we were living in the first golden age of young adult fiction. Everyone was reading, even the jocks. The Percy Jackson series transported nerds (me) into a world where Greek myths were real and where kids our age lived as demigods. The Hunger Games dramatized the dog-eat-dog world of our thirteen-year-old lives, turning the struggles of recess into bouts of life or death. When I was in high school, I suffered from bad acne, so I figured I might as well memorize a bunch of random history, which still comes in handy when watching Jeopardy! When I finally made it to university and grad school, I dove deep into social theory, ethnographies, French novels, and billion-page textbooks. The past six years at WRI, I’ve had to teach myself about the intricacies of restoration ecology and development finance, and I’ve read (and written) so many words that I couldn’t even guess the number to the right order of magnitude.
Are there books you go back to and re-read?
I recently started rereading childhood classics. I was especially impressed by Number the Stars by Lois Lowry, which deftly accomplishes the challenging task of teaching children about the Holocaust. I admire Lowry’s ability to comfort a young reader, overwhelmed by the horrors of mass death and persecution, with a seemingly everyday story of neighbors helping neighbors. She draws attention to the heroism of thousands of Danish people, who saved 95% of the country’s Jewish population by smuggling them to Sweden on fishing boats. By exposing a child to a story of daring heroism and good deeds, Lowry prepares her reader for the darker stories that are more representative of this sordid era.
At a time when the rich invest their billions in crackpot start-ups aiming to prolong human life or upload brains to mainframes, Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt came as a relief. When a child confronts death for the first time, they inevitably realize that one day life will end for them, too. In this gripping yet gentle parable, Babbitt reminds her young reader than eternal life has its challenges, too. Your friends change as you stay the same; your petty irritations get more and more deeply ingrained; and your desire to protect your secrets gnaw away until jealousy is all that remains inside. Sound familiar?
We all have those books and authors that we’ve been forever meaning to read but not really actually got around to. What are those titles for you?
There are a few massive tomes on my bookshelves that are embarrassing me after reading this question. Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad is swooning its siren song at me. (Yes, I know that’s in The Odyssey, but her translation of that masterpiece is magisterial!) Little Women by Louisa May Alcott is beckoning from its cozy spot, and I’ve been in the mood for a nineteenth-century classic recently. Maybe I should open the spooky The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins instead, so perfect to keep the Halloween season alive, or that new biography of the composer great Finnish composer Sibelius or…
There’s a triteness to this question, but I have to ask: How does your reading bleed into your work? Do you sometimes read books that are in some way related to your work at WRI?
It’s not trite! My job requires me to work with the leaders of hundreds of organizations across 30 different countries. I’ve learned from my more experienced colleagues that the best way to connect with these local leaders is to understand their lives, and reading is the easiest way for me to do that. For others, it may be films or short videos or podcasts, but for me, it’s books. Before I travel to a new place, I like to dive into a few novels written by people from that country and then complement that with a look at the country’s history and current politics.
I travel to Kenya often, and I like to chat with one of my close colleagues there about the political situation in our home countries. Paying close attention to how new laws and social movements affect each other’s lives make it easier for us to connect personally, and that in turn opens our minds to new ways of working. I’m also a fan of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, the Kenyan playwright, novelist, and activist who writes in the Kikuyu language. In one of our meandering conversations, I found out that this same colleague was also a fan and had even seen one of Ngũgĩ’s plays live, which made me immeasurably jealous.
Among paperbacks, audio books and e-readers, do you find a hierarchy? Or reading in any form works for you?
After I stare at a computer screen hour after hour at work, I like staring at paper instead when I get home. While I will happily read books of any size, font, and spine, I think that the French have it the best. There is nothing better than a classic, cheap Folio paperback. You fly through hundreds and hundreds of pages in a few hours thanks to the inviting, large font, and you can even fit these little books in the pocket of your jacket or jeans.
Thanks to Spotify’s recent expansion into audiobooks, I’ve listened to a few non-fiction titles during my long, head-clearing walks. I especially enjoyed Hammer and Hoe by Robin D.G. Kelley, about the deep organizing of homegrown labor activists in in1920s to 1940s Alabama, and The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins, which describes the murderous suppression of Indonesian communists in the 1960s. Because each writer has a strong ear for oral language and a consistent pace, both titles lent themselves to audio narration. I’m a firm believer that people should engage with literature in the way that is best for them, whether that’s via the computer screen, through their headphones, or on the printed page.
After reading a book for me a lot of times the instinct is to write about it, either for myself or publish a review for a magazine or journal. Or I sometimes read other people’s (usually my go-to literary critics’) reviews of them. Do you have a practice like this?
I read reviews off and on. If I’ve really loved a title, I’ll search out to understand how other people loved it, and I’m always thrilled to uncover a new angle or perspective about a book that I cherish. I’ll read reviews from friends I’ve had on Goodreads for more than a decade, people I’ve never met but whose judgments on literary merit I trust more than my own. Most of them have old-school screennames and avatars. Oddly, that anonymity makes me trust them even more.
But when I see a negative review of a work that I admire, I become stormy and indignant. “How dare they? What gives them the right to trash this masterpiece? Were they born under a rock?” It’s the Philadelphia in me. At the same time, when I don’t like a book, I let my dissatisfaction remain private. I don’t want to ruin someone else’s day, just like those nincompoops who hate The Age of Innocence make me want to rip my own hair out.
Do you follow the work of popular writers like Sally Rooney, Jhumpa Lahiri, Haruki Murakami, Ta-Nehisi Coates?
Funnily enough, I like all of these writers! I admire authors with a strong and compelling voice, and I think that fits all four of these folks. Rooney tells stories about ordinary people that are dripping in hatred for inequality and class discrimination. Lahiri exposed the intricacies of the lives of Indian American women – and then moved to Rome to learn and write in Italian, allowing her to tell a whole new set of stories. Murakami writes musical novels that mesmerize and perplex. Almost every literature lover has their Murakami phase, and mine got me through college. And Coates is calm and clear-eyed, systematically peeling away each layer of systemic oppression until the core of racial hatred and white supremacy stare back at the reader. I hope that all four of these writers – and hundreds more writing today – survive into the ages. Time will tell.
And finally, this recommendation corner:
Books you read recently that you enjoyed: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, which is the Great American Novel (Fight me!); Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman, which shatters the false distinction between history and memoir; and The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, which is a miracle bestseller that only a man who has read 10,000 books in 10 languages could ever write.
Classics you re-read: Every year, I re-experience Life? Or Theatre?, a graphic story in hundreds of gouaches created by the German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon. Telling the story of her family’s experience with suicide and her decision to live, even during the horrors of Nazi Germany, it is a work of literature like no other. French writer David Foenkinos wrote an excellent novel inspired from Salomon’s story that is also worth reading.
Books related to restoration, landscape and food: Native Hawaiian writers and their local allies continue to inspire me. Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai'i, edited by Hokulani K. Aikau and Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, flips the travel guide on its head and introduces the traveler to cultural landmarks, like century-old fishponds, that locals are restoring by reconnecting with their ancestry. A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty, edited by Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, Ikaika Hussey, and Erin Kuhanawaika'ala Wright, survey dozens of activists, including Native gender nonconforming people called Māhū, that are breathing life back into the land and the communities that call it home.
Read previous editions of Conversation here.