I am recently back from a trip to Zimbabwe where I went to visit a friend and learn about her non-profit organization, Tariro, that helps keep teenage girls in school. It was my first trip to Africa, and as I was packing I became somewhat—okay, very—preoccupied with protecting my body against the potential assaults of opportunistic microbes. I visited a travel doctor, got myself heavily inoculated, purchased a water purifying wand, filled dozens of Zip-lock bags with home remedies. You get the picture. In the midst of all that body-protecting obsession, I paid little attention to what I would read! At the last minute I grabbed three paperbacks in my “To Read” stack and headed out.

On the marathon seventeen-hour plane trip from Atlanta to Johannesburg, I read Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Fine, no problem there, I was still in a U.S. (European?) frame of mind. But once on the ground in Zimbabwe, I found myself reading—late at night when my young friend released me—Lisa Genova’s powerful novel, Still Alice, about a fifty-year-old Harvard professor who is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. It would have been a disconcerting read anywhere, but it seemed a downright strange reading choice to pick up after a day of traveling on pot-hole-ridden streets to a rural township where the girls we visited live without running water, plumbing, or electricity. I considered holding off on finishing the book until returning to the U.S. but I kept on, partly because the book held my attention and partly because it served as a kind of escape from the poverty I was seeing.

When I finished that book I moved on to Jennifer Gilmore’s Golden Country, a novel about Jewish immigrants in the U.S. in the early twentieth century. A lovely novel, full of wit and wisdom and quirky characters. But again, I was reading about a world so removed from my immediate surroundings that I kept asking myself why I was reading this book, now, here.

Which of course raises larger questions: How do we ever choose to read what we read? What informs these choices? (Is there a should?) Do we read to have our own sense of the world confirmed, or challenged? Is reading an activity that should stabilize us, or destabilize us? Or both?

I began thinking about the Zimbabwean authors I might have been reading? I wish I’d researched them before I went. Only when I got home did I remember Alexandra Fuller’s wonderful memoir Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, much of which takes place in Zimbabwe (the former Rhodesia). If I’d thought about it I would definitely have brought that book which is remarkable for its voice and honesty. Also, Zimbabwean Tsitsi Dangarembga’s novel Nervous Conditions.

I can’t help but wonder how my own writing might be read in Zimbabwe. With its focus on such U.S. preoccupations as dysfunctional families, school violence, transgender identity, would it make any sense?

I’m raising questions here for which I don’t have answers. I know that what I read in Zimbabwe engaged me, despite the discordance between subject and place. Maybe that’s all that matters…I invite your responses.