Mobility

14 years ago, I accepted the opportunity of a lifetime. My company moved me to Beijing for a 2 year assignment as Marketing Director for our chocolate gifting business. Before then, I'd never even been to China. During this time of adventure, I learned to navigate the cultural differences, how to speak Mandarin, and new perspectives on my home country of the U.S.

I loved Mobility because it took me back to that time of being an expat. Although Lydia Kiesling's main character doesn't travel to Asia, she beautifully captures the unsettling feeling of being in a foreign place, being… show more.

Bunny is an American teenager in Azerbaijan. Her father is a diplomat. She grows up in a world where oil is everything, listening to the language of the adults around her as some want their share of the profits reaped by this energy source while (a few) others point out the inequities in this industry and its potential long-term effects on the world.

What is fascinating as well is how she herself becomes part of this same world when she is an adult, almost as if she cannot help but be subsumed by the vast structure of the oil industry.

Bunny Glenn is confused about a lot of things: home and where to find it; the force of her appetites; how people figure out what work is right for them; and oil—the ultimate hyper object that touches every aspect of modern life and makes us all complicit in its extraction.

After years of adulting in late-stage capitalism and feeling trapped in a series of intersecting double-binds, I was ready for a book like this, one that asks urgent questions about our world while recognizing the bewildering inertia that so often accompanies the answers.