June 22, 2022
Here is a random list of books I have read so far that I recommend:
- The Book of Form and Emptiness: A Novel by Ruth Ozeki- I finished this book a week ago and I literally could not put it down. It is my first time reading anything by Ruth Ozeki (a fellow Smith grad 🙂 ) and her writing just blew me away. If you haven’t read the book yet, it’s about a young boy named Benny Oh who lives with his mom Annabelle, and both are coping with the death of Kenji, Benny’s dad. As Benny grows older he struggles to fit in at school and is bullied because he hears voices from objects. He finds refuge in a mysterious corner of the library, where he meets an artist named The Aleph and a poet and philosopher named Slavoj, who help him navigate his journey through his grief and his ability to hear voices. I thought it was pretty amazing how Ozeki let the book be the narrator of the story and have a back-and-forth dialogue with Benny. The book also helped remind me why I love reading so much, because they really do open you up to different ways of viewing the world. It also talks about clutter and how it’s connected to grief and loss, and how getting rid of clutter is a challenging emotional and spiritual process. Annabelle struggles to get rid of a lot of things in her home that are taking up space, such as news clippings from her job and Kenji’s belongings, because many of these things play a crucial role in how she grapples with the grief and loss of losing Kenji and her dealing with Benny growing up and changing as he goes through adolescence. There is a clear-your-clutter expert in the book who is based on Marie Kondo, and it alludes to a lot of the backlash that Kondo received from critics about handling books (there’s a Bustle article that talks more about the racist and classist overtones of these criticisms.) To be honest, I haven’t yet read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but I will say that organizing my bookshelves has brought me peace of mind, and when I was in 11th grade I decided to give away a lot of my old books because I had read a book called Clear Your Clutter with Feng-Shui by Karen Kingston and it said that clutter affects the way people treat you. For some reason I thought that the reason I was struggling to make friends was because I was holding on to too many books (which, looking back, probably wasn’t the reason at all), so I gave a lot of my old books away. Even though I thought I would miss those books, I have since accumulated more books and still have yet to finish even those, in addition to my stack of 12-13 books from the public library. Overall, The Book of Form and Emptiness is an amazing read and I recommend it.
- Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole: Susan Cain– Wow. This book. It really helped me unpack, heal, reflect and understand myself. I often thought my sadness and depression was things to be ashamed of, but this book taught me that sadness is human and that it can help give meaning to life, especially when it comes to dealing with the inevitable truth that we will experience loss, death, grief throughout life and it’s the not absence of these events but how we make meaning of them that matters. Honestly I wouldn’t mind reading it again. It helped me understand why I love the key E minor so much or why I love dramas and sad music by Sam Smith and Celine Dion so much, and why I cried as a kid (and still do) whenever I heard Celine Dion’s music (especially whenever the theme song to Titanic would come on while I was ice skating at the mall at 4. Golly geez.), or why I spent a month crying over George Michael’s death, why I cried for the longest time over anyone’s death (I recently broke down a few months ago while chanting in front of my Buddhist altar because Madeleine Albright passed away and I had finished her memoir Hell and Other Destinations some time before that and really loved it. It gave me a lot of insight into her diplomacy and dialogues with leaders and the life she led.) And unsurprisingly, this being a book about sorrow, I definitely teared up at some parts and even after reading the book got a little choked up just thinking about it. It also helped me understand that love is a process, not a one-and-done thing. I found myself resonating with the chapter in the book on longing because I had been struggling with romantic feelings for someone and reading the chapter helped me understand on a deeper level why I felt those kinds of feelings for this person. It’s still a process I am going through, but I’m growing so much emotionally and spiritually in the process of learning to love myself. Susan Cain gave me the space to tap into my authentic self and be honest about my emotions, just as she gave me the space to be comfortable in my skin as an introvert with her previous book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (ironically, I’ve become an extrovert when I write, as you can see from this long-winded blog post.)
- The Count of Monte Cristo: Alexander Dumas (there’s a lot of editions out there; the version I read was the Penguin Classics version)- I remember reading the abridged version of this book in 10th grade English, and while I enjoyed studying it I would get a tinge of envy whenever I saw the pre-IB (International Baccalaureate) kids toting around their 1,000 page copies of the unabridged version and decided one day that I was going to finish the unabridged version, too. Fast forward and that desire still held sway over my bookaholic imagination, so I finally asked my aunt to send me a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo for my birthday (in addition to a copy of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, another big-ass book. I’m in the middle of reading it though and it’s pretty good.) As you can guess, I was positively elated when I received them, and decided to finally open those first pages and dive in. Just to give a brief summary if you haven’t read the book yet, it’s about a young man named Edmond Dantes who lives a pretty happy life with his fiancee, Mercedes, but at their engagement ceremony, he is unjustly arrested and accused for a crime he didn’t commit, and is imprisoned in the Chateau d’If for several years. He meets an old priest named Abbe Faria and escapes the prison under the disguise of The Count of Monte Cristo. From there he gets revenge on the people who tormented him. Like I said, I loved reading the abridged version and I loved the 2002 movie with Guy Pearce as Fernand Mondego and Jim Caviezel as Edmond Dantes/ Count of Monte Cristo, but the unabridged is like a big juicy Big Mac fresh off the griddle and is just dripping in meat juices (as a vegan whose never had a Big Mac in my life though, I’d need testimony to see if I’m telling the truth.) It is juicy with detail and also violence, sex, revenge, and other intense moments. I took a long hiatus in the middle of the book, and darn did I forget some key plot points! But I finally finished it because well, I wanted to know what happened at the end. I’m glad I took my time reading it though because it is a pretty thrilling read and something that I kind of wanted to savor.
- Finding Me: Viola Davis- honestly, right after reading this book, I tried to articulate my thoughts and failed miserably. Ho.ly. shit. I remember Viola Davis coming to speak at my alma mater during a free Q and A panel and I was sitting in the balcony and she made eye contact with me. I was looking at her briefly but as I tried to put on a calm composed appearance, inside I was screaming with joy and jumping around as if one of The Backstreet Boys had kissed me on the cheek at a concert. I. was. fangirling and almost burst with excitement. But as this was a public event and I knew I wasn’t the only one fangirling in that auditorium, I kept quiet. But oh god, during and after the event I was in heaven and was deeply appreciative that I actually got to attend a free (key word: FREE, not just Turbo-Tax free-free-free, not just Free-Willy-free, but free.) event where Viola Davis was talking about her work and career. When I finally read her memoir, though, I slowed down and reflected. Davis gave me the real about having an acting career and that it takes grit and a long process of building your self-worth and overcoming imposter syndrome when you get that big break, and then continuing that process throughout your career. She also gave me an honest portrait of acting, because I didn’t know much about the field, so until I read Finding Me I didn’t know that theatre acting and film acting have as many differences as they have similarities. The salary range of actors was also a new statistic for me, because before I had always had this naïve idea that actors made billions and billions of dollars for each movie they starred in, but the reality is that a small percentage make somewhere around $50,000 (please correct me if I’m off the mark though) each year. Even though I’m not a professional actor, Davis gave me some lessons about the career and business of being a working actor to think about as I figure out whether to have a professional music career or not. One lesson is that you need grit and need to take rejection well, and not every gig is going to be stellar but it is an opportunity to work so take it. I was fortunate to have been paid for some music gigs, other times I played for free, and sometimes I think, “I just want to get paid for what I do” and other times I play tug-of-war with myself and my ego and say “It’s for my career/ for exposure/ I need to put myself out there.” Davis taught me that whatever the ups and downs of my music career, I need to just keep doing my best and not worry about how I measure up to others or whether I deserve success or not. I really loved the part where she meets with one of her idols, Meryl Streep, though (they acted together in the film Doubt), and I thought the same because I’m sure I would have been internally squealing with joy and a bundle of nerves at the same time if I met, let alone got to collaborate with, one of my favorite actors or musicians. Davis said that Streep is a very down-to-earth person though and even though she thought she was the only one dealing with imposter syndrome, Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman and the other actors that Davis worked with admitted they, too, struggled with imposter syndrome during their careers. This part really encouraged me because I struggle with imposter syndrome, so reading this made me feel less alone. After reading Finding Me, I watched an interview from one of my favorite series, Actors on Actors, and Viola Davis and Samuel L. Jackson talk about their careers and the daily work that goes into them.
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