What About Adolf?: Honestly I didn’t know what to expect before seeing this film. But honestly it kept me on my toes. It’s about a couple named Elisabeth and Stephen, and Elisabeth invites her brother Thomas, her friend Rene and Thomas’s pregnant girlfriend to dinner one evening. When Elisabeth, Thomas, and Rene get to talking about what names Thomas and his girlfriend Anna have picked for their baby, Thomas leads them in a nearly 5 minute guessing game to see if they can correctly guess what the baby’s name will be. Finally, after they give up, Thomas tells them they will name the baby Adolf. Unsurprisingly, Elisabeth, Rene and Stephen are not happy because of Germany’s history with Adolf Hitler and how you can’t really separate the brutal legacy of that man from his name. All of them get into a heated argument about Thomas and Anna naming their baby after a dictator, and when Anna arrives it gets even more heated. Stephen is actually the one who is the most heated out of him, Elisabeth and Rene and gives Thomas all kinds of reasons why he shouldn’t name the baby after a dictator. The movie had all kinds of plot twists in it and sparked a serious and also darkly comic philosophical discussion on namesakes and whether some namesakes are more appropriate than others.
The Class: I saw one other French language film before this one called The Intouchables, and it was an incredible movie. I also really loved this one. I saw the movie Freedom Writers and it kind of reminded me of it. However, the way the education system is depicted in France is different from the way the education system is depicted in Freedom Writers, which took place in the United States. It’s based on a semiautobiographical novel and it’s about a white teacher in an inner-city school (apparently the guy who wrote the novel plays the main character in the film) who navigates how to inspire his students in their learning.
The Lunchbox: This is a really touching film. Seeing as how most of the movies I watch contain a lot of intense violence (ok, maybe not Quentin Tarantino violence, but I’m guessing you know what I mean) I needed this film to balance out my film repertoire. This movie is a beautiful story about how a woman who makes lunch as part of a lunchbox system in Mumbai where people deliver lunchboxes to employees at an office. The lunch the woman makes ends up going to to a guy who is almost retiring from work and has lost his wife and is feeling rather lonely and depressed. The food he makes for her is delicious and he writes little notes to her to express his appreciation for her food. Their exchange via notes develops into a powerful friendship over the course of the film. Honestly, watching the movie made me hungry for Indian food and it made me want to go back to India because I really loved the food there.
The Women’s Balcony: I haven’t seen too many movies set in Israel, and the movies and shows that I do watch about Judaism are usually set in America (Uncut Gems, A Serious Man, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel). This movie is about a synagogue in Israel that has a balcony for the women who attend the synagogue, but when the balcony collapses, the women try to raise money to get a new balcony, only to get pushback from their husbands and the young rabbi who keeps trying to put down their plans. Nevertheless, these women persevere even if the men keep telling them that their plan won’t work, and eventually they win some of the men over to their side to support their plan to build a new balcony. It truly was a beautiful film. I read a book a while ago called Being Jewish by Ari Goldman, and reading it gave me some pretty good insight that was helpful when watching this movie, especially because there are differences between the denominations of Judaism that I didn’t really know about before reading the book and watching The Women’s Balcony.
Ok, to be perfectly honest, after watching Uncut Gems I had to watch Good Time. Seriously. The filmmaking of Uncut Gems made me want to watch Good Time. Like a lot of people, I saw Robert Pattison in the Twilight movie franchise and thought he was good in it, but I hadn’t seen his other films like Cosmopolis, The Lighthouse or Good Time. I finally watched it and honestly it was amazing.
The movie is about a guy named Connie (played by Robert Pattinson) whose brother, Nick (Benny Safdie), ends up at Rikers Island after the two guys attempt to rob a bank, only to have their plans to rob the bank backfire and Nick ends up going to jail (my one thought though was why the choice of bank robbery masks? It kind of looked like they were wearing blackface, but maybe I’m being paranoid, I don’t know.) Connie needs bail money to get Nick out Connie does what he can to get his brother out of jail, and when he finds the guy he thinks is Nick at the hospital and wheels him out, he stays with a Black woman named Annie and her granddaughter, Crystal (Taliah Webster). Connie involves the daughter in his plan to get Nick away from the hospital, but what ends up happening is that Connie finds out that the guy he thought was Nick isn’t really Nick but some other guy named Ray (Buddy Duress) who, like Nick, looked beaten up badly. Connie thinks of leaving the guy but can’t because the guy opens up to him this story about this bottle of LSD he bought from his friends that’s worth more than a pretty penny, and how it got left in an amusement park and the guy never retrieved it because he took a cab and then told the cab driver what happened and then the cab driver wanted to take him to jail and so the guy jumped out of the cab and injured his face badly while doing so. In the end, the guy jumps out the window in a suicide attempt and Connie ends up going to jail. The movie ends with Nick in a facility where they have a mental health group therapy session for everyone, and in the session they play a game where they have to step across to the other side of the room if some event happened to them. The end credits roll as Nick ponders as to why this game is even relevant and why he even has to play it.
Honestly, while watching this film, I had the same bodily reaction that I did while watching Uncut Gems. It was so packed with action, and the movie pretty much just jumps into the plot without stopping or building up suspense. The music by Daniel Lopatin is the same kind of music that Uncut Gems had, and it gave the scenes their intensity.
9/18/21: So it’s September 18, and it’s been a couple weeks since I started writing this review. I was really chanting and pondering about what kind of review I wanted to write about the film, and I was also wrestling with why Connie did the things that he did. And so I chanted and reflected this morning, and I think seeing the film from a Buddhist perspective helped me process it a little better. In Buddhism, there’s this concept called The Ten Worlds, which are ten states of life that any one of us can experience at any given moment. The first four of these ten life states are hell, hunger, animality and anger. I think Connie did the things he did because he was constantly in the life state of animality. I read this really helpful book called An Introduction to Buddhism that the Soka Gakkai International (SGI) published, and it talks about each of the ten worlds. According to the book, “when in the state of animality, one acts based on instinct or impulse, unable to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil…In the world of animality, people lack reason and conscience, seeing life as a struggle for survival in which they are willing to harm others to protect themselves. Unable to look beyond the immediate, they cannot plan for the future. Such a state of ignorance ultimately leads to suffering and self-destruction.” (An Introduction to Buddhism, p. 19) As I write this, it makes sense why the film moved so quickly the more I reflect on this probable reason for why Connie did the things he did. All Connie wanted to do was get his brother out of Rikers and get him home, but he didn’t really have a way out because the police are still tracking him down and the news keeps reporting about the failed bank robbery he and Nick set up. When he’s on the couch with Crystal and they’re watching television, the news suddenly comes on and his mugshot appears. Crystal looks at him and is trying to figure out if he’s that same guy that robbed the bank, but then Connie panics when he realizes she might turn him in to the cops, and so he forcefully kisses her. It’s hard to tell whether or not this kiss was consensual, but it showed me just one example of how Connie is in the world of animality. Because all he can think about is getting away from the cops, he’s willing to take advantage of Crystal to make his plot work. Even when Connie realizes that the guy he thought was Nick is actually somebody else, he still has Crystal drive him and the guy to White Castle to get them food with the little money that he has left. When Connie and the guy go to the amusement park to retrive the bottle of acid, a Black security guard stops them and Connie beats him up and steals his uniform while Ray pours the LSD down the guard’s throat. Connie by this point is not thinking about Crystal and when she gets arrested even though she’s obviously not the one who robbed a bank or beat up a security guard and poured acid down his throat, all he can do is just look silently as she is taken away. I was wondering why, while watching this film, it just seemed Connie was just going and going and couldn’t stop for anything, and I read the Wikipedia plot summary of the film after watching it and reading it gave me more insight into why the film moved so quickly. I know you’re thinking, Well, duh, silly, it’s a crime thriller, of course it’s gonna be fast-paced. But I think on a deeper level, seeing this movie from the perspective of the 10 Worlds concept helped me understand what might have psychologically or emotionally driven Robert Pattinson’s character to commit the actions he did. I mean, I can definitely see why the film got critical acclaim though, because Robert’s performance was really good.
I’m definitely still reflecting on the movie, and I’d probably have to watch it a second time just to maybe dive a little deeper into the film (and also, because the music was excellent.) I wasn’t even really thinking about what grade to give the film, I was just enthralled with the acting and the visual effects because the acting and visual effects of the Safdie brothers’ last film, Uncut Gems was excellent. My feeling about the movie at this point is pretty neutral; I just was more enthralled by the acting than anything else. Uncut Gems was really good, and I think after watching a lot of A24 films (Good Time is an A24 film) I think I just love the acting in them.
Good Time. 2017. Rated R for language throughout, drug use, sexual content and violence.
I had been meaning to see this film for a while. It’s an A24 film, and I am a huge fan of A24 movies, so I was definitely glad to see this one. I watched it a week ago with subtitles, and while at first I was able to keep up with the dialogue, I decided to watch it a second time without the subtitles. There is a lot of dialogue in the film, and pretty fast moving dialogue, and while normally I watch movies and TV shows with subtitles so I can hear the characters better and not have to turn up the volume, I missed out on a lot of key elements in the film because I was trying to keep up with every word the characters were saying. When I watched it without subtitles, I was able to fully take in the characters’ expressions and the dialogue flowed smoothly. The first time I watched it, I didn’t fully get into the film until toward the end when I turned the subtitles off. I’ll probably keep watching movies with subtitles, but this time I decided to keep them off the second time I watched the movie.
I also watched it a second time because in college I had to watch a lot of movies, and I found that movies are like literary texts. I would study literary texts over and over and would find something new each time, and would also be able to make connections between different things I read and saw and listened to. And after getting more into studying the Buddhist philosophy I practice, I found a lot of concepts in Buddhism that could be applied to Uncut Gems.
But just to give a brief plot summary: The movie opens in the Welo Mine in Ethiopia in 2010, and a group of Ethiopian Jewish miners are trying to help one of the miners whose leg is badly damaged, to no avail as their supervisors just stand by while the man is dying. A couple of miners go underground and find this rare black opal that is scintillating and is full of all these iridescent colors. Then the film fasts forward to New York City, where Howard Ratner, a Jewish American jeweler, is getting a colonoscopy (for those squeamish about medical procedures, maybe close your eyes around where the title of the film comes on because that’s where the movie leads into the scene with the colonoscopy.) Most of the movies I see, the suspense doesn’t happen until later in the film, and gradually builds up to it, but for this film, the intensity is evident the minute Howard leaves that office after his colonoscopy and heads out into the streets of NYC. Why is it so intense? Because Howard owes so many people money. He is in a lot of debt and is figuring out how to pay everyone back. On top of that, he has to figure out his crumbling marriage with his soon to be ex wife, Dinah (played by the lovely Idina Menzel. I first saw her as Maureen Johnson in Rent and have loved her ever since.) and his relationship with Julia, his girlfriend who works with him at KMH, Howard’s jewelry store. The guy who brings him clients to his store, Damany (played by LaKeith Stanfield, whose acting I also really love in Sorry to Bother You and Get Out) brings in Kevin Garnett. Howard shows Kevin the black opal and tells him about how he saw on the History Channel a documentary about Ethiopian Jewish miners mining the black opal, and so he bought it for a bonkers amount of money. Kevin’s eyes immediately flash and he becomes so engrossed with the opal that he ends up smashing the jewelry display case he is leaning on in order to look at the opal. He wants it, but Howard tells him it’s not for sale, and to come to an auction later on to bid on it. His deal with Kevin about the black opal gets him into even further trouble, though, because Howard is addicted to gambling, and so he stakes basically his whole life and his money on Kevin winning so that he can pay back the debts he owes everyone.
Honestly, I’m glad I watched this a second time, because when I watched it the first time I didn’t really understand why Howard acted the way he did towards everyone he met, but after watching it a second time, it made more sense from a Buddhist perspective. In The Lotus Sutra and its Opening and Closing Sutras, there’s a chapter called “Five Hundred Disciples,” and in this chapter there’s this beautiful parable. In this parable a man goes to his friend’s house and gets drunk and falls asleep, and while he’s asleep his friend sews a priceless jewel into the lining of the man’s robe, and leaves it with him when he goes out. The man travels to other countries the next day, searching for food and clothing and struggling to get by on what little he has, and because he was asleep he didn’t see his friend sewed the robe in the lining of his robe. When he meets up with his friend, his friend finally tells him that he sewed a jewel into his robe so he could live in ease. (LSOC, 190) This parable symbolizes the jewel of the Buddha nature within each of us, and this Buddha nature–our wisdom, courage, compassion and life force–already exists within our lives. While it’s of course ok to want nice things, I’ve found when I make external validation the center of my life, when I make external validation define my identity for me, I’m going to crave that validation, and in the long run that has made me suffer. When I chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo though, I’m able to remind myself of the jewel that is within my life: my innate Buddhahood, which has existed in me and in the universe from what we call in Buddhism “time without beginning.”
While watching Uncut Gems, I almost wished that Howard was real so that I could share Buddhism with him. Howard already had the jewel of Buddhahood in his life, but his fundamental darkness made it hard for him to see that Buddhahood. Him and Kevin both placed prime importance on the jewel as the key to their success; for Howard, the jewel was his ticket to paying off his debts, and for Kevin, it was the key to winning his basketball games and winning him recognition and success. However, as I watched this movie, I thought about a quote by Daisaku Ikeda, a Buddhist philosopher and educator, about what true winning is:
“Any goal is fine. The important thing is to strive toward it, triumphing in each challenge along the way. Winning doesn’t mean getting rich or becoming important. There are many rich and important people who succumb to negative influences and grow corrupt. Such people cannot be said to have won in life. True victory is winning over your own mind. Others’ opinions don’t matter. Nor is there any need for you to compare yourself with others. A genuine victor in life is one who can declare: “I lived true to myself, and I have won! I am a spiritual victor! Please remember that.” (Discussions on Youth, p. 422-423)
The film’s ending is actually sad because Howard won the bet, but it’s like he never got a chance to win over himself or change his karma with money in the end. Also, I kept thinking long after the movie was over: how is Howard’s death going to affect his family? Did Howard have a will? Julia is seen getting in the car so she can give the bags of $1 million in cash to Howard, but when she finds he is dying in the jewelry store, she is obviously going to be distraught and also how is she going to settle the money with Dinah, who was Howard’s wife?
I also thought about the concept of the Ten Worlds in Buddhism, particularly the worlds of hell, hunger, animality and anger. Howard goes through these four worlds throughout the film, and the other characters reflect his negative life states (a concept called esho funi, or oneness of life and its environment.) In one particular scene I felt for Howard even though he hadn’t paid off all these debts to the people in his life, because he was in a state of suffering even though he tried to put everything on the backburner. He has so many people who remind him of the debts he owes to them, and finally, after Phil, one of Arno’s henchmen, punches Howard in the nose and throws him in the fountain, Howard goes back to his office and tells Julia to send everyone working at the store home. When she comes up, he lets himself break down and cry, telling her through his tears that he doesn’t know how to handle all the debt he owes people and that he screws up every time he tries to do something. He is deeply hard on himself, and doesn’t feel like there is any way out. Even when Julia shows the tattoo of his name she got on her butt, he cries even harder and tells her he doesn’t deserve even that. The first time I watched it I didn’t have much sympathy for Howard, but the second time, after thinking about the Buddhist concept of the Ten Worlds, I actually realized that he’s not just this arrogant guy who only thinks about himself and his own problems, but someone who is deeply suffering. Howard suffers because he can’t see the potential he has to pay off the debt he owes to people and he also can’t see the jewel of his Buddhahood within his own life.
The fundamental darkness in his life makes it also hard for him to see the interconnectedness of himself with everyone else and other events. The movie reminded me of the music video for “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” by Kanye West because you see these young kids working in these mines and in one scene one of the kids holds up the diamond he mined and then we see above him a white jeweler taking the diamond from the kid and showing clients the diamond. Howard was so enthralled with this black opal that he couldn’t recognize that the opal not just had years of history, as he says, because it was mined by Black Ethiopian Jewish people, but also because of the dark history of European imperialism that can’t be separated from the sale of these jewels, no matter how much Howard doesn’t want to think about that.
Here is an interview where Josh and Benny Safdie talk more about the film. Honestly reading it helped because both of them are Jewish, and Jewish identity and culture is a central theme throughout the film, and I don’t have much knowledge about Judaism other than what I have read in some books and watched on TV shows, so reading this interview gave me more context when thinking about the movie.
I was on a cruise ship library (yes, girl, they had a library on a cruise and I was ALL.FOR.IT) and wasn’t able to check out my target book: Moonglow by Michael Chabon. Instead, the only section was the book exchange section, so I checked out a book from there called Girl in Translation.
At first I was disappointed to not be able to check out Michael Chabon’s book, but I’m glad I got to read this book instead. It’s about a young woman named Kimberly who immigrates from Hong Kong with her mother to New York City, where they find work in a sweatshop. Kimberly has a hard time fitting in because she doesn’t speak English and the other kids tease her. Her teacher also treats her poorly because she doesn’t speak English. However, she befriends one girl in her class named Annette, and they continue to be friends through thick and thin even when Annette, who is white and upper middle class, can’t fully understand Kimberly’s life, or why Kimberly has to work while the other kids get to go to academic programs and do other things over summer. Kimberly also meets a guy at the sweatshop named Matt, and later on as she grows older, he changes her life, and not exactly in a good way (no spoilers here, you’ll need to read the book to find out what I mean by this.) This book is a fast read and not just because it is accessible in terms of language, but because Kwon’s writing is so on point and as the reader, even if I couldn’t directly relate with Kimberly and her mother’s situation, I felt for her throughout the novel. It also made me want to educate myself more about classism (the discrimination of someone based on their socioeconomic status) because Kimberly not only encounters racism but also classism. She cannot afford nice things, and Annette is constantly asking her why she can’t come over to her house to hang out, and feels upset when Kimberly won’t tell her the truth. Reading this novel made me want to think more carefully about what I say, since I have said things before that could be considered classist.
The Poet X: Another excellent novel. I took back Girl in Translation, and wanted to check out another book from the cruise library (also because I’m nerdy and was still so hyped about the fact that there was a library on the cruise. I brought three books with me, but feared somehow–totally irrational fear, come to think about it, since I didn’t even finish the books I brought with me on the trip–that I would finish them.) I saw The Hate U Give, but I already read that book, then I found another book next to it, and it had a beautiful cover, so I decided to check it out. I understand it’s bad to judge books by their covers, but this cover was just so amazing I couldn’t pass it up. I didn’t know if I’d be able to finish it, since it’s a pretty long book, but I finished it in one evening. Not only was the writing spellbinding and raw, but also it was in the form of poetry, so the lines just flowed so well. The book is about this young Dominican woman named Xiomara, and she struggles in school with students teasing her about her body, and also feeling her mother instilled a sense of guilt in her. She is also conflicted about her faith in God. However, one of her teachers shows her a video of a young Black woman reciting spoken word at a slam poetry event, and immediately Xiomara is hooked. So she writes poetry like it’s nobody’s business and joins the poetry club that the teacher sponsors, but she also has to keep it a secret from her mom because her mom wants her to focus on school and faith, and writing poetry in her spare time would go against that. It’s an incredible novel and I felt inspired to write more after reading how Xiomara uses writing as a medium for expressing all of the human emotions she feels every day: frustration, angst, depression, guilt, love, the list of emotions goes on, but when she writes about how free she feels writing poetry, I could relate. Writing for me has allowed me to express myself in ways I normally wouldn’t, especially as someone who tends to be introverted even though I like talking to people, too.
Solo: I found this at the time that I found The Poet X. I saw that both books were in the format of poetry and I thought, “This is epic,” so I checked them both out. This is a really good book about a guy named Blade whose dad, Rutherford, is a famous musician fresh out of rehab who is trying to get his life back together but is failing in the process. Blade feels embarrassed when his dad tries to come back into his life, and on top of that, his girlfriend cheated on him for some big-name rapper. He goes to Ghana because he wants to find his birth mother, and through his journey in Ghana he finds out stuff about himself and his relationship with his family roots that he never thought he would find out. He also develops a deeper bond with his dad because at first, he is embarrassed that his dad followed him to Ghana (even when Blade’s sister, Storm, tried to talk him out of it) but he learns that his dad is more than just what the media portrays him as, and he learns to appreciate his time with his dad more. It’s a really heartfelt book and the music recommendations are pretty sweet.
Dog-Man and Cat-Kid: There was no way I was going to pass this book up. Honestly I saw it was Captain Underpants author Dav Pilkey and I knew I needed a knee-slapper. Like most, if not all kids, I loved Captain Underpants as a child: Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman, Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space, Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants, you name it. So of course, it was no surprise that after watching dramas and reading dramas, I would want to check out a lighter read. If you haven’t read Captain Underpants, it’s about these two little boys named George and Harold who do goofy pranks to try and bug their teachers and principal, Mr. Krupp, who becomes Captain Underpants and gains superpowers when he drinks alien juice. This time, George and Harold sought inspiration from a book they read in school called East of Eden (honestly, I think they just skipped seven grades because I didn’t get to read East of Eden until senior year of high school. I would never have grasped the language or content of that book at George and Harold’s age. Also it has some pretty raunchy scenes in it, as well as racism) and this book influenced their newest comic Dog-Man and Cat-Kid. I won’t give away spoilers, but as a grown adult, I needed to read this book. Life as an adult can be pretty stressful sometimes, but reading this book taught me that it’s ok to laugh at potty humor sometimes even if it seems immature to do so at my age.
I just finished the book I Owe You One by Sophie Kinsella and it is absolutely marvelous! This is probably the umpteenth (not literally) book I have read by this author and I swear, every time I read her books she spellbinds me with her writing. I devoured this book like her other books, a sweet devil’s food cake. It is about this young woman named Fixie Farr who runs a small shop with her brother, Jake, her sister, Nicole, and her mother. The family is struggling to cope with the death of their father and Jake’s ego gets the best of him when he threatens to revamp the shop so they can cater to a wealthier clientele, meaning that a lot of the inexpensive goods Farr’s would sell wouldn’t sell anymore and that pricier goods would replace the old ones. Moreover, Fixie’s ex-boyfriend, Ryan, who is just as egotistical as Jake, moves back to London with no money and no job after a failed attempt to make it as a film producer in Los Angeles. It gets worse when Fixie goes to a coffee shop and the ceiling collapses on her, leaving her soaking wet. A mysterious man named Sebastian has her watch his laptop, and mystically, the laptop goes undamaged even when Fixie herself is soaking wet from the damage. Sebastian not only thanks her in person for saving his laptop, he gives her a coffee sleeve with the letters “I.O.U” so that he will repay the favor to Fixie someday. Sebastian teaches Fixie a lot of important life lessons, the main one that while it’s ok to do nice things for others, you also have to do nice things for yourself and create some boundaries with others. Otherwise you just burn yourself out and cannot make yourself happy.
Take, for instance, Nicole, Fixie’s sister. She doesn’t do much around the house and when Jake lays out a plan at a family dinner while their mom is on vacation, Nicole says that they should not only tear down the merchandise that’s already there, they should have a yoga studio in the store and an Instagram page. But the Instagram page ends up just being Nicole taking photos of herself and not of the store’s merchandise. Nicole is so used to Fixie doing everything that she doesn’t make any real contributions to the household. Even though my struggles weren’t the same as Fixie’s, I can relate to her personality because she is an empath. I am an empath myself, and while being an empath helps me experience the world in ways I wouldn’t normally experience it, and while it helps me awaken to the beauty that life can hold, being an empath can be a mental and emotional drain. I think that’s why Fixie has a hard time accepting that she is in a loving mutual relationship with Sebastian where the two give to each other as much as take from each other. Fixie feels like she should do all the cooking, cleaning and other stuff, which is how Ryan viewed their relationship (i.e. the woman does all the household stuff and takes care of me while I try to become successful and get a lot of money again.) Sebastian, however, respected Fixie and knew how to take care of himself and his own business (he even makes her fudge. Ryan doesn’t even cook, let alone clean.)
This book is truly awesome, and I cried a lot toward the end because Sebastian and Fixie’s chemistry was amazing, and how Fixie grows closer to her family by honestly communicating with them about how they give her most of the responsibility. Fixie also comes to terms with the fact that you can’t please everyone and can’t solve everyone’s problems. Ryan bullies Fixie to get him a job because he finds out about the I.O.U. from Sebastian, and Fixie gives in because she thinks Ryan will break up with her if she says no. Fixie has this idealistic vision of her and Ryan in a long-lasting beautiful commitment, and yet her friends warn her that Ryan is flaky and does not like commitment. Fixie doesn’t listen though and gives Ryan the benefit of the doubt, only to realize that he really doesn’t care about her and the only reason he comes over is because he doesn’t want to work hard for his own money or take any responsibility for his own life. Jake eventually realizes that he is in debt due to his excessive lifestyle and that he spent so much time trying to impress others that he hasn’t taken the time to reflect on himself and what really makes him happy in life. He eventually goes back to not taking himself so seriously, and this helps humble him.
I can kind of relate because I had this lofty goal of getting into a professional orchestra, and I sort of put on airs about it, but I didn’t have any full-time work. I was also getting rejected by a bunch of other jobs, and at the same time looking down on people who worked jobs in the service industry (ok, not really looking down, but I was pretty indifferent to working in food service.) So it’s little surprise that the universe sent me a magical gift: I got a job at a coffee shop, and while I did apply to coffee shops because I needed the money, I expected them to reject me, too. Working this job at the coffee shop really taught me that while I should work hard and do my best at work, I shouldn’t take myself too seriously or else my job won’t be fun. When Jake trades in his expensive lifestyle for full-time work at the shop during the holidays, he is funnier and feels a lot better and more relaxed around his family. When Nicole, Jake and Fixie communicate honestly with each other, they develop a deeper bond than before, which showed me how important genuine communication is. Genuine communication isn’t as pretty as sweeping stuff under the rug, but it is way better than holding in all these negative feelings and letting them fester until it becomes a problem and the person holding in those feelings takes out their anger on themselves. Like Fixie, I bottled up the anger I felt when I felt like I was expounding too much energy on taking care of someone else’s mess, and like Fixie, I blamed myself for not making everyone happy and fixing their problems. But eventually I had to realize that you can’t please everyone, and that when you realize this your life actually becomes more fulfilling.
Overall, I loved this book and because there is so much happening in the world today, I needed some fiction to calm me down. So thank you once again, Sophie Kinsella, for your wonderful writing. I wonder how this book would be if it became a film, but the films don’t always do justice to the books (probably for copyright reasons.) I could read this book again; it is truly a treasure! 🙂
As a philosophy major in college, I wish I had read this book a lot sooner. It approaches the question of good vs. bad in a rather hilarious way. Of course, I didn’t laugh the entire time that I read it, as some parts are quite dark and make you sit and think for a minute. This is the third book I have read by Nick Hornby, besides his novels About a Boy and Slam, and How to Be Good never fails to satisfy me. It’s about this couple named Katie and David who are struggling to maintain a happy life with their two kids, Tom and Molly. They are a middle-class couple who both have stable jobs: Katie is a doctor and Davis is an angry news columnist. But there is one problem: Katie has an affair with a man named Stephen, and now David has to deal with not just his stressful job but his wife cheating on him, too. However, David goes through this spiritual change through the encouragement of his spiritual doctor DJ GoodNews. David then quits his job and decides he is going to have everyone on his block, including him and his family, bring in someone on the streets to live with them. At first, everyone on the block is skeptical, but then Monkey, the homeless kid who the family takes in, turns out to be a good guy and even gets back the possessions of one couple on the block whose adopted homeless person stole from them. While Tom and Katie think David and GoodNews are being ludicrous, Molly sides with David and becomes self-righteous. Katie begins to question whether her work as a doctor is as morally sound as the work David and GoodNews are doing with the homeless, but finds out that their plan to do good backfires and they lose hope in humanity.
This novel wrestles with the question of what does it truly mean to be a “good person.” Katie becomes a doctor because she wants to help people, but every day that she works with patients they are not happy. However, when GoodNews intervenes, people start taking his work seriously even though he lacks the qualifications to be a doctor and tries to “treat” people’s medical problems by giving them head massages instead of medicine. Katie eventually realizes that she cannot please everyone and that just because one isn’t doing what David does does not necessarily mean one cannot do good in life. In fact, I believe that if you truly want to do good in life, you should start with your family and friends. In Buddhism, we have a term called “human revolution,” which means that each of us can change the world and foster world peace by changing our attitude and striving to be the best at our workplaces, in our schools, at home. Naturally when we do this we become happy, and we naturally encourage others around us to share in that happiness. There are also the terms “relative happiness” and “absolute happiness.” Relative happiness is defined by material things: great grades, great college, wonderful spouse, your dream job, the nice car, anything that brings you joy in that moment. However, relative happiness is fleeting, because if that thing or person leaves you, breaks or gets destroyed in some way, you feel bad you no longer have it and you sink back into despair. Or even if those things still exist in your life, over time you may find yourself wishing for a better job, a better car, better food, etc., and so you attach your happiness to those things. Now, I’m not saying we shouldn’t want nice things; we’re human, we go through stuff, we deserve to have hot water, a nice meal, access to Netflix. However, when we define our lives only by the stuff we have and stop valuing others in our life, we feel empty inside. Absolute happiness, however, is a happiness that you feel while you go through struggles in life. Katie doesn’t have the perfect life, but she comes to terms with its imperfections. Life is messy and many times you will cry until your eyes hurt. But I have personally found that the times I remember the most are the times when I challenged myself to my limits and conquered something so seemingly impossible, and over time I laugh when I look back at those times, and I even cry tears of appreciation that I went through that time so that I could learn what I was capable of.
The novel also makes a great point about loving the ones you are with. One night David and GoodNews call people they wronged in the past to apologize and ask forgiveness so that they don’t have to feel guilty and burdened by the past. For David, the person he called was a kid he bullied years ago, and for GoodNews it was his sister Cantata for reasons I am still not clear about (something to do with a poster of Duran Duran frontman Simon LeBon.) GoodNews, unlike David, ends up cussing out his sister when she refuses to forgive him and hangs up. Even when Katie tries to console GoodNews he still says that he feels like a failure for what he did to her. Katie realizes that no matter how much she tries to convince him he isn’t a failure, he did in fact mess up. She wonders “who are these people, that they want to save the world and yet they are incapable of forming proper relationships with anybody? As GoodNews so eloquently puts it, it’s love this and love that, but of course it’s so easy to love someone you don’t know, whether it’s George Clooney or Monkey. Staying civil to someone with whom you’ve ever shared Christmas turkey–now, there’s a miracle.” (How to Be Good, Hornby, 275)
I have found from personal experience that even as someone who passionate about social justice, I need to be a human being and look out for my friends and family, too. There are lots and lots of problems in the world: suicide bombings, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, white nationalism, global warming, the list goes on (why do you think there’s a Good News section in your Microsoft Newsfeed? Life is tough, and we could all use some acts of compassion once in a while.) However, as I am not God, I cannot solve all of the world’s problems. But what I can control is my outlook on life. I can choose to value my current friendships, my family ties, and having such ties grounds my approach to social justice. Sure, working at a coffee shop after college wasn’t the equivalent to being the CEO of the International Monetary Fund, or being the star onstage playing the Edouard Lalo Cello Concerto for a climate change festival (although I would actually love to do this someday, to be honest), or being principal cellist of the New York Philharmonic. But if anything, it was this: a way to bring home money and pay my bills so I can in fact afford to pursue my music activities and charitable pursuits. In order to take care of others, I had to take care of myself, which means taking care of my finances, saving money for myself, getting rid of any debt, and spending time with family and friends. When I was in college, I invested a lot of my rage in theses about the factories polluting the predominantly Black low-income Altgeld Gardens in Chicago. I threw myself into my papers on the Harlem Renaissance, police brutality and the ethics of freegans.
Yet I had quit my job at the local daycare because I felt this work was more important, when the reality is that other kids had to work while studying so they could send home money to an ailing parent or provide for their kid. I wasn’t focused on the preschoolers I needed to show up for every day as part of my work study, I wasn’t focused on taking care of my finances, I was solely concerned with my grades. And while I don’t regret my college experience and appreciate even just going to college, I will say that I took a lot of things for granted, like thinking I could survive each waking day after staying up studying until 2 am to polish the perfect two-page essay for that medieval philosophers class, or the times I left my phone off and didn’t call my family to check in on them. Like Katie said, it is easier to value someone outside of our immediate environment, and if we can’t treasure the people closest to us while we are out saving the world, we may end up regretting that we didn’t spend more time with them. I know I cannot speak for everyone, but this has just been my experience, so even if I go to graduate school because I want to study some noble thing and go on to make big contributions to society (because, to be honest, I want to do this), I still need to value my loved ones so that when they pass away (as I will, too, someday, like everyone and everything on this planet) I will look back on the time I spent with them with a sense of gratitude rather than wishing I could have spent more time with them.
Reading How to Be Good taught me that taking care of yourself isn’t selfish, and it doesn’t mean you did something bad for society. And doing acts of kindness is a good thing; I would never want to say it was something people should stop doing. I myself remember doing an acts of kindness project for a class I took in high school, and it was so much fun because I had to do it anonymously. However, it’s important to have a healthy relationship with yourself and your boundaries so that you can carry that healthy self-esteem in your relationships and in broader terms your work for world peace. This novel was a New York Times bestseller when it came out almost two years ago, and I can see why. I finished it in just a couple of days, it was that good.
Dang it, Sophie Kinsella! You’ve got me again with another incredibly hilarious and also very well-written novel! Haha, just kidding, I love you Sophie, but seriously this book was so much fun to read. I’ve Got Your Number is about this young woman named Poppy Wyatt who is engaged to this academic named Magnus, and frankly, Magnus’s family doesn’t like Poppy much just because she’s not an academic like they are. However, things change when Poppy cannot find her ring and has the staff at the hotel she is at look everywhere for the ring. Even worse, a random guy steals her phone while she’s on the street figuring out how to best tell her friends and fiancée that the ring is gone, but lucky for Poppy, the personal assistant of a consulting company threw her phone in the trash bin. Finders keepers. So Poppy takes the phone and uses it to contact her friends and fiancée, but before she knows it, she is getting email after email from a random guy named Sam. Turns out that this is the consulting company’s phone, and all of Sam’s business emails go into that phone. At first, Sam doesn’t of course want Poppy to keep the phone because it’s the company’s phone, but after she does him a favor (by stalling this Japanese businessman who Sam is supposed to meet with a hilarious rendition of “Single Ladies”) he reluctantly lets her keep the phone. Poppy gains access to all his business email threads, and when she sees that he doesn’t respond to most of the emails his colleagues send him, she writes everyone these super nice emails and signs them under Sam’s name. This lands Sam in a lot of trouble because he goes to the business meeting unprepared for people at work thanking him for doing things he never actually did for them. Poppy’s assumptions about Sam land her in even bigger trouble when she reads the emails from Willow, who she thinks is his girlfriend (spoiler: she’s his ex.) But when Sam’s friend is caught up in a business scandal and Sam inadvertently becomes involved in it, it’s up to Poppy to help get him out of this sticky mess. In the process, the two learn more about each other than they thought they’d need to know, and Poppy learns that she’s more capable of being assertive than she thinks she is. Sam encourages her to go after what she wants, and Poppy realizes that she and Magnus really aren’t all that compatible with one another and their marriage would be very difficult. She also realizes that she cannot please everyone in his family and that she wouldn’t be happy being married to a man who is, in reality, a commitment-phobe in just about everything (jobs, relationships) and is just marrying Poppy so he can prove to his parents that he can stay committed to something, while he has so many women lined up to be his wife.
Of course, this wouldn’t be wise in reality. Honestly, with all the surveillance and debate around privacy rights, this book, while a comedy, had a slightly disturbing undertone to it. It’s why you need to erase any personal data on your computer’s hard drive before giving it away or recycling it, because if someone accesses your data, it’s not so fun when someone is stalking you because they know your information from your computer (8/30/21: how much I can follow this in my own life, I don’t know.) But of course, if the situation was desperate, I’m sure I would have done what Poppy did (of course, it wouldn’t be the right thing, but it would have saved my friends a ton of stress.) I remember one time I was texting and walking down the stairs, and because I wasn’t paying attention and was in a rush, I fell down the stairs and my phone went crashing with me. It hit the hardwood floor of the office where I was supposed to turn in my key (for the dorm I stayed in during a summer program) and I found myself without a phone. I cried all through the flight because I couldn’t contact my closest friends to let them know I was alive and was on the flight back home. I also couldn’t check the time when my flight boarded, so much to the dismay of the woman checking everyone’s boarding pass before they boarded, I was so caught up in my sadness about dropping my phone, and so busy calling myself every demeaning term in the book for dropping it, that I didn’t realize everyone had boarded until the lady was telling me, rightfully upset, that the flight was going to leave without me. Of course, I could have averted the situation completely by not texting until I had gotten down the stairs, but you live and learn, right? I also learned to back up my phone in case I did something like that again (which probably won’t happen, after I remember to this day the pain and agony on my friends’ faces when I told them I couldn’t answer their calls and texts because I dropped my phone and broke it.)
Overall, excellent novel; Poppy and Sam make an incredible duo; I seriously hope they make a movie out of the book! 🙂
I’ve Got Your Number: A Novel. Sophie Kinsella. 435 pp.
I was browsing the shelves of the library last week, searching for Shopaholic Takes Manhattan, the sequel to Sophie Kinsella’s bestselling novel, Confessions of a Shopaholic. My face fell when I saw it was not on the shelves, but then I wasn’t going to lose hope, and instead spotted a green book with a young woman and the words “My (Not-So) Perfect Life” written diagonally. I wondered if it was part of a series, and then found it stood on its own, so I wouldn’t have to read anything before it, so I checked it out. After watching so many dramas and reading dramas, I needed to take a break and read some funny stuff.
I devoured the book in less than two days. Sophie Kinsella continues to amaze me with her plot twists, her witty characters and her sheer talent for writing. This may sound weird, but it kind of reminded me of a novel version of The Financial Diet. The Financial Diet is a blog where people share about their personal financial experiences, such as how they lived in a big city on a budget, paid offtheir student debt, changed careers, or found great deals on flights and travel. The blog also has a lot of stories about comparing ourselves to others and the use of social media and its effects on our happiness. However, there are also posts about a healthy use of social media, such as Chelsea Fagan’s post on using Instagram positively.
My (Not-So) Perfect Life is about a young woman named Katie Brenner who is trying to start her career at a marketing agency in London. She expects her life to be better than in her hometown in the countryside of England, and even changes her name to Cat so people will treat her like a serious city person, but she gets a reality check. Her roommates are terrible, her job pays little and is quite boring, she doesn’t have a boyfriend. Some of her colleagues also make fun of her accent and her countryside roots. In short, Katie’s life is less than perfect.
Her boss, Demeter, on the other hand, seems cool as a cucumber (I kept imagining Demeter as Amy’s boss Dianna, played by Tilda Swinton, in the film Trainwreck.) Demeter seems to have the perfect life: a husband, two children, a nice home, a nice life and a top position at her job. However, at work she is controlling, berating her employees and putting so many demands on them that her entire staff loses respect for her. One day, without warning, she lets Katie go and Katie moves back to her family’s farm in Somerset. Even though she doesn’t want to be at home, she helps her dad and his girlfriend, Biddy, with their glamping business. Soon after the glamping business takes off, and Dad, Kate and Biddy get new customers. However, when Demeter ends up visiting Somerset to glamp with her family, Katie must keep her cover so she doesn’t let her dad and Biddy know that Demeter fired her. Katie plots a revenge plan to get back at Demeter for firing her, but eventually sees that Demeter is less perfect than she thought.
This book taught me a lot of things. First and foremost, it taught me the importance of being my own person and not comparing myself to others. Katie spends most of her time in London looking at other people’s lives and assuming that she is the only person who doesn’t have it all together. Instead of deciding to be herself, she thinks that she only has to post good stuff on her Instagram in order to not let her friends know that she isn’t having a great time in London. Her friends post their positive moments, but rarely, if ever, post whether they’ve had a bad day. However, later in the book we find out that most of these people in Katie’s peer group, despite moving to these luxurious places, still have problems like every other human being on the planet. While it’s important sometimes to “fake it ’til you make it” in order to do your best work, social media and the Internet in general have made it easier for us to compare ourselves to each other and seek happiness outside of ourselves in things that, in the end, don’t last long. Social media can be great for a lot of things, but I have noticed after celebrating my 1-year anniversary of not having a Facebook account, I don’t miss it at all and have come to embrace myself without trying to keep in contact with everyone. Instead of deleting her Instagram, Katie starts a hashtag where people can post imperfect photos of their lives, such as a crowded subway platform, soaked hair, and other things that people deem failures.
This book also taught me to never forget your roots. Wherever I move, I cannot forget who I am and where I came from. As a musician, even if I do make it to Carnegie Hall and other prestigious places, I want to stay grounded and not let my ego get in the way of letting me be myself. Katie tries to leave behind her identity as a young woman growing up in Somerset with her father, but when she moves back home she gets in touch with her roots. There’s this idea that to be an adult, you need to enjoy things that we typically consider to be for adults, such as going to the bar every evening, dining out, having the dream job. But trying to be someone besides herself ends up draining Katie, and she comes back acting like Demeter towards Dad and Biddy until she realizes how much she has let Demeter’s controlling demeanor influence how she acts towards others.
Although I must say, like Confessions of a Shopaholic, this book felt like a movie. I awwwed at the sad scenes and whenever Katie spoke up for herself and even won back Alex, her coworker she was crushing on who Katie thought was having an affair with Demeter, I snapped my fingers and kept saying, “You go, girl!”, “Amen!” or “Yasssss, slay queen!” In one scene, Katie overhears Demeter trying to engage her two spoiled children in conversation while they are glued to their phones. She observes that Demeter feels lonely and broken inside even though it looks like she has the perfect family, and her kids don’t respect her or show any appreciation towards her. So Katie, when Demeter is gone, calls the two kids out, in the calmest way, for not appreciating everything their mom has done for them, telling them that her (Katie’s) mom died when she was young, so she wasn’t able to spend time with her mom, unlike Demeter’s kids. When the kids hear this, it seems as if they ignore her, but then later Coco, Demeter’s daughter, briefly looks up from her phone and thanks Demeter for taking them on the glamping trip. This scene taught me that if we want to make it anywhere in life, we need to have a deep sense of gratitude.
This novel also taught me that everyone has their own definitions of perfect. This blog post isn’t going to be perfect. None of my blog posts are perfect. My music playing isn’t always perfect. But to someone else they may be the thing they need to get through the day. I do think it’s important to work on improving yourself every day, but I try not to be a perfectionist anymore because I don’t have time to keep worrying about whether people will like me or not. Life is messy sometimes, and to get through life and your day to day means embracing the messiness. This book was awesome and so relevant to this day and age. Thank you once again, Sophie Kinsella.
My (Not-So) Perfect Life: A Novel. Sophie Kinsella. 438 pp. 2017.
Ten summers ago, I was bored out of my mind. School had let out and all I had planned was summer reading and vegging out in front of the TV while knitting. And then I came across it, a magical treasure, one of eight incredible summer reads I delved into that sticky season: The Friday Night Knitting Club, a beautiful touching novel by Kate Jacobs. I vaguely remember not finishing it, but then I rediscovered it one day at the library nearly a decade later, and thought, “I need to finish this book.” So I read it, and I’m pretty sure I shed more than a tear or two. Set in modern-day New York City, it narrates the lives of a group of women who all meet on a Friday evening in Georgia Walker’s yarn shop called Walker and Daughter. In the first book, Dakota, Georgia’s daughter, is thrilled to be around so many incredible women and learn from their lives as they knit afghans, scarves, hats and other things.
While I can’t remember much in detail about the characters’ backgrounds, I remember enough to know how they develop in the sequel. At the end of the first novel, Georgia dies of ovarian cancer, and in the second, Peri, one of the members of the knitting club, takes over the shop and renovates it. She wants Dakota to take more responsibility for the shop, but Dakota is now eighteen and has other interests, namely attending college at New York University and getting a cute guy at school to notice her. Anita, an elderly woman, is trying to find love after the death of her husband; Catherine is not sure she’ll ever find a man who loves her truly for her after her divorce; Lucie is searching for the father of her newborn daughter, Ginger, not only raising her but also taking care of her mother. Not to mention Darwin is now a new mom with twins and KC is struggling with her career. Like the first book, each character has their own struggles they deal with, but nevertheless, they stick it out and support each other, especially because they want to honor the incredible life that Georgia left them through the shop.
At first, I started the novel but then thought I would need to read the first again just to get into the beginning. I read the book rather a long time ago, so it took me a while to catch up to the characters, but once I remembered the plot line from the first novel, I once again devoured it like the most delicious piece of (vegan) chocolate cake ever in the entire world. This book almost got me a little choked up because these young women support each other even through the rough times. I love to knit but have only been knitting by myself for the longest time, and reading The Friday Night Knitting Club helped me understand how I really need to find other people to knit with. I like knitting alone, it’s just that it’s fun to do with friends, too. Once again, I can’t thank Kate Jacobs enough for another excellent read. This book reminds us knitters that the things we make carry our personal stories with them, and that our projects as knitters can help us connect to one another even at the times we feel alone.
Back in 2006 or 2007, around that time, they said Julia Roberts was going to star in a movie adaptation of The Friday Night Knitting Club. Fast forward ten years later, and I’m still crossing my fingers hoping they live up to their promise. And maybe it’s for the best; sometimes when people make movies from books, they have to leave a lot out, not just for time constraints but also probably for copyright policy. And I have no doubt that Julia Roberts is working on other great projects right now, but even if she didn’t play in the movie, they could have another actress play in the film. I am still (more than a little) sad that no movie has come out yet, but oh well. Maybe someday. I guess I’ll just keep crossing my fingers and praying for a movie adaptation.
Knit Two: A Friday Night Knitting Club Novel. Kate Jacobs. 326 pp. 2008.
The Arts Are Life 