Tag: books

Book Review: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

July 17, 2019

Categories: books

I cannot remember the last time I checked this book out from the library. All I know is that it was a long time ago and I never finished it. But this time, I was browsing the shelves for a new read, and somehow this inner craving spoke to me, told me, “If you run out of ideas, check out a Margaret Atwood work.” I remember reading The Handmaid’s Tale some time when I was in high school, but I cannot remember the plot of the book other than the fact that these women lived in this oppressive dystopian society where the only purpose they served for men was to bear them children. I was also rather young when I read it and so I couldn’t really get why such a society would exist (I still have yet to see the TV adaptation of the novel.) Because I sped through The Handmaid’s Tale, I cannot remember whether or not I liked it.

The Blind Assassin took me some time to get through, but I guess that is why I need to re-read The Handmaid’s Tale because I didn’t approach it with the same care as I did (or at least tried to, anyway) for The Blind Assassin. As I have found out by reading even just two of her works, Atwood’s books are not quick reads; they take quite a bit of time to digest, and for a good reason. It isn’t easy to talk about abortion or anything related to sexism or reproductive rights, and Atwood wants readers to sit with these topics for as long as possible. The Blind Assassin is a little over 500 pages (for the hardcover copy) and it packs in a whole lot of details that you might want to take notes of while reading. I only jotted down a few notes but wished I had written more descriptive notes about the characters. And the themes are quite deep, themes such as family, loss, grief, and womanhood in a time when women had to adhere to strict social norms in order to fit in.

I won’t give a boring plot summary because that would ruin the book, but to make it short, the main plot of the story takes place between the 1930s and the 1940s in Canada. It is about two sisters, Iris and Laura Chase, who come from a well-off family in Toronto but struggle as they get older when their father’s business starts to suffer during the Great Depression. Iris, who is still a teenager at the time, marries to a much older and wealthier man named Richard so that her family can support themselves financially. Laura has her own relationship with a man named Alex, but her family disapproves of him because they suspect he is an orphan and would lead the family into further financial ruin. However, Laura is adamant about following her own path, not just in relationships but in life in general. The novel opens up with Iris saying that Laura drove her car off of a bridge on May 26, 1945, just ten days after World War II ends, and describes the complex events that led up to Laura’s death. In between chapters dedicated to Iris’s first-person account of growing up with Laura are the chapters of Laura’s science fiction novel The Blind Assassin, and in between both Iris’s chapters and the chapters of Laura’s book are obituaries and news surrounding Laura’s death, as well as the deaths of other members of her and Iris’s family.

This book isn’t just one of those novels within a novel; it is a combination of science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and coming-of-age drama. I say coming-in-age because Iris narrates how both she and Laura grew up together, from their childhood to their present lives as adults. It helped after I finished reading the book to go back to the beginning and read the opening pages, because these opening pages give away the end of the book rather than leaving the end for the reader to figure out. I think what got me through this really deep work is Atwood’s powerful use of language and dialogue. It moves like melting butter, and even when I wanted to finish the book as quickly as I could so I could put another book on my reading log (trying to read 50 this year), I simply could not speed up because I wanted to reread the way Atwood described a particular scene or character. Of course, this is a dark book with a lot of plot twists that made me go “Oh no he/ she didn’t!”, and Laura’s death was obviously quite depressing. Still, there is something magical about Atwood’s writing. I wanted to savor this book rather than get caught up in plot summary (which is probably why my synopsis of the book is so short), and I think Atwood granted my wish. The ending for example was so profound I had to read it at least three times in order to truly understand it was. Atwood’s writing is spellbinding.

I cannot wait to delve into another one of Margaret Atwood’s works! 🙂

The Blind Assassin. Margaret Atwood. 524 pp. Copyright 2000 by O.W. Toad, Ltd.

Book Review: The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer

June 7, 2019

Categories: books

This morning I just finished this incredible memoir called The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. I saw the trailer for the Netflix adaptation and wanted to see the movie, but I’m one of those people who has to read the book first then see the movie (Precious and For Colored Girls are the few exceptions where I saw the film adaptation, then read the book afterwards.) So I went to the library and lo and behold there’s a display for World Water Day smack dab in the middle of the library’s back section. Not only did I find the documentary Tapped, about the bottled water crisis, but I found The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. I was interested in learning what I as a consumer could do to help the environment, and even just educating myself on these environmental issues such as clean energy and water consumption was a starting point.

It took me a while to complete this book not because of its length (it’s around 200 pages) but because I normally read fiction, so I was reading all these novels and kept renewing The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind because I was determined to finish every book that I checked out from the library, whether it was fiction or nonfiction. I devoured The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. It is an incredible read. William Kamkwamba takes us to his life in Malawi, a country that struggled with making education, clean water and clean energy accessible to its residents and was struck with famine in 2002, causing millions of deaths. William’s family struggled to pay for his school fees and because of this, he could not attend school, so he went to the library every day and read books. William came across some books on wind energy, and sought about making his own wind turbine to bring electricity and water to his village. People in his village laughed at him, and he often faced bullying from his classmates for going out every day and finding discarded materials to use for his wind turbine, but he persisted because it was the only thing that gave him hope. William takes us through the process of how he built his turbine out of recycled materials, and it is fascinating how he did it. What inspired me is that even though the parts of the turbine kept falling off (and even ripped off parts of his skin when he tried to reattach them to their proper places) he never gave up on himself. His first turbine powered people’s cell phones and radios, and brought clean energy to his village, and he was able to speak at a TED conference on clean energy and his journey to bring wind power to Malawi. Not only that, but he was able to go back to school later on in his life after many years of not being able to go to school.

This book inspired me, too, because it taught me that even things we throw away or think have no value can be used for many different things. Gay Hawkins, in her book The Ethics of Waste, says that value doesn’t exist in and of itself, but only when human beings give a thing a sense of worth and put it to use. William could have treated the old bicycle parts and PVC pipes like trash to never be touched or used, but he couldn’t afford new shiny parts, so he worked with what he had. Even though the parts had slime and weren’t the newest coolest parts, he took lemons and made serious lemonade by using what he knew from reading books on renewable energy to create something useful from scratch. I read a New York Times Magazine issue on climate change and how we will need to adapt to rising temperatures, worsening natural disasters, and other consequences of burning up the planet. It talked about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green Deal plan, and how people were divided about it. However, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind reminded me that renewable energy is our last hope if we seriously want to, if not completely wipe out, at least mitigate the effects of climate change on our planet and our own individual lives.

Through sharing his experience, William also reminded me of the importance of education in one’s life. Even when he wasn’t in school, he read a lot of books, and this helped him unlock his potential more than anything else. Speaking for myself, I love reading to this day, and at a point in my life where I cannot afford graduate school, I am catching up on all the pleasure reading I didn’t make time for during my years in college (except for winter and summer breaks, where I inhaled books as if they were air.) Growing up, I always carried a book around with me, even at the times when it wasn’t always called for, such as parties. When I read, I uncover new worlds that I didn’t think existed. It’s important to read and watch the news to stay aware of things, but it can be draining sometimes, so I sometimes have to switch off and read a nice book instead (I know if someone has to read the news for their job, that would be hard, but it might be doable, I dunno.) Reading is not only one of my few forms of self-care I can’t get enough of, it’s also my education (besides, well, life, of course.) I feel a lot less lonely, too. Friends in real life are a must, but friends come and go, so when that happens I try to stave off feelings of loneliness by reading. Reading reminds me that I’m not the only one with problems and that everyone in life struggles with something.

Overall, I highly recommend you read this book! It is incredible and I cannot wait to see the film adaptation! 🙂

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope. William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer. 273 pp. 2009.

Book Review: Freedom

June 25, 2019

Categories: books

Last night I finished the book Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Even though the novel is almost ten years old (it was published in 2010), it is relevant now more than ever and I highly recommend you read it. I’m glad I found it at the library because I found it at Half Price Books and was about to buy it, but some inkling of intuition told me that I could easily score a free copy of it at the library, so I waited patiently and went to the library to find it. At first I couldn’t find it and was a little sad, but then a librarian helped me out and I found it on a display shelf for books of the month (or some kind of other theme, I forgot.) Bingo! I though, and I immediately started reading it.

What I love about this book is how very similar it is to the writing styles of Michael Chabon and Jonathan Safran Foer, two of my favorite authors. Normally I prefer first-person narratives to third-person narratives. I don’t know why, that’s just what I’ve always preferred. But so far, I’ve read Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon, Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer, and this novel, and I’m starting to realize that maybe I’m not as biased toward first-person narratives as I thought I was. Franzen, like Chabon and Foer, uses the third person to allow the reader insight into the characters that we might not have gotten if were read it in the first-person. I’m not saying first-person isn’t insightful, but we only get to read about the situation from the main character’s point of view (or whoever’s point of view it is, if it’s a novel with more than one character, such as The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon.) In Freedom, Patty and Walter Berglund are an American couple living in Minnesota. They seem to have the perfect life on the outside: they have two children, they live in a neighborhood that is becoming more and more gentrified, Walter has a great job and Patty seems to be the talk of the town, albeit not always in a good way. But as the book goes on, we find out that Walter and Patty aren’t the perfect couple, and are in fact quite imperfect in so many ways.

The book is genius not just because of its eloquent writing, but also because there’s an autobiographer who writes Patty’s biography so we gain extensive backstory into how she became who she is. Patty’s mom, Joyce, grew up poor, but her father, Ray, grew up rich, and so Patty and her sisters Veronica and Abigail grew up living this privileged life. However, Patty gets raped and her parents don’t handle it very well, and so this sours the relationship between her and her parents. Patty befriends this girl named Eliza, who seems shy but turns out to be quite controlling of Patty, criticizing her and even refusing to let Patty see her singing and playing her guitar. Eliza is friends with a guy named Richard Katz, who goes to Macalester College with Walter. Patty and Walter meet at one of Richard’s gigs, and when Eliza ditches her, Walter keeps her company and soon they become a couple.

Flash forward more than a few years, and Patty and Walter are doing better than they ever did. Patty gets to stay at home with the kids Jessica and Joey, and Walter goes to his cushy job at 3M. But Richard Katz comes back home having still not succeeded much in his career, still sleeping with women and mooching off of Patty and Walter’s good will. Then Walter gets a job at a coal company, and the guy who runs it wants to clear off land for a private sanctuary for cerulean mountain warblers because they are the guy’s favorite bird. Even though Walter grew up as an environmentalist, the fact that he would allow for mountain top removal in West Virginia just so the cerulean mountain warbler can have its own space, especially since they guy said they were dwindling in number, is beyond ironic. It gets even more twisted when Walter has an affair with his assistant for the Cerulean Mountain Trust, Lalitha, a young woman in her late 20s who is working with Walter to raise awareness of overpopulation and how it is killing the planet. What’s more twisted for the family is that their son, Joey, becomes a Republican and starts living with his girlfriend Connie because he can’t stand living with Patty anymore (it’s shocking for them because they are liberal.)

If this novel taught me anything, it’s this: we can talk all we want to about freedom of speech, freedom from financial stress, and our free country (and, most recently, freedom gas.) But no one is free of suffering. In Nichiren Buddhism, the only thing that truly sets us free is realizing that suffering is a part of life and that even if we’re suffering, we can turn that suffering into something positive. There are two kinds of happiness: relative and absolute. Relative is short-lived happiness: you get the dream job, the perfect spouse, the GPA that lands you into a top-tier grad school. But those things only make you happy for a short time because they require a lot of hard work and you may not even like every part of the dream job, or you might end up burning out during grad school, or after a few years of your relationship, you might end up sick of your partner. You’ll find things to escape from your pain and misery, but those end up being temporary solutions to a larger problem. Then there’s absolute happiness, where even if you’re stuck in a job you don’t like, you got a divorce or any other kind of thing that makes you suffer, you can turn those sufferings into impetus to to keep going no matter what. It seems that even though Walter and Patty have the perfect life, they don’t, because all this other stuff comes up in their lives and they aren’t prepared to deal with it. Walter is unhappy in his marriage, and even though he seeks escape from his problems through his involvement with environmental work, he still can’t shake the fact that he’s sick of being married to Patty and is lovesick for Lalitha. Lalitha also suffers because Walter is still married to Patty but still, in the end, loves Patty deep down, and Walter’s personal life is starting to affect his work rapport with Lalitha. Lalitha is pretty much the only person of color in the book, and even though the book doesn’t directly say it, it’s almost like she’s a prop for Walter. Walter doesn’t treat women very well, and neither does his friend Richard, but Lalitha is both a woman and a person of color. In one scene, a white man confronts Walter at a store and makes a derogatory comment about Lalitha’s race towards him, showing how even though Walter and Lalitha love each other, they still have to deal with bigots, people who live in the prison of racial bias and prejudice. The racist who confronts Walter about his relationship with Lalitha can’t free himself of his own ignorance, and deep down, even though the book doesn’t talk about it, this ignorance causes him, too, to suffer. Every character in the book goes through some sort of pain, which serves as a reminder of why literature is so important. Literature lets us know that we aren’t alone in our suffering, and that other people have problems, sometimes greater than our own.

There’s an archetype I studied in my English class: man vs. nature, and this book works a lot with this archetype. Walter seems to live a very Walden-esque life. For those who haven’t yet read Walden, it’s by the philosopher Henry David Thoreau and in the book he talks about how he dropped everything, went into the woods, built himself a shack and journaled about nature and politics. Even though Walter seeks an escape through nature, he can’t escape his own ego. He sees nature as a way to get away from the people he held most dear in life, and this causes him to just suffer more. Walter leaves his cushy job at 3M so he can do conservation work, but it’s not a totally selfless pursuit because he’s really doing it to escape his relatives and his family, who never seemed to understand him or take him seriously. However, he is still not free because he must deal with the environmental consequences of his project. The Cerulean Mountain Trust isn’t in the end sustainable at all even though it proposes a conservation sanctuary for a species of birds and thus helping it from going extinct, it still degrades the environment because it proposes clearing land for this sanctuary, thus putting people’s livelihood at risk and endangering other species. Freedom isn’t really freedom if it causes another being suffering, and the novel says that clearly through the actions and thoughts of its characters. Even though Walter and Patty are liberals, and seem to be free of biases and open minded, they are not free because they still have biases and are tethered to their pasts, and this affects their view of the world and their political views.

Overall, I really liked this book.

Freedom. Jonathan Franzen. 562 pp. 2010.

Movie Review: If Beale Street Could Talk

June 26, 2019

Categories: movies

I didn’t think I was going to cry when I saw this film. But alas, by the end I found my shoulders quaking as I erupted in tears. And while I was of course super ecstatic when Regina King won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for this film. I didn’t truly understand at the time why she won the award because I hadn’t yet seen the film. It wasn’t until I saw the film that my appreciation for Regina King’s acting deepened.

The film, based on the novel of the same name by James Baldwin, is about a young Black couple, Alonzo “Fonny” Hunt and Tish Rivers, living in Harlem. Tish announces to her family that she is pregnant with Fonny’s child and while her mom, dad and sister, Ernestine (played brilliantly by Dear White People’s Teyonah Parris) celebrate her pregnancy, Fonny’s family does not. Tish not only has to deal with Fonny’s family’s disapproval of her, but also Fonny’s incarceration. Victoria Rogers, a young Puerto Rican woman, accused Fonny of raping her when she has to point out her rapist in a line of Black men. Sharon, Tish’s mom, goes to Puerto Rico to tell Victoria that Fonny didn’t rape her, but it doesn’t end up working too well. Even when they are young, Tish and Fonny still live in a brutal world where police will still accuse them of doing things just because they are Black.

This film is important because racial injustice is still a messy reality even though social media has allowed people to spread awareness of incidents of this injustice. In Fruitvale Station, for instance, the white lady Oscar Grant meets earlier at the grocery store records the moment where the white police officer holds Oscar and his friends hostage and accuses them of starting the fight on the train, when in reality the white inmate of Oscar’s started the fight. However, at the time James Baldwin wrote If Beale Street Could Talk, there was no social media or smart phones. Barry Jenkins, the film’s director, illustrates this point by putting historical photos of white police officers beating Black men and arresting them. I know the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words” is overused, but in this case, it’s more relevant than ever. Even without physical words, seeing these brutal images of police brutality in the 1960s reminds us how important it is to talk about the intersectionality of criminal justice and racial injustice, even if it is hard to discuss.

I was sad I never got to see it on the big screen, but the benefits of seeing a movie like this on a DVD player is that you get to watch extras, such as deleted scenes and a behind-the-scenes look at the film’s production. Also, like, let’s be real. If Annapurna Productions can give us gut-wrenching films like Detroit, they can certainly deliver a gem like Beale Street. The deleted scenes, while they didn’t make their way into the film, are key to the storyline and left me trying to catch my breath because the acting is just so brilliant. Also, watching the feature about the making of If Beale Street Could Talk was pretty awesome because I learned about why Barry Jenkins made the film, the inspiration behind the costume design and makeup, and why the cast was perfect for this film. I got to hear what the actors had to say about their characters and hear about what Barry Jenkins loved about working with these actors. In one powerful scene, Fonny’s family confronts the Rivers family about Tish’s pregnancy, and I swear, I was snapping my fingers the whole time and my mouth stayed in an “O” shape for as long as I can remember because there were so many disses that Ernestine, Sharon and Fonny’s mom dished out to each other.

Barry Jenkins was the perfect director for this film. If you haven’t yet seen his film Moonlight, I recommend you watch it. While you don’t of course have to watch it before watching If Beale Street Could Talk, watching Moonlight and then watching If Beale Street Could Talk gave me a greater understanding of why Jenkins chose a certain lighting or way of zooming in on the characters. The cinematography of Moonlight (courtesy of James Laxton) was incredible, and I don’t think I will ever get tired of this film for that reason. I honestly wouldn’t know how to describe the beauty of Jenkins’s filmmaking, because it has its own unique style. The lighting, the focus on the characters’ facial expressions, and the brilliant beautiful music score made Moonlight a kind of beautiful that’s just super hard to describe unless you see the film for yourself. It’s the same with Beale Street; you just need to watch it to know why it’s so incredible.

And of course I would be remiss if I didn’t also recommend you read the novel If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin. I first heard about it when I heard they were making a movie based on the book. Before that I had read Go Tell It On the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, and I also saw the documentary on James Baldwin called I Am Not Your Negro (if you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend you do so. Powerful film.) But I didn’t know about If Beale Street Could Talk; maybe I had passed by it in the library and ruffled through its pages, but I didn’t read it until I saw the trailer for the film adaptation. When I heard Barry Jenkins was directing it, I immediately grabbed a copy and started reading. I devoured that book like it was a delicious meal; it grabbed me and didn’t let me go. Baldwin’s raw depictions of sexuality, Black womanhood, Black masculinity, love, pain and racial injustice got deep down into the pits of my soul and tugged so hard at my heartstrings I thought I would pass out. It sounds like I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. The cast of Beale Street wanted to pay tribute to a legend (aka James Baldwin) and they certainly delivered that tribute through their hard work and dedication during the production of this film. Incredible novel and film. This review doesn’t do justice to how moving both of them are.

If Beale Street Could Talk. 2018. Rated R for language and some sexual content.

Book Review: China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan

June 26, 2019

Categories: books

First of all, I have to say that Kevin Kwan never fails to amaze me with his incredible writing. I first saw Crazy Rich Asians while browsing the bookstore one time, but I had other books to read, so I put it back on the shelf. Then I finally read it and enjoyed it. For those who haven’t read it, it’s about this economics professor named Nicholas (“Nick”) Young. Nick takes her to Singapore to meet his family, and Rachel discovers that they are super wealthy. Turns out that Nick’s mom, Eleanor, hates Rachel and thinks that if Nick marries her, it will cause the family to go into financial misfortune since Rachel doesn’t come from means. The trip ends up being stressful for Rachel because she has to deal with everyone’s criticisms about her marrying Nick. Rachel moves back to New York, telling Nick to not come see her because she thinks that it will cause further pain for his mother and the rest of his family.

In China Rich Girlfriend, the sequel to Crazy Rich Asians, Nick and Rachel are back in New York and are planning to get married soon. However, Eleanor disrupts the wedding and tells Rachel about her long-lost father, who she hasn’t seen in years. Eleanor tracked down Rachel’s father and tells her to come see him. Rachel meets him and finds out that she has family in China that is richer than even Nick’s family in Singapore. She even meets her brother, Carlton, who she hasn’t met before. His friend Collette is a super-wealthy model who spoils Rachel during her visit while also dealing with her parents’ disapproval of her love for Carlton and not Richie, the super-rich guy they were trying to get her to marry. Meanwhile, Astrid Leong, Nick’s cousin, is dealing with a terrible marriage to Michael, who didn’t come from wealth but is now a tech billionaire, and her love for Charlie Wu, another tech billionaire who was Astrid’s first love before Michael. Kitty Pong is trying to go undercover after her breakup with Alastair Cheng lands her in hot water, and seeks the advice of Corinna, who tells her to dress down and behave in ways that won’t give her away as Kitty (this ends up backfiring badly.) At the core of all this nonsense is Rachel, who just wants to have a nice marriage to Nick and not have to deal with all the drama that comes with being married to one of the richest guys on the planet.

If anything, this novel taught me that while money itself isn’t the root of all evil, it’s what people do with money that can really mess someone up. We’ve all heard the phrase “Money doesn’t buy happiness,” and while it’s good to have money to pay your bills, rent, and occasional luxuries, spending lots of money just because you have a huge inheritance doesn’t ultimately lead to satisfaction. Colette and her friends spend a lot of money shopping and going out to eat, but Colette lashes out at her parents and even towards the end lashes out at Rachel, calling her ungrateful and a bad friend even when Rachel didn’t do anything to upset her. Colette wants more and more stuff, but she always ends up feeling unfulfilled. Even though Nick comes from wealth, he still wants to live a more down-to-earth life with Rachel without worrying about his inheritance. Even though Rachel’s brother and parents have lots of money, Rachel still holds strong to her roots because her single mother, Kerry, raised her to persevere even when they struggled financially living in a pricey place like New York. When Carlton sees Richie embarrass Colette by proposing to her and then throwing a tantrum when she tells him no, he bets all the money he has on drag-racing Richie, unaware that he already got in a very bad car accident and nearly died. When he fumes about it, Rachel goes to comfort him and convince him that it’s not worth it to fight back with Richie. Carlton tells her in fury that she needs to get out of his life and that he wishes he never met her, but then realizes what he said and breaks down into tears. Rachel doesn’t let anyone’s pretentiousness get to her because she dealt with it with Nick’s family, and this makes her one of the few down-to-earth characters in the novel.

All I can say is, I can’t wait to read the last novel in the trilogy, Rich People Problems. And I hope they make movies for the second and third novels of the trilogy. 🙂

China Rich Girlfriend: A Novel by Kevin Kwan. 481 pp.

Book Review: The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon

July 8, 2019

I just finished this incredible novel, The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon by Kathleen J. McInnis. It’s a powerful novel about this woman named Heather Reilly who studied conflict resolution in college and ends up working at the Pentagon because of an academic fellowship opportunity that came up there. At first, she is assigned to develop a peace plan for Afghanistan, but due to budget cuts the peace plan gets put on the back burner and she is reassigned to a stressful job in another department, one having to do with military coalitions. Not only that, but Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (aka her boss) Ariane Fletcher, is tough on her and the rest of the team, and not even the toughest generals can out-tough her. Moreover Heather is struggling with the loss of her brother, Jon, in combat, and her sister-in-law, Amanda, is also dealing with the pain of losing Jon, who is her husband. Oh, and one more thing: Ryan, Heather’s fiance, isn’t interesting anymore to her and he can’t afford to pay off his student loans (she, too, has student loans she is struggling to pay off.) However, even though Heather deals with issues on a personal and work level, she remains tenacious and eventually gains the approval of her colleagues (and even her boss) through her persistent hard work.

This book was a combination of movies: Late Night, Legally Blonde, and The Devil Wears Prada. It reminded me of these three films because all of them, like The Heart of War, feature young female protagonists who lack experience in the fields they pursue but nevertheless conquer this knowledge and surpass their peers in their work. In Late Night, Molly Patel has little experience writing for late night TV even with her experience in stand-up comedy. But when her boss, Katherine, finds out she’s actually really funny, she starts to see Molly’s stand-up talent as an asset rather than as a lack of expertise. Also, Molly puts in the work of writing the jokes because if she kept criticizing Katherine’s way of running the show, then Katherine was going to fire her. In The Devil Wears Prada, Andy Sachs thinks all the hype around fashion at Runway magazine is overrated, but Miranda Priestly, her boss, tells her she can accept the culture at Runway or leave for good. When Andy cries, Nigel, Miranda’s art director, tells Andy to snap out of it and just do her job because Miranda is doing hers. When Andy changes her outlook on her job, she dresses like everyone at the magazine and even takes on the behaviors of the people at Runway. Now, of course, while Andy did change her attitude, her job as Miranda’s assistant still consumed her life and she lost that work-life balance that was so essential to helping her be her best self. She ended up losing her friends and touch with herself. However, the film taught me that while you shouldn’t let people talk down to you, it’s also important to be willing to learn new things, even if they’re things you don’t care much about. And in the end, Andy’s time as Miranda’s assistant landed her a new and better job, and the guy who interviews her says that working for Miranda Priestly is tough and that he would be “an idiot” if he didn’t hire Andy because of the hell she endured working as, in Miranda’s words, “her worst assistant.”

In Legally Blonde, there is a similar theme. Elle Woods is this cheerful fashionable woman from Los Angeles whose jerk boyfriend, Warner, breaks up with her before he leaves for Harvard. Warner tells her she’s not smart enough for Harvard Law School and she proves him wrong. At the beginning when she is first in class, the professor doesn’t take Elle’s ambition seriously just because she writes with a fluffy pink pen and wears cheery attire, but when Elle meets Warren at a party and he once again tells her she’s never going to be good enough for Harvard and that he’s gotten back with his ex-girlfriend, Vivian, she realizes that Warner is a waste of her time and studies hard so she can excel in her classes, and proves to her professors and peers that she belongs at Harvard and that wearing pink and smiling doesn’t mean anything is wrong with her.

In The Heart of War, Heather wonders for the longest time why Fletcher is so hard on her. Fletcher in the book later explains to her that she was so tough on Heather because she herself had that tough kind of training and wouldn’t have been so good at her job if her bosses hadn’t been so hard on her, but that because women are held to different standards than men are, and while her being a female boss was seen as overbearing, male bosses would never be told that being aggressive was bad or intimidating. Like Fletcher’s colleagues, Miranda Priestly’s colleagues (and the general public) saw her as this evil ice queen because she was tough to her employees and had no time for shenanigans. Like Fletcher, Katherine in Late Night was a hard boss to work with, but she was hard on her team because she wanted them to do great work, and she was hard on Molly because she herself struggled as one of the few women working in the comedy profession, and wanted to let Molly know that she had to have a thick skin to deal with her male colleagues’ attempts to make her feel like she’d be better off bringing them coffee and cupcakes and not sitting at the writer’s table doing the work she set out to do in the first place. Heather grew from her experiences dealing with Fletcher and realizes that she is actually interested in the kind of policy work she is doing. When her old fiance, Ryan, tries to win her back, Heather reveals she’s been promoted, and Ryan, like Warner in Legally Blonde, tries to talk her out of doing such work because he thinks it’s a waste of her time to try and go for something challenging. But like Elle Woods, Heather understands that if she were to go back to her life with Ryan, she would probably not have the chance to do this kind of interesting work again. Also, her (Heather’s) brother, Jon, died, and Heather’s mission is to serve her country because of the impending likelihood of war between the U.S. and Afghanistan.

The book also reminded me of the film Arrival because of the theme of diplomacy and international relations. Communication and language is a central theme in Arrival; Louise Banks is a linguistics professor who actually goes to communicate with aliens after a series of mysterious spacecrafts are seen hovering in different places on Earth. At first the communication is shaky and the extraterrestrials’ message doesn’t get across to Louise and her party, prompting nations around the world to cut off communication with the aliens. Louise then goes by herself and the aliens finally communicate that they didn’t arrive on Earth to start a war, but instead to foster a mutual friendship with human beings. Instead of using weapons that can kill people, they want to use the weapon of communication to restore peace to Earth. Louise’s willingness to meet people face to face with the heptapods shows how, although dialogue isn’t the only method for effective diplomacy and, in the end, world peace, it should serve as the foundation for the process of establishing bonds of trust between countries.

Similarly, communication is at the heart of The Heart of War. It’s not just a story about a woman who gets any old job working for the government and falls in love along the way. It gets knee deep in foreign policy matters, and for good reason (otherwise, why would they put such a genius spin on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War?) Heather, despite not having much military experience, uses her studies in conflict resolution to come up with a military strategy that is more nuanced and more thought-out than simply invading someone’s country and blowing up their citizens. When the peace plan for Afghanistan gets cuts at the beginning of the book, Heather asks Voight, one of her colleagues, why they would do that, and he tells her that it’s because the war in Afghanistan is over and the U.S. is withdrawing most, if not all, of its troops, so they don’t need many people in that department. Even when Heather tells him there is a civil war going on in Afghanistan, which is all the more reason for the U.S. to take up the peace plan again, Voight tells her to drop the issue if she wants to get on even just an inch of good footing with Ariane. When Ariane assigns her team to Moldova and drops the Afghanistan peace plan, Heather asks why she’s not focusing on Afghanistan. Ariane tells her that the Islamic State doesn’t present any threats to the U.S. or its allies, but Russia does, and, moreover, the Moldovan Minister of Defense wanted Ariane to protect Moldova from Russian influence since they were so close and Russia so powerful. Heather tries to reason with Ariane that she can use her experience studying about conflict resolution in Afghanistan to help the team, but Ariane simply doesn’t care.

However, after Heather writes out a thorough, well-thought-out memo detailing the strategy that the team should use for dealing with Moldova, the senior leaders (aka the guys at the main table, the guys who make the big decisions and do all the big talking, the guys that Ariane doesn’t want Heather sitting with and talking about these issues with because she doesn’t think Heather has the experience necessary to do so) begin to rely on Heather for information about the strategies they should use for drafting out the strategy, and eventually she ends up sitting with the guys at the big table, hashing out the most complex strategies with them. Even when Ariane tries to make it seem like Heather did something wrong by speaking up about the issue and not just sitting at her desk and carrying out Ariane’s orders, Heather refused to back down and that is what earned her respect later from Ariane and her later promotion to the peace plan for Afghanistan. Because the team had been so focused on Maldova, they let the issue with Afghanistan drop, but the impending threat of terrorism didn’t go away and the Islamic State of Khorasan in Afghanistian claimed responsibility for the attacks they made on several American schools around the world. When Amanda and Heather watch this news, Amanda tells her that even though Fletcher chewed her out for wanting to focus on the peace plan for Afghanistan, it’s all on Heather to bring this to the generals’ attention because of her prior knowledge of negotiating peace with Afghanistan. When Heather meets with the top leaders, she voices her disagreements with their opinions and instead calls for an approach that involves being aware of what’s going on in the region and also communicating directly with the Islamic State. Because the U.S. government left civilians in Afghanistan to fend for themselves and got distracted with the Moldova-Russia situation, the terrorists in the country took over and dismantled all of the efforts that the U.S. put in before to establish peace in the country.

Heather finds herself conflicted when the generals talk about letting Afghanistan deal with the war on its own because she remembers how Jon died fighting to end the mess that terrorists were causing in Afghanistan, and how, even if the U.S. were to pull out of the country and not risk anymore of its soldiers losing their lives, it would just further strengthen the threat of terrorism in the Middle East, which, as the attacks showed, isn’t just Afghanistan’s problem but the entire world’s problem, showing how we are interconnected even though we live in different parts of the world, and that one place’s actions can have a severe impact on other places. Heather calls for the U.S. government to rebuild the Afghans’ trust so that we wouldn’t repeat how we dealt with the Middle East after 9/11, which brought about several negative consequences. Her strategy for Afghanistan requires thinking long-term rather than focusing on short-term wins for the U.S. When a general at the table asks her if this means she doesn’t want the U.S. to go to war, she answers that it’s more complex than just a yes or no matter, and involves working with Afghanistan’s government. He thinks she is ridiculous for wanting to talk to terrorists, but she tells him that they can’t assume they are all terrorists and that stabilizing the region means working together with the people in that region. Similar to Heather, Louise in Arrival takes the initiative to go by herself to communicate with the heptapods even when other people think her doing so is too risky. Her desire to communicate with them openly allows the heptapods to establish trust with her even when the rest of the world sees them as a threat. Both Arrival and The Heart of War taught me that when talking about peace or diplomacy, careful consideration and the desire to communicate without pretense or assumptions is crucial if we want to get anywhere putting our peace proposals in action.

Excellent novel that I highly recommend you read.

The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon by Kathleen J. McInnis. 371 pp.

Book Review: Up in the Air by Walter Kirn

July 1, 2019

Categories: books, movies

This morning I woke up bright and early and finished Up in the Air by Walter Kirn. It at first moved kind of slowly but it gradually picked up pace.

The book is about a successful businessman named Ryan Bingham who works as a career transition counselor (CTC), which involves, at its core, assisting companies in downsizing their staff. He racks up all these frequent flier miles, gets first class on all the flights, and sleeps with all these beautiful women he meets (okay, I might be exaggerating, but he doesn’t want to get married or settle because he loves living the high life.) He meets this woman named Alex on a flight and they hit it off, but he’s wondering if she’s the one. Meanwhile, his family is worried for him because he’s rarely at home since he’s traveling all the time. However, Ryan still seems justified in keeping up his lifestyle.

This novel is a work of psychological fiction, so we only get to really witness what happens in the book from Ryan’s point of view, no matter how pessimistic it is. I didn’t hate the book of course, I thought it was well written. I just wish I read it before seeing the movie, then I would have noticed what was different from the novel. For one thing, while George Clooney plays Ryan just as he was in the novel, the book seems to focus more on Ryan’s relationship to his sisters than it does in the movie. In the novel, Julie, Ryan’s sister, goes with him to the airport and we see how she worries about his constant traveling and how it exhausts her when for him, it’s just a part of his job. The film adaptation, from what I can remember (I saw it more than a year ago), focuses on Ryan’s business relationship with Natalie, his new hire, and how she is trying to digitize the career transition process.

The film will stick with me for the longest time because it made me understand that even though I have a great job, I need to save money in case something happens. Layoffs are a reality; I don’t care how good of an employee one is. The economy now is getting shakier even though people are divided on whether we’re going into a recession or not, and not everyone can afford to save money for emergencies because they have bills to pay and mouths to feed. But in those situations, it really does help to have money saved up. The film also showed how the job market is different and it’s rare nowadays for one person to hold the same job for 20-30 years like it was in the past. You have people job-hopping, you have people getting fired, and more people are turning to freelancing and working from home so that they don’t have to go into an office every day. Skills are becoming more technologized, and just having a bachelor’s degree isn’t enough anymore; one has to major in something lucrative nowadays in order to make a six figure income (although it does help to be good in your craft if you want to become successful, even if that craft doesn’t always get a good rap in the job market. Speaking as a musician here.)

The novel reminded me that job hunting is no fun and games. It can be a lot of hard work, blood, sweat and tears, and rejection after rejection. In the novel, Ryan explains CTC to Julie, and after his long explanation she tells him he is trying to paint this job description as some sunshine-and-rainbows gig when it’s, at its core, talking idealistic nonsense to people who got fired. According to Ryan, CTC folks don’t do the actual firing and they don’t find them new jobs. Instead, CTC means “coaching” them through the process of unemployment because, as Ryan describes, job hunting is a job in and of itself. I agree with that, because I got rejected by seventy different jobs while searching for one after college, and not having a job took the life and self-esteem out of me (of course, had I been smarter, I would have driven up to that pancake house right after I graduated to see if they were hiring. Darn it.) Job searching requires patience, it truly does, Ryan isn’t lying about that. Doing self-assessments about your skill set and qualifications can be draining, too, because you are constantly having to look at yourself, at both your strengths and weaknesses.

However, in the film we don’t get to see how these people go through that process, only that they are depressed when they find out they are being let go. One lady tells Ryan and Natalie that she will jump off a cliff because she no longer has a job, and it’s revealed that she ended up doing so. I found the film dark, but the book was actually a lot darker. It’s almost like a corporate version of Catcher in the Rye; the protagonist sees life in a dark way, and it consumes him, affecting his relationships with everyone around him.

This book also made me think about what home and rootedness really means. Ryan thinks that everyone else doesn’t have a strong sense of themselves when they travel, but that he has a strong sense of who he is even when he doesn’t have a home of his own. A guy in the book tells him he should own a home, and Ryan doesn’t take much interest in having a home or being settled because he’s used to the life that he has traveling and flying in first class. He doesn’t want to be rooted because to Ryan, that means he has lost his freedom. But like the characters in Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom, who have all this success but have these unhappy lives, Ryan still suffers because he is chained to his ego. He won’t let go of this idea that somehow he has to rack up the most miles to feel the most important, he’s holding onto this idea that he is the best at everything and pities everyone else. In the film, he tries to get Alex back, but finds out she is married with kids.

I’m too tired to finish this review, but the book was good. And the movie was great.

Up in the Air: A Novel by Walter Kirn. 2001. 303 pp.

Book Review: We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins At Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer

October 19, 2019

Categories: books, environment, social justice

A few years ago, in my philosophy course on Animal Rights, our professor had us read and discuss Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer’s exploration of factory farming and the ethical dilemma he found (and still finds) himself in with regards to cutting meat 100 percent out of his diet. From what I can remember (I’d probably have to go back and read the book despite reading it several times in that one course.) Eating Animals mainly talks about the ethical implications of factory farming and how factory farming puts these animals in cruel conditions. In We Are the Weather, published this very year, it goes to another level to talk about the impact of factory farming on the planet. This book attracted me because he forces us to sit back and reflect not just on factory farming and global warming, but on the deeper meanings behind our actions, like Part 2 he gives these disturbing statistics about climate change and the average carbon footprint, and the ways in which factory farming contributes to increased greenhouse gas production and, in turn, higher climate temperatures. He also talks earlier in the book about the film An Inconvenient Truth (the film that inspired me to go on a save-the-planet movement when I was in middle school.) But then in Part 3, “Only Home,” he talks about the concept of home and how it relates to the ways we treat the planet. In one of the chapters of Part 3, called “Mortgaging the Home,” he talks about how his family was just one of many American families with the “American dream” mindset, where his grandparents’ house was larger than his parents’ house, and how his house is larger than his parents’ house. The “American Dream” dictates that one’s lifestyle should be more expansive than that of one’s parents, but now that climate change is worsening and people are using more resources than the planet can provide, we have to ask ourselves: is The American Dream sustainable? What do we have to lose by sacrificing it? Foer talks about the debt that many Americans have: credit card, student loans, car debt, mortgages, but he takes it to another level by forcing us to think about the debt we owe to our only real home, Planet Earth. He says in the beginning of the chapter that we will need four planets to sustain the average American lifestyle for all 7.5 billion and counting people on the planet, while in other countries that are less affluent, we would only need one planet or so to do that.

I have lately been reading about lifestyle inflation and never thought that our planet would live long enough to still sustain the kind of lifestyles that the American Dream pressures us to pursue. I am fine living below my means, but I can’t speak for everyone since everyone has different goals and situations. But this book left me with this bittersweet feeling, of, like, I am hopeful that we will mitigate what we’ve done to the planet, and at the same time I think about all the species that have gone extinct and the communities that have to deal with the worsening effects of climate change (coastal places mainly.) I am a vegan, but I also drive a car to work, I keep my phone on every day, and I have flown a lot in the past on planes and still crave that spirit of travel. I also try to compost and not waste too much food, since I watched the documentary Wasted and realized that being vegan by itself wasn’t going to cut down on greenhouse gases if all the food I ate was being thrown away in the trash so it could go and rot in a landfill and emit even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Part of me wants to start a composting program at my workplace, but since I have composted before, I can tell you that it attracts a lot of critters and that wouldn’t necessarily be good for the firm’s business. Still, I get sad when our office manager has to throw out all this uneaten fruit at the end of the day, and no matter how much fruit I try to take home I know it won’t fit in my Pyrex container. So you can only do so much.

I guess I gelled with Foer’s book because in Buddhism, we talk about karma, and how it means that we create karma through our thoughts, actions and words each day, but from Nichiren Buddhism, yes, our karma is deep but we don’t have to be fatalistic and think it’s the end of the world. We can transform this karma not just through chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo but also through taking actions in our daily lives to transform the effects of this karma. In a way, as a collective of individuals we have created a social karma through setting up these institutions and systems that perpetuate discrimination and consumerism. And Foer recognizes that people who say we should stop eating meat and flying aren’t being super practical, and also that this perspective might as well be saying that we should become “air-a-tarians” and abstain from having fun altogether. But he also recognizes that the far end of the perspective, aka cynicism, won’t help. He writes a lot about hopelessness and suicide in the past part of his book, and suicide being one of the leading causes of death, but that we need to still have hope even at a time when we don’t know how we’ll adapt to global warming. He says that we can’t just sit back and pray for stuff to happen, but instead we can take action:

“by having honest conversations, bridging the familiar with the unfamiliar, planting messages for the future, digging up messages from the past, digging up messages from the future, disputing with our souls and refusing to stop. And we must do this together: everyone’s hand wrapped around the same pen, every breath of everyone exhaling the shared prayer.”

Foer, We Are the Weather, page 224

We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast. Jonathan Safran Foer. 272 pp. 2019.

Book Review: Peace, Justice and the Poetic Mind by Daisaku Ikeda and Stuart Rees

September 26, 2019

Categories: books

I just finished this amazing dialogue between Soka Gakkai International president Daisaku Ikeda and Stuart Rees, who is the former director of the Sydney Peace Foundation and professor emeritus at the University of Sydney. This dialogue was published just last year and we need dialogues like it more than ever.

I needed to read this dialogue because there is so much happening in the world. The trade war between the U.S. and China, Britain threatening to leave the E.U. and recent mass shootings, as well as the damage that has been done to the planet and is just getting worse. But then I read Peace, Justice and the Poetic Mind, and I can honestly say how empowered I feel to be part of a movement to foster a more just and peaceful society. What I love about this dialogue is that Professor Rees and President Ikeda go deeper than the surface-level definition of peace, which usually means no more war. Because, as Ikeda and Rees agree upon, the discussion around peace and justice is more complicated than just stopping wars. It involves bringing peace and justice studies into our schools’ curriculums, finding ways to take care of the planet and giving voices to marginalized individuals. They also emphasize in the dialogue the need for more discussion around the history of settler colonial countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia, where Indigenous populations faced genocide and greed at the hands of white European settlers. Climate justice should involve Indigenous voices because this was their land first. Indigenous communities still face a ton of injustice today at the hands of the state, and while the communities of persons have fought so hard and so long for their sovereignty to the land’s resources, and while individuals in the U.S. and Canadian and Australian governments have spoken out against this injustice, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done.

That is the thing, I guess, about social justice. You have to keep talking about it. It’s not something you talk about and then all the problems of the world are gone. And more people are aware of this reality. In Nichiren Buddhism, if you want to understand what is happening in the present, you need to look at the past, and in order to understand what will happen in the future, you need to look at the present. Individuals create karma throughout their lives, and so this collective karma that we have with settler colonialism, global warming, the trade war, gun violence, injustice against immigrants and poverty, is because certain individuals created the cause of abusing their power and after many years, the effects have shown themselves in ugly ways. Which is why art is so important. It’s why I painted a picture of an elephant and a polar bear standing on melting polar ice caps and sweating while the sun, which has a hole in its ozone layer, beats down on them. I was angry with the status quo and wanted to do something about it, and watching how Greta Thunberg fought hard to address climate change showed me that even as an introverted person, I can still speak up about these issues through creative means. Rees, in the dialogue, says that “artists break down the walls of habitual practice and promote visions of world citizenship. In this way, they touch the hearts and minds of so many people.” (p. 59 of Peace, Justice and the Poetic Mind) As an artist, I need to speak out. And as a human, I need to be willing to have the tough conversations. I need to also use my art and my pen to create art that will move the human spirit, inspire a dialogue about the tough stuff.

Peace, Justice and the Poetic Mind: Conversations on the Path of Nonviolence. Stuart Rees and Daisaku Ikeda. 2018. 218 pp.

Book Review: Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer

June 13, 2019

I had to take a break before writing this post. Seriously, I couldn’t bring myself to cry, and yet I felt a huge lump in the back of my throat as I turned the last page of Jonathan Safran Foer’s poignant novel Here I Am, and at last breathed a sigh of relief.

I read Foer’s other works before: in my Animal Rights seminar we read and studied Eating Animals, a brilliant non-fiction account about vegetarianism and animal rights. I read and didn’t finish Everything is Illuminated on a train in Chicago, and picked it up again after letting it sit on my shelf, calling me to finish it. To this day, I still can’t shake that novel from my memory because Foer’s writing is so powerful and deep.

Here I Am grabbed me. It beckoned me, no, commanded me to finish it. It is, at its core, a meditation on life, success, family and identity. Jacob and Julia are a Jewish American couple living in Washington, D.C. They have three kids, a nice house, a dog and relatives who spend time with them. However, when Julia finds out that Jacob sent sexually explicit texts to another woman, she files for divorce. They seem far apart after their separation, but after an earthquake hits Israel, their lives change. This novel covers a lot of serious themes, so I had to take quite a few notes so I wouldn’t miss the details.

One of the major themes is identity. In my junior year of college I was interested in learning about the historical bonds between white Jewish Americans and African-Americans. At first I was learning about just the context of the U.S., but then I understood that my scope wouldn’t be deep enough if I just focused on the U.S. It turns out that what divided a lot of white Jewish people and Black people was the debate on Israel and how it treated and still treats Palestinian people. (5/23/21: I realize I’m writing this at a rather sensitive time, in the wake of escalating violence in the Israel-Gaza conflict). I won’t share my own personal thoughts on this because I don’t really know where to stand and I’m still in the process of educating myself on the topic, but after reading Here I Am, I understand that the Israel-Palestine debate is complex and has had a huge impact on both Israelis and Palestinians. In one scene, Tamir and Jacob are sitting at the kitchen table and watching the TV. Tamir asks Jacob why he stays in the U.S. but never actually goes to Israel to help people. Jacob tells him that he donates to the state of Israel and supports it enough as it is even while living in the United States of America. Tamir then reminds him that while people in Israel are dealing with armed conflict and the psychological toll of the earthquake, not to mention everyone’s criticisms of Israel, he, Jacob, lives in comfort and can watch the plight of the Israeli people on his TV because he’s not living their lives. I am aware that Jewish Americans are divided on this issue: some Jewish Americans have told me they support Israel, other Jewish Americans have told me they do not support Israel. As someone who isn’t Jewish American, I can’t say much on BDS (the Boycott, Divest and Sanction against Israel) or about the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians as a whole, but even just reading Foer’s novel reminded me that the entire debate and the war has hurt people in both communities and that in the end, no one actually wins because so many people lost their lives in this decades-old war. Jacob wrestles with his identity as a Jewish American because he knows his roots lie in Israel even though he was born in the U.S., but he also wonders whether he should support Israel or not.

The novel also wrestles with the concept of success and “making it” as an American. Even though Jacob and Julia seem to have the perfect life, it’s quite messy. Their son Sam is accused of writing racial slurs in class and they are also trying to get ready for his bar mitzvah even though Sam is reluctant to have one. They are also struggling with their divorce as well as the death of Jacob’s grandfather Isaac. Rather than keeping them farther apart, the news of the earthquake in Israel brings them closer together. This book reminded me that no matter how much money you have, whether you get married and have kids or have the best dream job in the world, no one is immune to loneliness, and even the most successful people struggle with it. Even when he is surrounded by his family, Jacob always asks whether his life has a purpose. He feels an emptiness that can’t be cured by wealth or success. The reason I majored in philosophy was because it forced me to wrestle with those tough questions: what constitutes a good life? what happens after we die? what is identity? what is home? Reading literature helps me contextualize my studies in philosophy because the characters ask themselves these tough questions even when they seem too busy to think about them. Life and death are not easy topics, but death happens to everyone, whether it’s the death or a marriage, the death of a loved one or the death of a beloved animal. Death forces us to stop and reflect on our existence and transcend our urgent need to always crave success, money and happiness. Philosophy often seems like it’s separate from religion, but the two are interconnected, and through the dialogues between Jacob and his family, philosophy unites with religion.

The thing that attracted me the most to this book was the use of dialogue and the constant theme of communication throughout the novel. When Jacob doesn’t communicate in an honest way with Julia about the texts, it hurts both of them. When Julia talks with Mark, the dad of one of Sam’s friends, their dialogue captures how much pain Julia feels when Jacob cheated on her and that Mark serves as a vessel through which she can embrace that pain and openly talk about how wrong it was for Jacob to cheat on her. A lot of times when writers have dialogue between characters they use “he said”, “she said”, or “they said”, and like many writers, I have done this, too. But in Here I Am, Foer treats the dialogue as if Jacob and Julia were real-life characters just having a regular human dialogue. He rarely uses “he said”, “she said” or “they said” when the characters talk to one another, and this helped me engage with the novel more because I wasn’t bored by the word “said”. The dialogues seemed like something out of a movie (I’m wondering if anyone’s written to Mr. Foer about the film rights for the novel. It’s that good.) and I felt for them because their discussions are so real. When Jacob and Julia are talking about their divorce and Jacob cheating on her, it is so raw and genuine. The characters also communicate through silences, and these moments of silence bring them together, make their world smaller than before. In Buddhism, there’s this concept of interconnectedness, and the reality is that no one is separate from one each other and that we are all connected to one another and met each other for a reason. By communicating with Jacob in a frank no-holds-barred discussion, Julia forces Jacob to confront his insecurities because he keeps them buried deep inside and doesn’t do much to address them. He texted the other woman those messages because he did not feel confident in his relationship with Julia and moreover, with himself.

The novel meditates on life and reminds us that through the deaths of Isaac and Israelis during the war and the earthquake that life is precious and we should cherish it. Towards the end of the novel, Jacob ponders the statement “Life is precious”, and regrets that he didn’t learn that sooner when Argus, his dog, is dying and Jacob must decide when to let him go. For too long, Jacob was so busy moving and doing things that he didn’t consider how his own success and life decisions would impact the people around him. Argus’s illness makes Jacob confront the fact that none of us should take life for granted because it can leave us before we know it.

I am still digesting this novel, so this review doesn’t do much justice to it. But I still recommend you read it. Foer is an incredible writer and worth reading.

Here I Am: A Novel. 2016. Jonathan Safran Foer. 571 pp.