‘…I am just carbon and bad timing…’ -Clatter. Neil Heilborn.
The whole point of reading is to live multiple lives…to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and to experience life from other perspectives. I have seen a part of myself in every book I have read. If you’ve watched the Netflix show ‘Everything, Everywhere All at Once’, then you might understand how I feel. And if you love reading, I know you have felt it too…you are everyone, everywhere all at once. You are Jay Gatsby in ‘The Great Gatsby’. You are Kainene in ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’. You are Heathcliff in ‘Wuthering Heights’. You are Elizabeth Bennet in ‘Pride and Prejudice’. But you aren’t just the characters, you are the authors too. You are Hemingway when he writes, ‘I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?’ You are Virginia Wolf in her letter saying, ‘I feel we can’t go through another one of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time.’ Books have always been a huge part of my life. The connections I have felt, the lives I have lived, the lessons I have learnt…That being said, here are the top five books that have changed the lenses for me; P.S. All links to the books will be listed at the end.
1.FreshWater by Akwaeke Emezi.
‘…the first madness is that we were born, that they stuffed a god into a bag of skin…’
Of everything I have ever read (and it is a long list) I have never experienced so much emotion in a single book. It’s not a sad book or anything like that, the protagonist doesn’t die (or does she?) Freshwater, by the beautiful and talented author, Akwaeke Emezi is such a beautiful story. It revolves around how misunderstood mental health issues are even by the people suffering from mental illness themselves. But the way she writes it is poetic. When you start reading it at first, the angle is that the protagonist is born with gods inside her. The author approaches it from a cultural point of view. She attaches meaning to it, the naming of the baby, the gods themselves, the culture, she gives insight into the cultural understanding of mental illness. This isn’t a summary of the book so I won’t tell you what happens, but it deals with loss and its effects at a young age. We get to see how Ada loses her mother and how her father abandons her without ever actually going anywhere. We witness Ada struggle with different aspects of her identity. We watch her journey as she finally discovers that she has multiple personality disorder. We understand how each personality emerging is linked to a traumatic event in her life. We watch her dissociate, we watch her fight. We see people in her life misunderstand her. We understand that if her parents had held on a little longer, if they had chosen her instead of themselves, maybe she would have had a chance. But most importantly, we watch her survive. This is a must read for anyone in their twenties. Here are three of my favourite quotes from the book;
‘It was interesting for us to watch, how he didn’t even have to go anywhere in order to leave her’
‘…it scrapes your mouth bloody to say it. When you name something, it comes into existence -did you know that? There is strength there, bone-white, injected in a rush, like a trembling drug…’
‘And so we were strengthened, because belief, for beings like us, is the colostrum of existence.’
2.The Ruins of Us by Keija Parssinen.
‘So while Rosalie, Abdullah, Miriam, Dan and Faisal are removed from my biography by virtue of our differences in age, religion, provenance, and in some cases, sex, they are born of my imagination, cultivated from my knowledge of pain, joy, betrayal, love. They are, indeed, me.’
–Keija Parssinen. The author.
This is the kind of book that would never have shown up in my library. It was an odd choice, based on my track record, but it surprised me. The story touches on religion, sacrifice, feminism, terrorism, impressionability and betrayal. Like all great tragedies, this story starts with a woman who falls in love. Don’t cringe yet, I promise it’s a great story. It follows Rosalie, an American woman married to a sheikh in Saudi Arabia. She gives up her family, her religion, her friends, her culture, her country to follow Abdullah, her husband. And she does this willingly, not a doubt in her heart. But their family gets torn apart when she finds out that her husband married someone else. But the way Keija writes it, you almost feel sorry for Abdullah. He doesn’t do it because of resentment or because he hates Rosalie. He isn’t a mean drunk who is a dictator to his wife and kids. He is a family man, a man of God. The kind of man he is makes it hard to hate him. He really does struggle with his decision to marry someone else…it eats at him, knowing what kind of pain he causes Rosalie. His son Faisal joins a movement, almost cultic, that hates Americans. His mother being one, complicates things. Faisal kidnaps his own mother at one point. Their daughter Miriam is a feminist who writes a blog about her life as a female Saudi teen. Every single character in this story is living separate lives that weave into each other. No one is an accessory of someone else’s life. Rosalie story is of her grappling with the reality of her husband’s betrayal and how she deals with it. Miriam is seeing the world in technicolour for the first time, not the black and white her country and religion have taught her. Faisal feels lonely and misunderstood so he craves belonging…even if that leads him to kidnap his own mother. I loved how Keija captures everyone’s individuality…their thoughts, their voices and decisions. You need to add this one to your list.
3.Our Numbered Days by Neil Hilborn.
‘But isolation is not safety, it is death. If no one knows you are alive, you aren’t.’
-Neil Hilborn.
This book is an all-time favourite of mine. It’s not really a story per se. I think the best way I can describe it is that it is a collection of words. The number of times I have re-read this book should be studied. Neil Hilborn is a genius, by all definitions of the word. I’ve read his works and I am in awe. The way he thinks, the way he writes, the way he expresses it in his books is so beautiful to me. And I know people have different tastes in books and literature, so let me say this, this book is for the over-thinkers, the writers, the poets, the ones who experience an existential crisis every fortnight. This book is for those who love words and what happens when words are put together to form sentences that express things you’ve only ever felt. This book is for those who adore literature in its entirety. Since this isn’t really a story here are some of my favourite quotes from this book:
‘I am a pile of bricks and you are holding the sledgehammer, which is to say I would not exist without you.’
‘I am sitting in this park watching an old couple almost cry together, and I want this to be the most important thing I do all year.’
‘It’s unfortunate that your offspring make people wish for a dystopian future in which euthanasia is a universally accepted form of birth control…’
‘:whatever you are feeling right now, there is a mathematical certainty that someone is feeling that exact thing. This is not to say you aren’t special. This is to say thank god you aren’t special.’
4.I wrote this for you by Iain S. Thomas.
‘I wrote this for you and only you’ –Iain S. Thomas.
This book is in the same genre as Our Numbered Days. One led me to the other, I can’t remember in which order. The book is called I wrote this for you because the author is writing it to you. Think of it as letters from someone who knows what you are going through. Find comfort in these words. Find healing. Find connection. Or don’t. Disagree with everything he writes. Stop reading because his words express everything you’ve never been able to in words. Close the book because it hits too close to home. Either way, this book was written for you. Nobody else gets it. Finding my favourite quotes in this book was hard. I love every word. But here are some random ones to get you started;
‘So forgive my absence. But I was never really here to begin with anyway.’
‘And it may look to you like I’m just walking through your city with my head held high. But in my head, I am not in your city.’
‘If you blur your eyes, the streetlights become hundreds of ghosts going home.’
‘You are nobody’s hero. And nobody needs you. Desperately.’
5.All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven.
‘Before I die I want to stay awake.’ -Jennifer Niven. All the Bright Places.
You’ve either already read the book or watched the movie. But I really hope you read the book first. ‘All the Bright Places’ was a coming of age book for me. The way Violet and Finch meet, everything they go through both individually and together. When I say reading is living multiple lives, what I mean is, I experienced loss for the first time through Violet’s eyes. It was the first time I had come across mental illness in any of the books I had ever read. I saw Finch write on sticky notes and place them on his wall and smile. It was the first time I ever considered how lonely loneliness is. It was the first time I understood that not everyone is trying to live, sometimes people are just trying to not die. I saw love as connection, sacrifice and not the fairy tales I had always read them out to be. The way it ended really broke my heart though. One of my favourite parts of this book is when Finch takes Violet to the ‘Before I die’ wall. What Finch wrote on the wall is in one of my journals. It is something I try to live up to everyday.
‘You are all the colors in one, at full brightness.’
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Awesome read.