SED Artist

One of the many things I will always be grateful for about my family is their passion for literature and making that such a huge part of our daily lives. You can’t be a writer if you aren’t a reader. Reading and writing is just one more of those wonderful art forms that unite humankind and remains timeless no matter the challenges that art and culture faces. It is one of our human instincts surely, to write down our thoughts and feelings, our stresses and to do lists, to write down the names of the people we love and the places we want to go. It’s a fight against and for ourselves, where an array of confusions, contemplations and contradictions exist on the same page. It resists that vagaries of time and space, once written into the universe they belong to us, to it, to them, and can be used and studied and believed, argued and understood and resisted. Words on a page are a simple form of art, a basic form of expression, that once tuned, most likely becomes the most widely used and wholly human creation that unites and separates us silmulteanoualy, whether used in cruel cold attempts to twist our brains and manipulating our thoughts, or in the attempts to capture and share beauty and joy and love and all that connects us.

So, I want to share some of my favourite books in the hope that someone likes one or two of them as much as I do. These aren’t in order of preference (except maybe the first one).

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. This book is more like my handbook for life. Although you probably shouldn’t act like the protagonist with regard to love and other people, the messages and ideas are poised and thoughtful and can be tuned to your own actions and feelings as chosen. It’s one of those books that can become everything you need it to be, without even knowing what that really is. It answers and poses so many questions that you end up in a sort of ‘knowing more’ and ‘knowing less’ part of your brain which can be really confusing and really enlightening all at once. Its philosophy is plaited so effortlessly into the tyrannies of daily choices and human nature, that its subtleties are compellingly comedic and universally valuable.

A friend of mine with whom I discussed this book quite a bit had an interesting insight regarding Tomas and his approach to polyamory, suggesting that actually Tomas is most likely just a selfish sex addict with grandiose excuses. Maybe he’s right, but there is great insight and comedic value to his approach on the human desire to have everything and to have nothing all at once. Isn’t that what we always strive for ? We want responsibility, but we also don’t, we want to work hard but also we don’t want to work at all, we want to have many friends and ties to places, but we also desire to be free and alone and be tied to nothing. We desire the weight and the lightness of life as it so pleases us. This is Kundera, it is here that he displays it under a microscope in the simplest and most human manner.

The Overstory, by Richard Powers.

This book is just beautiful and is actually my mother’s favourite book. It is a journey between the reader, each narrator, and nature. It took me a little while to fall in love with the first few pages, it was unexpectedly poetic and I didn’t quite understand the premise of the story. Once you get into it though, and once the stories start to knit together, you’re hooked, you live and breathe it, and the natural world inside and outside the story blossoms. The fight that humans are willing to put up for the love and protection they feel over the great natural beauties is inspiring and will make you feel like a teeny tiny piece of ridicule who doesn’t do enough for the planet. How can a book teach you so much about yourself and the planet you belong to, silmultaneously ? This book is like an exciting novel and documentary all in one, where you keep on pushing to learn something more about the natural world, and the best thing is, you’re learning all these things in sync to the characters in the book. Really, you’re just another chapter to the story, another character with their own approach and discovery of the things it’s teaching you.

Now, as I’ve just discussed something to do with inherent human goodness, I should probably talk about Humankind next, by Rutger Bregman. Humankind is really just a non religious bible, to set us back onto the right path, to fill us back up with hope and kindness. Why is it that we always think humans are cruel, heartless and selfish, when truly that is not the case. As we all know, negative news, just like negative thoughts and negative people, takes over and smothers the good things. Humankind is here to prove you, and me, and all of us, in our pessimistic moments, that actually we are all inherently good at heart. And what better time to read something so positively mindful than now?

Moving onto the next, and slightly less jolly, the book I am reading at the moment, Shuggie Bain. It was Douglas Stuart’s debut novel and won the 2020 Booker Prize. It’s heart wrenching, truly. It’s one of those devastating books that you can’t find yourself to put down. The clear disintegration of his life and the life of his mother is brutal and vulnerable in a way which makes you feel like it’s your own autobiography. It’s not hard to understand the attachement to this now treasured classic, even as it progressively tears you apart.

Next in line is an author and her two books, not just one. Both of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels bowled me over. Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah. I’m sure you will have heard of the latter, but the first I assure you is just as good.

Americanah

Her non linear storytelling is enthralling, she commands the story subtly and with determination, choosing whether to keep you at a distance or pull you in. As she unravels herself in both book and blog, her readers become a rare form of voyeur, knowing and pulling apart the narrative with both insider and outsider perspective. She does not isolate her reader, on the contrary she takes you under her wing and trusts you with her vulnerabilities and her notable remarks. It is raw and never overly dramatised, displaying true moments of suffering open on the table with such great yet humble effect , and actually the largest sufferings or discomforts were felt through the simplest of techniques, where Adichie’s writing is so honest and present that she’s transports her reader into any moment, of her choosing of course, because it is within her power, which she uses excellently, to pull or us or keep us at a distance.

In Half of a Yellow Sun, she uses similar techniques for back and forth narration between two different protagonists, whose stories gradually fold into each other naturally. She is a writer of great beauty and humility whose storytelling strategies continue to lose you in time, space, and emotion. It’s a scary experience to feel uneasy when reading a book, especially when the author has intentionally placed you there. In this case, Adichie has strategically positioned you in a vulnerable position, a direct parallelism for the protagonists positions within the Nigerian civil war.

Adichie wiggles with clever intention and exciting remark between dialogue and story telling.

Now, a heavy one. A Little Life by living legend Hanya Yanagihara. How does a person even come up with a story like this, woven through such trauma and pain, in such crisp and clear detail, with not a single loose string in its entire 720 pages. Its most likely that you’ve already heard and seen quite a lot about it online, or that you’ve been suggested it by a friend but are too scared to pick it up because of the things you’ve heard about it. Too right. It is truly the definition of tragedy and it will most likely break you in ways you didn’t think possible. You should still read it though. It’s a one in a lifetime read. It’s one of those books you have to put down when it gets tough, just to save up enough courage to pick it up again the next day. You cannot discard it, no matter the pain you feel reading it, no matter how hard the struggle, the battle between yourself and the suffering you feel for the main character. Once you’ve finished it, it will most likely remain closed forever, and it will be one of those books you keep with you for a long time, and the you will always suggest to friends with a large warning message attached to it.

Barbarian days: A Surfing Life by William Finnigan.

Whether you’re into surfing or you’re not, it’s a brilliant book. Finnigan is an honest writer who transports you into each of his passions, which include surfing and journalism. In this novel you follow his unusual lifestyle filled with love, fear and excitement. He is bright, he is exciting and he never lets you down in his search for something new. You’ll find yourself professing your own words of love to the waves and the way the tide turns by the end of the book, no matter how little you know of it.

Educated by Tara Westover.

Tara Westover was actually a lecturer at my university, and that’s why I read this book. It was worth every second of my time and more. She tackles her memoir with a ferocity you could only hope to face life with one day. Demonstrating the adversity and disadvantages in growing up in a Mormon family, she leads us along her battle of a journey with bold determination. It is inspiring, exciting and bold. It is courage in writing.

Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason.

This is a fairly recent book, and not particularly too easy of a read, mainly because of the emotional battle you feel like you’re taking part in. This book helped me a lot in the face of keeping myself balanced between the reality of joys and sadness. This is a story of forgiveness and love which lays in the ugly realities of mental health.

I will leave you with two last classics, The Book Thief, and Any Human Heart. Both beautiful, both more than worth your time, and both also made into great films.