march and april reads
Recently I’ve felt more inspired than ever to diversify my reading list and indulge in my reading wherever I go- on trains, planes, balconies and quiet corners of coffee shops. This is owed partly to finding more and more bookstagrammer accounts that pair enthusiastic reviews of so many books I’d like to read with very aesthethic book photography. If anything deserves to be romanticised, it’s escaping into a new literary world at the opening of a new book. By discovering new places of creativity and oodles of good recommendations, I’ve felt inspired to widen my world and try new styles and genres.
And while my reading wishlist never ceases to grow, my propensity to reach for a book and escape for a while has become more regular. Less screen time, more calm time. I love it.
So without further ado, let’s get into the good stuff: all the books I loved the most in March and April.
One Day, David Nicholls
And what a strong start this is. After the release of the popular Netflix series, one that kept me glued to a gut-wrenching story beautifully rendered on screen, I had to read the novel that inspired it. Especially since I watched it all, funnily enough, in one day..! I re-experienced the story while vividly picturing the characters and scenes from the show.
It’s so endearingly written, taking place on the same day [July 15th] every year, over twenty years, exploring Emma and Dexter’s changing relationship as they navigate their lives since graduating university. It made me laugh, it made me cry - and its message of grasping the important things in life [family, friends and loved ones] while navigating life’s obstacles, is an important one for all audiences. An incredible story that I’ll be holding dear for a long time coming.
Blueberries: Essays Concerning Understanding, Ellena Savage
A book of creatively crafted essays exploring a variety of topics stemming from Savage’s life experiences: from the idea of home to the cultural politics of travel. She plays with form and style in every piece, creating an enriching collection of literary experimentation that leaves you wanting more with every essay’s end. She says, “Books have […] interiority. They are about insides as well as surfaces, not only surfaces”. This couldn’t be more fitting for a book that delves into a writer’s inner world and, for me, reinvents what an essay collection can be.
Ripe, Sarah Rose Etter
An incredibly written piece of fiction about one struggling worker’s relationship to the capitalist machine, as she navigates a highly competitive work environment in the Silicon Valley. The narrator grapples with depression by expressing the darkness she feels as a black hole, threatening to drag her away into eternal obsoleteness forever. It’s such a unique and revelatory read about the perils of modern life, family and mental health.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
This book had been on my radar for a while and I decided to see what it was all about. It explores the relationship between Tomáš and Tereza, and Sabina and Franz, as they navigate their lives during the 1968 Prague Spring, a period of political liberalisation and protest in Czechoslovakia. It explores the character’s attitudes towards their relationships and love, and their attitudes towards the meaning of life.
The idea of the “lightness of being”, or rather the possibility that our existence on earth occurs once and never again [so we mustn’t place so much seriousness and heaviness upon it] is explored throughout as certain chapters take a form that strays from the narrative and become philosophical inspection. I found this book intriguing and can see why Kundera’s unique expression, and his pairing of philosophical meanderings with eccentric happenings in the plot, has earned it a firm place in the list of “must-read” fiction.
Four Seasons in Rome, Anthony Doerr
After travelling to Rome in late March, and rediscovering the beauty and magic of this city, I was compelled to pick this book back up, after reading it during university. It’s a truly unique piece of travel writing, telling of Doerr’s year spent in Rome as a research fellow, along with his wife and newborn twin boys. He’s a fascinating writer, compellingly documenting his discovery of the Italian language and way of life. His way with words is incredibly unique, conveying so much beauty and reverence in the smallest of details- from sights to scents to sounds. This is literary expression at its finest, and I absorbed every page feeling transported back to Rome. I really recommend a slow read of this book to discover the magic of the Italian bella vita for yourself.
Watching Women & Girls, Danielle Pender
I picked up this short story collection exploring women’s experiences, relationships and struggles. I would’ve loved to keep reading about many of the different characters, and how they defy archaic gender norms and reflect on their internalised thoughts on ‘expected’ behaviours and the female body’s place in patriarchal society. They often subversively challenge and critique expectations typically placed on them - with each story powerfully drawing you in. A book that has evoked in me a newfound love of short story compilations, and the diversity of experience these can offer within their pages.
Heaven, Mieko Kawakami
After entering a slight reading slump, I inhaled this short novel by literary genius Kawakami. I have read her longer [and perhaps more well-known] novels Breasts and Eggs and All The Lovers In The Night, and this story was all the more compelling. It tells of two high school students, an unnamed male narrator and his newfound friend Kojima, and their intensely blossoming friendship amidst an incredibly cruel torrent of bullying. They are both social outcasts, and soon form a bond of solidarity and unspoken support as they explore what a close friendship and loyalty means.
While the subject mater is utterly heartbreaking, the novel interestingly explores topics of morality [including, quite uniquely, the perspective of one of their tormentors) and whether our actions truly have moral value on this earth, and where our motivations to act really come from. Do we act because it is right or do we simply want to act regardless due to our own interests? While the bullied grapple with their attitudes towards the verbal and physical abuse they suffer each day in school, we see their resoluteness to take their pain and suffering without a public show of emotion, to not give the bullies a reaction- and how much mental strength this takes. It’s a powerful exploration of the importance and meaning of true friendship, beautifully written as always by Kawakami.
Enter Ghost, Isabella Hamad
A powerful read exploring Palestinian resistance and the challenges of homecoming, this novel tells the story of Sonia returning to occupied Palestine to visit her sister, after over ten years since setting foot in her familial homeland. It is an experience fraught with conflicting emotions as she grapples with a sense of dislocation after over a decade living in London. Though she intends to spend her time reconnecting with both her sister and her old neighbourhood, while processing a difficult breakup, she becomes involved in her sister friend Mariam’s production of Hamlet in the West Bank.
This theatrical undertaking comes with certain risks, being funded by a infamous figure of Palestinian insurgency. Our narrator’s experiences as cautious participant in this site of collective resistance allows us to view the living reality of Israeli settler colonialism in a unique light. The novel explores estranged sisterhood and theatre as a site of rebellion through this lens, and was a uniquely crafted way to better understand the oppression and struggle of Palestinians today. Sonia powerfully comments that Palestine is like “an exposed part of an electronic network…this place reveal[s] something about the whole world”- which certainly rings true now more than ever.
Greek Lessons, Han Kang
My final mention is another novel that could be described as ‘philosophical fiction’. It depicts a woman’s loss of connection to her mother tongue [Korean] while she learns another language [Greek]. She ceases to be able to verbally communicate, including with her young son, while her Greek teacher grapples with the gradual loss of his sight. They are both losing a form of connection to the world at a time when they find a kindred sprit in each other.
It explores the connection between our language and our world, and how a rupture like an incapacity to connect our wishes and feelings to our language can affect our experience of the world arounds. It made me think deeply about the different forms of communication, and language’s important role as mediator of our emotions and understanding of the world. The novel really encourages you to think about the world in a new way, and how we’ve constructed life and human interaction around our means of verbal communication [interestingly including humour and laughter]. It’s a short book - but rich with meaning.
And like last time, I leave you with a quote I loved from the ultimate book mentioned: “the world is an illusion, and living is dreaming.” I love novels that make you pause and reflect, and introduce a sense of rupture between how we unknowingly experience life and how life might truly be. The novel, as seen here, is a powerful site of challenging reality, whether political, personal or philosophical, and I cannot wait to continue to enrich my thinking patterns and understanding with the reads I have lined up next.
