3 Books to Get to Know Me!

Good afternoon 🍋8️⃣ residents,

Here are three books that represent me as a person. These books have magnificent characters, stories, plot lines and depth that I resonate with 💛 I will share my reviews for each one so this caption might get longer than usual

🌟 HOUR OR THE STAR // CLARICE LISPECTOR

Translated from the Portuguese by Benjamin Moser, The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector delivered a story I didn’t know I needed in less than 90 pages. This novella is about a self-conscious narrator who knows too much writing about a poor oblivious Macabéa who knows too little. “She wasn’t an idiot but she had the pure happiness of idiots.” As you can expect already, the writing is almost magical as Lispector twists and turns words with diminutive observations and spontaneous judgments to find balance somewhere in between the two “characters” who suffered from innocence and consciousness respectively. I was shocked when Macabéa noted that “Sadness was a luxury” because I used to tweet the same thing when I realized if you have time to be sad you’re actually very rich. Macabéa was born into poverty and body image that didn’t fit societal standards. She also suffered from mental illness. And yet she never bring up about her shortcomings. “She wasn’t crying because of the life she led: because, never having led any other, she’d accepted that with her that was just the way things were.” Mr Narrator’s futile efforts at labeling her life as “sad” didn’t succeed as it proved further that she was inwardly free. This book reminds me so much of my all-time favorite book: DEATH IN SPRING by Mercè Rodoreda because it also consists of sort of “anti-hero” narrative and characters with free spirits that stuck in a cruel society.

🚀 TO BE TAUGHT IF FORTUNATE // BECKY CHAMBERS

Where should I start with this gem—packed with genetic engineering goodness, organic chemistry (my favorite subject🧪), primordial emotions, longing of a certain soil, a certain feeling, forgotten people—that blew my mind and arranged it back again. Chambers always did it. She is amazing.

Ariadne is light years away from “Earth” with her crew mates. To be Taught, if Fortunate is her long letter seeking for approval—for any signs of living, of other people other than themselves, of connections, to be precise—whether to halt their exploration and go back, or to abandon their mission and spend their remaining days in the space until they’re out of supplies.

“You don’t have to rush. This file will have taken fourteen years to reach Earth, and assuming that we have the good luck of someone reading it right away and replying right after, it’d take that another fourteen years.”

I was bawling at the ending. I’ve been wanting to cry at page one but I have to keep my cool. I love this book so much, like the other books in The Wayfarer Series. The writing is always sharp and smooth when needed, blocky when it’s detailing tech, and soothing when the melancholia set in. It’s the best writing style in my honest opinion. We cannot separate human and emotions. We can be serious and in love, genius and sad simultaneously. The way Chambers’ characters were fleshed out beautifully, with passion and flaws respectively appealed to me the most. Her note on chirality is perfect. I happened to learn it this semester, so I was totally absorbed reading the whole thing.

“We exist where we begin, yet to remain there is death.”

🏜️ STORIES OF THE SAHARA // SAN MAO

In order for me to talk about this book, I must talk about the author, Sanmao. She was and still is greatly revered by Taiwanese and Chinese women for her extraordinary life paths she carved for herself in the Sahara.

“I knew that my parents would be so delighted and comforted when they received this news. They’d been suffering for many years because of this wanderer.”

She was both enchanting and tragic. Let her free and she will color the world the way she sees fit, let her down and you’ll see the flesh of her wrists. I see so much of myself in her wonderful stories, her seemingly endless energy, her thirst for knowledge, her love for nature and people, and her contradictory sense of self (feeling like she belonged and knowing she was a lifelong outsider). She loved to break rules and yet adored the local traditions of the Sahrawi (the people living in Sahara). She would jump in the air in the middle of the desert but was afraid of djinns/ghosts. She was kind but wasn’t necessarily nice.

Each story carries a spectrum of intensity and emotions, so it’s normal to have the most traumatizing one branded in my mind: ‘Child Bride’ and ‘Crying Camels’. I laughed with my belly reading ‘The Desert Bathing Spectacle’ and ‘Nice Neighbors’ but mostly skimmed the uncomfortably written ‘My Great Mother-in-Law’ as I felt Sanmao probably didn’t want anyone to read it. ‘Sergeant Salva’ and ‘The Mute Slave’ had their own tragic main characters.

Sanmao eventually committed suicide in 1991 while getting treatment for cancer in Taipei Hospital.

I might make a part 2 if you’re interested to know more (either about me or the books I read)

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