[Book Review] Dinners with Ruth

In addition to the word “friendship,” the expression I saw a lot in Nina Totenberg’s Dinner With Ruth was “soldier on.” Nina, RBG, Cokie, and many people in this book soldiered through their hardships. Whether it was a health problem, stereotypes, or blatant discrimination, they were technically fighting on their own. No one else could join, fight for, or substitute for them.

Nonetheless, friends made a difference. “It [friendship] is about extending the invitation, making space at the table, picking up the phone, and also remembering. Friendship is what cushions life’s worst blows and what rejoices in life’s hoped-for blessings… We were present in each other’s lives, especially when it mattered most. We showed up.”

Maybe that’s the true definition of friend: the one who’s present at the moment. Their presence makes us feel less lonely facing the headwind and more confident in ourselves.

So that we can keep soldering on.

[Book review] Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv

The books that grab me have something in common: duality. They are sharp and compassionate, distant and intimate, personal and socially relevant, and anecdotal and analytical. Note that I used “and,” not “but,” between two opposing words because they can co-exist in the hands of few writers. Rachel Aviv, the author of Strangers to Ourselves, is one of them. 

No matter what your preconceptions on mental illness are, Strangers to Ourselves will alter it not through sheer force of definite answers, but through subtlety and complexity of the stories of the individuals with mental illness. Aviv let them fully live on the pages. Their experiences are not reduced to be measured and diagnosed. Instead, multiple layers and views are deliberately added to construct a person who’s been seeking “a continuous sense of self” in the midst of social norms, neglect, and injustice.

There’s no easy conclusion about mental illness awaiting me at the end of the book. Instead, I was left with threads of vivid stories that made the patients, trapped them, and saved them. And it was oddly satisfying to end the book with more questions than I started it.

Some quotes from the book:

[Book Review] The Promise by Damon Galgut

The promise was made, but immediately silenced, then reluctantly put aside, and then finally kept when it was “as good as nothing.” The frailty of the promise is clear from the very beginning of the book. It was said by a dying woman, whose return to her religion upset people around her, and heard by her youngest child whose kindness and thoughtfulness were often overlooked as immaturity and blankness. The promise was made to a servant, who was owned and couldn’t own any.

This ill-fated, ever-thinning promise, however, doesn’t leave a constant gloomy stroke cross the pages. Damon Galgut’s humorous and subtle descriptions of the characters as well as their surrounding (I laughed so hard reading his sentence about urinating outside) make reader keep going and realize that even people who blatantly ignored the promise had their own stories, fighting their own battles.

Time to get moving, and to use haste to cover what would otherwise crack the heart. Both women know they won’t see each other again. but why does it matter? They’re close, but not close. Joined but not joined. One of the strange, simple fusions that hold this country together. Sometimes only barely. They embrace a last time. Frail basket of bones, containing its fire. Pulse beating dimly under your hand (p.265)

What happened? Life happened. And It keeps happening, filling the space and writing stories over the old ones that carry unmet desires, unsaid apologies, and the promise that was finally fulfilled.

[Book Review] Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong

When they write, essayists must be holding scalpels, not pens. They cut open banal words and we readers see the truth concealed and the emotion shrugged off. Essayists also have a talent of freezing a scene. While everything is stopped, the writer alone walks around, captures what could have been dismissed, and tells the story of the silenced voice. 

It’s the racism against Asian Americans that Cathy Park Hong cuts open in her book Minor Feelings. She freezes the scenes where racial discrimination shakes up someone’s life and changes their worldview while it doesn’t leave any mark to others.

Reading the book, you may feel a paper cut in your finger left by Hong’s refreshing, straightforward, and honest account. That uncomfortable feeling is not so bad though. Because it means that learning has occurred and now you are aware of what has been invisible or overlooked. 

[Book Review] Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Deficiency has been an engine behind the progress that human beings have made. Lack of something results in inconvenience, which in turn inspires us to be courageous and creative. Humans in Kazuo Ishiguro’s recent novel, “Klara and the Sun, are not too different. They take risks to “lift” themselves to get ahead of others and also pursue immortality to shield themselves from the pain of loss. On the other hand, it’s Klara, a highly intelligent robot (or “Artificial Friend”), who accepts her inability, turns to the Sun and his nourishment to save Josie, and makes sacrifices.

The futuristic world, where the story unfolds, is somewhat familiar—robots are everywhere and human genome editing creates new classes in society. The mind-blowing moments in the novel rather come from Klara’s pristine and sharp observations that reveal to her and the reader what makes us ‘us.’ 

“… however hard I tried, I believe now there would have remained something beyond my reach. The Mother, Rick, Melania Housekeeper, the Father. I’d never have reached what they felt for Josie in their hearts… Mr Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.”

Maybe Klara could see what others couldn’t see because she knew that a void in person is not a space remained to be filled, but an organic and vital part of themselves, without which they cannot be complete.

[Book Review] The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Thee lessons I took away from this book:

1. The real progress of a startup is on how much and what it learns about “what creates value for customers.”
2. Don’t ask customers what they want–they are likely unaware of what they want.
3. Measure what matters to your startup’s learning. Instead of relying on vanity metrics that web analytic tools spit out and put into a pretty dashboard, spend time on creating “actionable metrics.” They are the ones that help you learn what assumptions are right and wrong and what needs to be changed.

I’m just a junior employee at a startup. However, I want to have the mindset of an entrepreneur and apply their perspective to my own projects. If you are like me, you will also find from this book something valuable to bring to your workplace. To make differences. To grow.

[Book Review] Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala

It is a small, light book, but take a deep breath before picking it up and reading it. Because you will be awash with the author’s tragic and unimaginable loss, what she has gone through, and what is still with her everyday assuring not only the loss, but also how lucky she is once to be called “Mummy Lissenburgh.”

While reading this book, I wanted to get to the end as quickly as possible to see how her grief is resolved. At the same time, I wanted to stay with her–and the book–as much as possible while she was coping and coming to terms with the death of her parents, husband, and two kids. Maintaining that tension in the reader was the author’s literary gift: her sincere voice, simple prose, and the memoir’s structure that invites the reader to accompany her through her incremental recovery.

Time cannot revert a loss. The person who has occupied a space and warmed the air in it is not there. What time changes though is that the space left behind is slowly filled with the memory and the love shared. It’s no longer vacant, but inhabited again. Fully and vibrantly.

[Movie Review] Minari

“You are the strongest boy in the world.” It was all he needed to hear and it could be said not by someone who listens to his heart nervously everyday and reacts to every single moment, but by someone who could see the current moment as part of a long span of life with lots of unexpected twists and turns. His grandmother could picture all the years that the boy could live and small and big milestones he could accomplish. That was enough for her to say that her grandson was the strongest boy. Because he could have everything, not because he would.

“Minari” is a story of an immigrant family. It’s also a story of a boy whose world opens up and expands thanks to his grandma. The physical world she has inhabited might have been limited, but she brought the limitless world full of hope to her grandson.

And Youn Yuh-jung was beyond amazing in this movie playing the boy’s grandmother. Even after the movie was over, the hollowness I saw in her eyes at the end of the movie stayed with me because I knew how her eyes beamed with love before. It was as if she poured all she had to her grandson so that he could have her world. With it, he indeed became the strongest boy.

(Image from: https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/art/2021/04/689_307729.html)

[Book Review] Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

For the first third of the book, I was confused and couldn’t quite concentrate on the plot. I heard that this book was about Shakespeare’s family and the death of his beloved son, which is not well known to the public. However, the Bard as we know him rarely took the central stage of the story and the chapters alternating between now and the past felt rather distracting than engaging.

Then, a plot twist came like a mighty storm and it raged on all the way to the end of the book. There was no pause, no time for distraction. The source of that overwhelming force was the author’s superb ability to describe the heart-wrenching helplessness in the face of a disease engulfing a kid’s life and the perpetual hollowness it left behind in the family. Following the story, I lived the life of each family member who grieved his/her own way. The distance between myself and the story vanished and I became a new character experiencing the tragedy together with the fellow characters.

Technically speaking, the science book I wrote in Korean a couple of years ago for a general audience made me a published author. However, I never considered myself as an author because I reserve that title for someone whose words can expand their own or someone else’s life so that the reader could be effortlessly transported into the story, the time, and the universe the author creates. And that’s exactly what the author of Hamnet did.

Book Review: Memorial Drive

This book is about a proximity. The author’s grandmother suffers the phantom pain from the murder of the author’s mother. The author remembers her long drive with her mother where she leaned against her mother. “For several miles we’d drive like that: so close we seemed conjoined, and I could feel her heart beating against me as if I had not one, but two.” Twenty years after the murder, the author moves to the place only few miles from where her mother was killed, which led to obtaining the records of her mother’s case. She’s getting closer to what exactly happen.

The past never stays as the past because “we see and perceive new things always through the lens of what we have already seen.” Then, are we trapped in the past that we cannot change at all? What has already happened won’t change, but how we tell a story about it can.

Orson Welles wrote, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” And the author of Memorial Drive hasn’t stopped her story.