Books That Changed My Life: Why We All Need to be Readers
During the depths of quarantine, circa early 2020, everyone dove into something. Some people started eating vegan. Maybe you got way too reinvested into Harry Potter. It’s possible your Spotify turned into a reborn shrine of 2014-Arctic-Monkeys-based playlists. We all had nothing to do, nowhere tangible to invest our time and energy. For me, I slipped right back down the reading hole.
Sure, I’ve always loved reading. For god’s sake, I have wanted to be a writer from the moment I could wrap my head around the idea that it was a career possibility. Reading and writing go hand in hand. During the last year, however, reading has become much more of an intimate experience. When the rest of the world was so far away, it was by a sort of linear cognitive process that to pick up a book was to escape.
The first book I read in the last year that really stuck with me was Be Here Now by Ram Dass. Ram Dass as in the psychedelic-tripping, toga-wearing, borderline-overly-introspective hippy that taught a significant amount of eastern spirituality and practice to the west through psychology, yoga, and writing. He has a certain energy to him that might turn off your traditional frat-boy, suburban mom, or preacher, but nonetheless, he is someone everyone needs to listen to, at some point or another. This book reiterates a concept that seems simple but is objectively so hard to achieve: to remain present. To get out of one’s mind and into the current moment. It is beautifully illustrated and captures the author’s energy with brilliant intentionality. My favorite line he writes in this book is “This love is actually part of you; it is always flowing through you. It’s like the subatomic texture of the universe, the dark matter that connects everything.” This book is simple. It teaches kindness, it teaches mindfulness, and it teaches love.
On a very different note, my favorite fiction novel of the last year was Normal People by Sally Rooney. It seems that everyone who is anyone in the book world has had something to say about this novel since its eruption in popularity, and for good reason. Normal People follows two characters who can't seem to keep away from each other, through the years of high school and college. Normal People is so delectable because, in some ways, we have all experienced a love or a friendship like the one that the book chronicles. Those people that you can never seem to fully escape, and aren't exactly upset that they keep resurfacing. This book has helped me stay patient through times of missing someone who I drifted apart from, with the hope that like usual, time will bring us together again. It is raw, it is to-the-point, and it is heartbreakingly relatable. At the end of the book, Rooney writes a passage that is quite honestly burned into me forever: “What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another. You should go, she says. I’ll always be here. You know that.”
Next, John Green’s most recent memoir is one I can't go without mentioning. Green holds such an iconic spot in literature for our generation. As soon as he announced this most recent project, I felt the same giddiness I felt back in 2017 at 14 years old about the release of his prior novel. It is this genuine excitement that brings me back to his work time and time again. In The Anthropocene Reviewed, his most recent book, he takes a turn from his usual unconventional romance novels and steers towards an existential memoir style. Reading this memoir is like looking at the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. It is vulnerable and unique and retains Green’s quirky tone. My favorite line is as follows: “We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.” At a minimum, in the middle of a global pandemic, this book made me feel less lonely.
The most recent book I read was The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. The Midnight Library centers around a woman who is caught between this world and the next after attempting to take her own life. The Midnight Library is a limbo in which she is able to go back, undo her regrets, and live the different lives she dreamed of having. I read this book in the days following a breakup that felt like the end of the world. The Midnight Library illustrates purpose in the most direct and forceful way. It makes you look at where you are now and realize that there is a version of you somewhere who is aching to experience your present. In this novel, Haig writes “And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness forever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”
In such a lonely time, as I have felt both physical and emotional distance, there has been no better distraction or companion than a good book. Everyone needs to be a reader, and everyone can be. Reading doesn't have to be shrouded in an aura of academic stress or a competition of intellectual superiority. Books and stories and words of wisdom from people you may never meet hold even more value than we give them credit for. Reading has gifted me company, solace, and learning. Reading allows one to live a thousand different lives within the one we are given. It allows each of us to feel and experience and ponder roles we never would otherwise.