Letters to a young poet, sea of tranquility, and more

Everything I read in July

Jul 31, 2024

What I Read in July

Idiots: Marriage, Motherhood, Milk & Mistakes by Laura Clery - I received this memoir as a gift during my bookish bridal shower and I admit I didn't know Laury Clery before reading the book. Laury Clery is an actress, comedian, and internet personality. Her memoir is funny but I find it a bit self-absorbed. But all memoirs are kind of like that anyway. She talks about the realities of pregnancy, post-partum, and motherhood. I had learned so much about giving birth in her memoir and took down notes. It’s really scary you guys!!

My friend gifted me this book to give me a reality check on marriage, pregnancy and motherhood and it worked! On brand of being raw and honest, Laura bares her soul and exposes her own bad choices in this book. I like it that Laura doesn't hold back anything in this memoir. Her voice is funny and chaotic. Even though I have read better memoirs than this, I enjoyed reading this and didn't think it was a waste of time.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin - Fantasy is my first love. Like most people who started reading at a young age, fantasy was my entry to literature. Even though I have expanded my reading now to other genres, I still go back to fantasy from time to time. The Wizard of Earthsea is the story of young Ged, a great wizard and the main protagonist of Le Guin’s Earthsea cycle. It tells us how Ged discovered he is a wizard, gets sent to wizard school, and how he defeated his inner demons. Even as a young boy, Ged has been told countless times by great wizards that he is destined to become powerful someday. And this book is the first of many stories of how he came to be. I can't help compare Ged to Harry Potter. There's just so many echoes. But that's for another day.

I really loved reading this book. I was totally immersed in the story that everything around me was just silenced. It was just me and the book. It reminded me of reading when I was a kid. I loved the lore, adventure, and action.

The ending was a surprise to me. People said they saw the ending coming from a mile away. But me? I didn't. I let out a big Oh! when I came to that part. I felt like this book could be a self help book about personal journey because Ged did take on a personal journey. Like The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho but less cliche. If you read this as a child, you can take it at face value, plot wise. But if you read this as an adult, after going through so much pain, disappointments, and doubts, this story takes on a whole different meaning.

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainier Maria Rilke - This book is a series of letters by Rilke to an aspiring young poet, Kappus. From the letters, we can deduce that Kappus started writing to Rilke to ask for advice and in the hopes of asking him to review his work. What Rilke responds to this request is an answer we can all apply to every aspect of our life, writer or not. Rilke tells Kappus to look into our inner life and find inspiration there instead of looking on the outside. He encourages a soul-searching solitude/journey to find our voice. Even when we do this little exercise and we don't get to be the somebody we want to be, it will not be in vain. In the course of this journey, we will discover what we want to be from then on. Rilke also teaches us to become patient.

Everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered.

I read this on my birthday and reread immediately after finishing it. What a great gift! I have the Penguin Little Black Classics and I looooove writing on it. Does anybody know what kind of paper was used in this book? There are so much you can get from this book in its 50 pages. I encourage you to discover them for yourself.

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The Stuff of Nightmares by Malorie Blackman - My brother gave me this book for my collection a couple of years ago but I had no intention of reading it. It just wasn't my type. I picked this up the other week though because I saw one of Blackman’s popular book as Dua Lipa's Book of the Month. That got me interested in her. Ah, the power of celebrity book clubs. I also learned that she's an award-winning children's author!

On the way to a school field trip, Kyle, his classmates, and their English teacher, got into an accident. The train they were riding crashed and it ended up dangling over a precipice. Kyle manages to stay conscious and finds himself hopping from one passenger’s mind to another, encountering their inner thoughts and nightmares. The next couple of chapters alternate with the passenger’s nightmares and the book’s overarching plot.

The book felt like a collection of short stories. Kyle’s story is a bit predictable but I enjoyed the minor stories - the nightmares. Some of them were really unique and terrifying. I loved reading them all!

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel - Mandel is my favorite author but I just read her latest book (published in 2022) this month because there’s so much good stuff around to read! I think this is the first book I read about a pandemic and was written and published while we are still on a pandemic. I have Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout next.

Sea of Tranquility are four interconnected stories. There’s time travel, a pandemic, and living in simulation. An extreme mix I know. Over the top, even. As with all time travel topics, I’ve had so many questions. There were loopholes I want to dig in. I want to shout "Grandfather paradox". But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Because those three elements weren’t the point of the book. It’s about living a meaningful life and what we do with the life given to us. It’s about the 3 major characters and how their lives are connected.

The book opens with Edwin in 1912. I like Edwin, a man of simple pleasures, who loves to people-watch, gaze at the beach, draw stuff, go on walks, and admire gardens. I feel at peace reading him and wished I was a woman of leisure too just fleeting from one place to another.

Then we meet Olive in 2203, author of a best-selling pandemic novel on a book tour at the onset of an actual pandemic. The irony. It’s hard not to see Olive as Mandel herself, an author who unexpectedly reached commercial success because of her pandemic novel, Station Eleven. I went online to confirm this and saw an Ezra Klein podcast where Mandel confirms that the Olive sections are indeed auto-fiction. Mandel also discussed on how the novel came to be. I was really geeking out. I got so much out of that interview.

Olive's book tour was cut short when somebody tipped her off that she's about to die in the pandemic. We then spend the next chapters with Olive living through a pandemic, like us in 2020. And like Mandel herself when she was writing this book. See, auto-fiction?

And then there’s Gasprey, always longing for his childhood in the Night City and forever finding his way through this world. But that’s all I’m going to say because anything more than that will be a spoiler.

Sea of Tranquility is like Station Eleven where Mandel shows us slices of life but it's also different because Sea of Tranquility is a bit plot-driven. Like the Glass Hotel, it also shows us different non-linear POVs. Fans of Mandel will recognize her writing style. Long sentences with a sometimes elegiac and sometimes dream-like narration. I don't know what it is in Mandel but she transports me. I really like her writing style which I can’t put the words into yet. She's truly a unique author who can combine different genres, creating a genre of her own.