A Year of Reading

Plus a question I've been asking myself for a while now: what's my story?

Photo by Jessica Ruscello on Unsplash

The author Haruki Murakami once wrote, “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” I believe there’s some truth to that. Reading is such a personal thing, and yet it’s not. When you read a good book, the kind that you wouldn’t mind reading again and again, it pulls you in. Suddenly, you’re immersed in a different world, one vastly different from your current one. And suddenly, an hour or two has passed, and you wonder where time went.

That’s the power of books, my friends.

But how do you choose what to read? I don’t have a particular method, really. I generally read a lot of fiction—I was once on a memoir binge—but what I read depends on what’s going on in my life at the moment. And at the moment, I am writing my second book, a work of fiction…which is what has occupied my mind for the past year and a half. I’m reading fiction to study other writers, other stories, and to help me decide how to tell my own story.

If you’re here, you know that I love books and stories. But recently, I had a conundrum. It occurred to me that a lot of writers on this platform, at least the ones with a large following, has a ‘story’—something that can be neatly summed up in a single sentence; for example, “I quit my Ph.D. program to become an artist,” or “We’re a couple on a nomadic journey together!” or “I’m looking for an alternate audience for the book I wrote,” etc. while I…do not.

Then I realized that the reason I don’t have a ‘story’ is because I’m still rewriting it. My story is my family’s story. It’s generations of hardship, of colonization, of struggles, of war. I can’t think of anyone who chooses to be poor—you’re just born into it.

But just because you’re born into a certain environment doesn’t mean you have to accept it, right? You can dream big. You can change it. That’s why I’m here. I was born into a much better time in my parents’ lives, but it still wasn’t great. Even after we immigrated to the United States we were still low income. To this day, I don’t know anyone—aside from my late father—who is a writer in real life, or anyone who has done wildly different things than what’s already been done in the past in their own families.

These thoughts come to mind as I was thinking about a book I’d read two years ago called The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. This book blew my mind. I discovered it after watching its film adaptation on Netflix. If you haven’t read this book, stop reading right now and go read it. You won’t be disappointed.

To give you a short blurb, it’s a coming-of-age story about a boy born into the lowest caste in India and his journey to becoming a successful entrepreneur, with a sinister twist. It’s also a story about right and wrong, about fairness and inequality, and about power and control. I loved Adiga’s stellar prose style—written in first person, epistolary form. The descriptions of the landscape, of people and their actions are so vivid that reading the novel, I could understand where the protagonist is coming from, because I, too, came from that kind of environment.

And while we’re on the subject of stories, I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t tell you about the other stories I read during my year offline. From September 2022 to September 2023, I read a total of 64 books (!) and from this came a few standouts. To narrow down my list, I asked myself two questions: 1) would I read this book again? and 2) if I do, would I still like it? These are the books that made the cut.

My ten favorite books of 2022-2023

The Sky Over Rebecca by Matthew Fox. This book won an award, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a brilliant middle grade debut about a girl looking for friendship and finding it where she least expects it—from two kids who happen to be Jewish children escaping the Holocaust.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. Thanks to

Marg Moon

who recommended it in a previous post. I wouldn’t have found this wonderful book about the dual (often underappreciated) roles that women played both at work and at home.

Trust by Hernan Diaz. What a strange, yet electrifying novel. It’s about money and power and the world of 1920s stock market. Most importantly, it’s a novel within a novel, told in four very different perspectives, and it’ll make you wonder: whose story is real and whose isn’t?

Anatomy: A Love Story by Dana Schwartz. A kick-ass YA novel about a kick-ass young protagonist who dreams of becoming a female surgeon at a time when it was literally impossible. And she’ll stop at nothing to make it happen…including digging up dead bodies for experimentation. Wow.

Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris. Because I love everything that David Sedaris writes, I loved this novel. A bit different from his usual humorous anecdotes, but nonetheless worth reading for its brilliant treatise on family, society, politics, aging and loss.

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar. Part cultural criticism, part memoir, it’s a beautiful narrative on identity and belonging and about father-son relationships. Best to read on audiobook, read by the author himself, who has such a fantastic voice that he’ll draw you in quickly.

We Came, We Saw, We Left by Charles Wheelan. Another fun memoir about a family who takes a year off from work and school to travel around the world. Wheelan somehow has the gift of turning stressful incidents into laugh-out-loud stories that you’ll want to tell your friends about.

Counterfeit by Kirstin Chen. A work of a fiction genius, in my opinion, about an Asian woman who seems to “have it all,” only to give it up for the thrill of importing counterfeit handbags. Themes of upward mobility, class, race, and the American dream rings loud and clear, and I loved it.

The Stationery Shop by Marjan Kamali. A true tearjerker of a novel about two young Iranians who fall in love, only to be separated by war and reconnect fifty years later. Aside from the themes of lost love and connection, Kamali’s rich descriptions of Iranian food was stellar and made me salivate.

The Frangipani Hotel by Violet Kupersmith. A collection of short stories inspired by the folktales that the author’s grandmother told her while growing up. It’s about the traumas of the Vietnam War, filled with rich descriptions of landscape and food and even included some supernatural elements, like ghosts.

While writing this list, I sensed a few common themes here, which are:

• breaking the rules

• women who defy societal norms

• women defying their own norms

• money and power and control

• lost love

• friendship

• funny family stories

• reconciling with past traumas

What kind of books do you like to read and what does it say about you?