recently read: beautiful world, where are you
32: while everyone was reading intermezzo, i was reading sally rooney's third book
Knowing what book someone is reading and what parts they resonate with most can be so intimate. It reveals their interests, where their head is at, and what excerpts are so significant that they will mark up a page because they think it’s worth revisiting at a later time. I’m fascinated by what books others gravitate towards and I find that it helps me get to know them better and gives me a small glimpse into who they are at their core. No one asked for these book reviews, but maybe it’s my way of showing who I am and what I’m interested in – beyond the clothes, the products, and my career. Or at the very least, encourage some to look up from their phones and instead towards the pages of a good book.
Book no. 16 of 2024
Beautiful World, Where Are You - Sally Rooney
I’ve heard both ends of the discourse on Sally Rooney — that her writing is extremely relatable and captures the nuances on relationships, identity and social issues and how they interact with one another, on one end, and on the other, that she is completely overrated and her writing dull. After reading Normal People and now Beautiful World, Where Are You, I’d say I understand both sides and happen to fall somewhere in the middle because of it.
In her third book, while I found the pacing to be a bit slow and found the main characters’ emailing back and forth tedious at times, I really appreciated the questions Rooney poses through their interactions — questions about the point of our existence, politics, relationships, sex and happiness. I do think she captures the millennial existential angst and despair so well, that at times it feels like I’m reading conversations I’ve had with my own friends. By the time I got to the end of the book, I felt warm and hopeful — like everything is going to be ok and at the end of the day, what matters most is doing good where you can, especially to and with those you love.
I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who plans on reading it, but around the same exact time I found out I was pregnant, I got to the part where one of the characters found out she was pregnant — one who, too, wasn’t sure if she ever wanted to be a mom. It felt so serendipitous. I remember crying when I read those pages, feeling it was fate:
“Children are coming anyway, and in the grand scheme of things it won’t matter much whether any of them are mine or his. We have to try to build a world they can live in. And I feel in a strange sense that I want to be on the children’s side, and on the side of their mothers; to be with them, not just an observer, admiring them from a distance, speculating about their best interests, but one of them…
No matter what we think or fear about the future of civilisation, women all over the world will go on having babies, and I belong with them, and any child I might have belongs with their children.”
I had so many more quotes underlined, which is when I know a book really resonates with me, but sharing a few below.
Underlined quotes:
“What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people?”
“And we hate people for making mistakes so much more than we love them for doing good that the easiest way to live is to do nothing, say nothing, and love no one.”
“Maybe we’re just born to love and worry about the people we know, and to go on loving and worrying even when there are more important things we should be doing. And if that means the human species is going to die out, isn’t it in a way a nice reason to die out, the nicest reason you can imagine? Because when we should have been reorganising the distribution of the world’s resources and transitioning collectively to a sustainable economic model, we were worrying about sex and friendship instead. Because we loved each other too much and found each other too interesting. And I love that about humanity, and in fact it’s the very reason I root for us to survive — because we are so stupid about each other.”
“I feel so frightened of being hurt — not of the suffering, which I know I can handle, but the indignity of suffering, the indignity of being open to it.”
"It made me think about people who have done bad things – what they are supposed to do with themselves, and what we as a society are supposed to do with them. At the moment, the cycle of insincere public apologies is probably making everyone suspicious of forgiveness. But what should people who have done terrible things in the past actually do? Spontaneously advertise their own sins in order to pre-empt public exposure? Just try never to accomplish anything that might bring them scrutiny of any kind? Maybe I’m wrong, but I believe the number of people who have done seriously bad things is not insignificant… What I mean is, what if it’s not only a small number of evil people who are out there, waiting for their bad deeds to be exposed? What if it’s all of us?”
“To live with someone I really love and respect, who really loves and respects me — what a difference it has made to my life.”
“When I try to picture for myself what a happy life might look like, the picture hasn’t changed very much since I was a child — a house with flowers and trees around it, and a river nearby, and a room full of books, and someone there to love me, that’s all. Just to make a home there, and to care for my parents when they grow older… What else is life for?”
Book no. 17 of 2024
Four Thousand Weeks - Oliver Burkeman
My friend Rosa recommended this book to me and I’m happy she did. It’s a reminder to be present instead of always looking anxiously ahead into the future. It challenges us to reflect the fleeting moments of our lives and embrace the limited time we have. It’s for the perfectionist, for the always productive, for one struggling with work-life balance.
It reminds me of this quote from Before Sunrise (1995):
Underlined quotes:`
“The world is bursting with wonder… the ultimate point of all our frenetic doing might be to experience more of that wonder.”
“Every decision to use a portion of time on anything represents the sacrifice of all the other ways in which you could have spent that time but didn’t — and to willingly make that sacrifice is to take a stand, without reservation, on what matters most to you.”
“Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful.”
“We stop engaging in certain valuable activities altogether, in favor of more convenient ones. Because you can stay home, order food on Seamless and watch sitcoms on Netflix, you find yourself doing so — though you might be perfectly well aware that you’d have had a better time had you kept your appointment to meet friends in the city… As convenience colonizes everyday life, activities gradually sort themselves in two types: the kind that are now far more convenient, but that feel empty or out of sync with our true preferences; and the kind that now seem intensely annoying, because of how inconvenient they remain.”
“Your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention to.”
“[These techniques and products]… work — in the sense that you’ll get more done, race to more meetings, ferry your kids to more after-school activities, generate more profit for your employer — and yet, paradoxically, you only feel busier, more anxious and somehow emptier as a result.”
“One can waste years this way, systematically postponing precisely the things one cares about the most.”
“Rather than taking ownership of our lives… we try to avoid the intimidating responsibility of having to decide what to do with our finite time by telling ourselves that we don’t get to choose at all — that we must get married, or remain in a soul-destroying job, or anything else, simply because it’s a done thing.”
“When people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to.”
“That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage — the trial-and-error phase, learning new skills and accumulating experience.”
“Much of what you value in life only ever came to pass thanks to circumstances you never chose.”