Books I read in June, 2021
The books and my thoughts
So apparently June was crazy enough that I just ... umm.. forgot to do a book review for the month! :o So here goes.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
This is easily the most poignant book I have read this year. It beautifully captures idea of family, love, relationships and death all through the eyes of "Artificial Friend" Klara. It makes you want to cherish the loved ones around you and think about the immensity of life. I loved this week and would encourage people to read it. The words beautiful, elegant, majestic were invented for this book.
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
As I contemplate moving into my 30s I am enjoying reading rags to riches and coming of age stories. Crying in H Mart definitely fit that brief. I saw this book pop up all over my Instagram and TikTok so I was definitely influenced into buying it. I am glad I did. Michelle Zauner is incredibly relatable in her writing as she shares her story as an awkward adult who grapples with being biracial and preserving her culture in a time of great sorrow (her mother is diagnosed with cancer). The autobiography is a genuinely heartfelt tribute to her mother and you can feel the love and loss that Michelle feels when she loses her mother.
While Glennon Doyle is a NY Times bestseller, this is the first that I have come across her writing. Again via Instagram :P It's a journey of self discovery after she overcomes her husband's infidelities, deals with divorce, and finds herself in love again and remarried to a woman. It's a series of anecdotes in her life that go to her central thesis that we must "untame" ourselves and live free from societal expectations and ideas about how we should behave.
My 2021 reading goals?
- Continue to read more poetry!
- Read more about the space of health, be it nutrition, mental health, physical health, etc.
- Try to get into audio books. I don't think I will but it's worth a shot. I strongly believe that listening to audio books is useless as you don't capture or understand the content fully.
- Continue reading books by diverse authors.
- See my wider reading goals here.