“What we are experiencing is experiential poverty. Such poverty may not only be about a lack of experiences, where nothing is happening. An abundance of activities can also create a feeling of experiential poverty. And this last point is interesting. Things just get to be too much. the problem, according to Lars Fr. H. Svendsen, is that we carry on seeking "increasingly more powerful experiences" instead of pausing to breathe deeply, shut out the world and use the time to experience ourselves. The idea that boredom can be avoided by constantly pursuing something new, being available around the clock, sending messages and clicking further, watching something you haven't yet seen, is naive. The more you try to avoid boredom, the more bored you become. Routine is like that too... Busying oneself becomes a goal in and of itself, instead of allowing that same restlessness to lead you somewhere further.”
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“Shutting out the world is not about turning your back on your surroundings, but rather the opposite: it is seeing the world a bit more clearly, staying a course and trying to love your life. Silence in itself is rich. It is exclusive and luxurious. A key to unlock new ways of thinking. I don’t regard it as a renunciation or something spiritual, but rather as a practical resource for living a richer life.”
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“For many people, it’s about FOMO, the “fear of missing out,” or “the fear of losing a special moment.” Eyal describes this as the brilliant driver for Instagram. And this last part is true: the app at the very least is nearly brilliant. But that moment which he is referring to is not necessarily something special. On the contrary. There aren’t enough special moments, so we end up making do—repetitive and mundane moments are documented instead.”
― Erling Kagge, Silence: In the Age of Noise
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A post for my book recommendations, to be continuously updated as I read and remember more. Because without reading, I would not be writing.
All time favourites are marked with a ☆
All are sorted by genre and will be linked (if able) to their Goodreads pages so that you can dig deeper into whatever catches your eye.
(ps if you have a Goodreads account, you can add me here)
Anthology/Short Story Collections
Behold This Dreamer - Walter de la Mare ☆
Love Letters of Great Men - Ursula Doyle
Difficult Women - Roxane Gay
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories - Ken Liu
The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami
Essays
Bad Feminist - Roxane Gay ☆
Bluets - Maggie Nelson ☆
On Freedom - Maggie Nelson
In Praise of Shadows - Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
Malleable Forms - Meeka Walsh ☆
Fiction (Classic)
Persuasion - Jane Austen ☆
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Awakening - Kate Chopin
North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell ☆
Siddhartha - Hermen Hesse
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera ☆
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Fiction (Modern)
All’s Well - Mona Awad ☆
Bunny - Mona Awad
Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Richard Bach
The Pisces - Melissa Broder
The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
For Today I Am A Boy - Kim Fu
The Vegetarian - Han Kang
The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova ☆
Fall on Your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing - Eimear McBride
No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
The Road - Cormac McCarthy ☆
Under the Hawthorne Tree - Ai Mi
The Song of Achilles - Madeleine Miller ☆
After Dark - Haruki Murakami ☆
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami
1Q84 - Haruki Murakami ☆
Hamnet - Maggie O'Farrell
The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Boy, Snow, Bird - Helen Oyeyemi
Mr. Fox - Helen Oyeyemi ☆
A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki
The Overstory - Richard Powers ☆
The Godfather - Mario Puzo
Blindness - José Saramago
How To Be Both - Ali Smith
The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt ☆
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Ru - Kim Thúy
Brooklyn - Colm Tóibín
Big Fish - Daniel Wallace
Kitchen - Banana Yoshimoto
Horror/Thriller
The Exorcist - William Peter Blatty
Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton
Gerald’s Game - Stephen King
The Shining - Stephen King
Audition - Ryū Murakami
I’m Thinking of Ending Things - Iain Reid
Manga/Graphic Novels
Basilisk - Futaro Yamada, Maseki Sagawa
Death Note - Tsugumi Ohba, Takeshi Obata
Eureka Seven - Jinsei Kataoka, Kazuma Kondou
Lore Olympus - Rachel Smythe
Nana - Ai Yazawa ☆
Paradise Kiss - Ai Yazawa
Uzumaki - Junji Ito
xxxHolic - CLAMP
Memoirs/Journals
Speak, Okinawa - Elizabeth Miki Brina
Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness - Susannah Cahalan
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty
I’m Glad My Mom Died - Jennette McCurdy
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running - Haruki Murakami
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi
Henry and June - Anaïs Nin ☆
The Glass Castle - Jeanette Walls ☆
Non-Fiction (General)
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking - Susan Cain
The Red Market - Scott Carney
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern - Stephen Greenblatt
Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right - Jane Mayer
The Psychopath Test - Jon Ronson
The Elements of Style - William Strunk Jr, E.B White
Non-Fiction (Philosophy/Spiritual)
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge - Carlos Castañeda
Silence: In the Age of Noise - Erling Kagge ☆
The Kybalion - Three Initiates ☆
The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo - Chögyam Trungpa
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu
Poetry Collections
I Love My Love - Reyna Biddy
Let Us Compare Mythologies - Leonard Cohen
The Prophet - Khalil Gibran
The Anatomy of Being - Shinji Moon
The Beauty of the Husband - Anne Carson ☆
Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth - Warsan Shire
Night Sky with Exit Wounds - Ocean Vuong
Speculative Fiction
Dune - Frank Herbert
Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel ☆
Battle Royale - Koushun Takami
True Crime
Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders - Vincent Bugliosi
In Cold Blood - Truman Capote ☆
Young Adult
A Great and Terrible Beauty - Libba Bray ☆
The Diviners - Libba Bray
The Sun is Also a Star - Nicola Yoon
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