LitLove: The Book of Form and Emptiness
"Books appreciate your eccentricities."
The Wordsmith: Ruth Ozeki
The Genre: Adult Fiction
The Story: Benny, a neurodiverse thirteen-year-old boy navigates the grief of losing his father, the challenges of his mother’s increasing hoarding tendencies, and the unraveling layers of his mental and emotional journey.
The Energy: Engaging, sentimental, emotional, alive.
The Themes: The delicate, often imperceptible connections among all things. The chasms between different types of lived experience and how they relate (or don’t) to each other. Collective consciousness. Intimate experiences of memory, pain.
Why I Like It: It is wonderfully, beautifully unique; I’ve never read anything quite like it. “The Book” is the primary narrator, giving life, voice, to the magic of books: their creation, evolution, intentions. The way they manage to find us exactly when we need them. The way they won’t let us read them until we’re ready to face them — and whatever it is within ourselves that is calling for what their pages hold. The ways they reveal us to ourselves, speaking to us from a place we didn’t know was missing, essential, possible.
Lines That Move Me: There are honestly too many passages to relay here; including the page in the image above, which stays with me, always.
"Inside? Outside? What is the difference and how can you tell? When a sound enters your body through your ears and merges with your mind, what happens to it? Is it still a sound then, or has it become something else? When you eat a wing or an egg or a drumstick, at what point is it no longer a chicken? When you read these words on a page, what happens to them, when they become you?"
"Human language is a clumsy tool. People have such a hard time understanding each other, so how can you even begin to imagine the subjectivities of animals and insects and plants, never mind pebbles and sand? Bound as you are by your senses—so blunt and yet so beautiful—it’s impossible for you to imagine that the myriad beings you dismiss as insentient might have inner lives, too."
"She didn’t really give me back my heart, but that’s what it felt like, like my heart had flown out of my body and now it was lying all naked and raw in her hands, beating like crazy, even though she was offering to return it to me, it didn’t want to come home. My heart was happy, cupped in her hands. It wanted to stay there forever."
