A son’s letter to a mother who is unable to read is found in the book On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. The letter, which is written while the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, provides a window into aspects of his life that his mother has never known while revealing an amazing revelation about a family history that began before he was even born and has its roots in Vietnam. It is both a brutally honest examination of race, class, and manhood and a witness to the complicated yet unmistakable love between a single mum and her kid.
As we are enmeshed in addiction, violence, and trauma and ask questions that are fundamental to our American moment, questions that are supported by compassion and kindness, Both the power of speaking one’s own tale and the deafening quiet of not being heard are major themes in On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.
Ocean Vuong questions how we might heal and save one another without sacrificing who we are while writing about people stuck between two very different realities with breathtaking urgency and elegance. The most significant first book in recent years is driven by the dilemma of how to survive and how to make of it a form of joy.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“They say nothing lasts forever but they’re just scared it will last longer than they can love it.”
“You once told me that the human eye is god’s loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn’t even know there’s another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty.”
“I miss you more than I remember you.”
“Because the sunset, like survival, exists only on the verge of its own disappearing. To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted.”
“Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”
Two young people—the sensuous, fiercely independent Nadia and the sweet, restrained Saeed—meet in a nation that is on the verge of civil war. They start a covert relationship, but the upheaval shaking their city soon isolates them in an early intimacy. They start to hear rumblings about doors until it erupts, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts. These doors can transport individuals far away, but only at great risk and expense. Nadia and Saeed come to the conclusion that they are powerless to stop the violence as it intensifies. They locate a door and enter it, leaving their house and previous life behind.
Exit West portrays these characters as they leave behind their familiar past and enter an unfamiliar and unknown future while attempting to cling to one another, their history, and their very sense of themselves. It recounts a remarkable tale of love, devotion, and courage that is simultaneously entirely of our time and timeless. It is profoundly intimate and incredibly innovative.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“We are all migrants through time.”
“To love is to enter into the inevitability of one day not being able to protect what is most valuable to you.”
“when we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind.”
“And so their memories took on potential, which is of course how our greatest nostalgias are born.”
“In this group, everyone was foreign, and so, in a sense, no one was.”
From her vantage point inside the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with exceptional observational skills, keeps a close eye on the actions of those coming in to browse and people walking by on the street outside. While Klara is still certain that a client will soon select her, she is cautioned not to place too much faith in human promises as it becomes possible that her circumstances could change for good.
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro examines the fast-evolving modern world through the perspective of a memorable narrator to delve into a central query: what is love?
Best Quotes from this Book:
“There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her.”
“Perhaps all humans are lonely. At least potentially.”
“They fought as though the most important thing was to damage each other as much as possible.”
“At the same time, what was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom, and I saw it was possible that the consequences of Morgan’s Falls had at no stage been within my control.”
“So I know just how much it matters to you that people who love one another are brought together, even after many years.”
When Ifemelu and Obinze leave military-run Nigeria for the West, they are young and in love. Ifemelu is attractive and confident when she leaves for America, but despite her academic excellence, she is forced to confront her first-ever questions about what it means to be black. Quiet, reflective Obinze had intended to go with her, but after 9/11, he was unable to enter America and instead settled into a perilous, illegal existence in London. They rejoin in a modern democratic Nigeria fifteen years later, reigniting their passion for one another and for their country.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Racism should never have happened and so you don’t get a cookie for reducing it.”
“Why did people ask “What is it about?” as if a novel had to be about only one thing.”
“Race doesn’t really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don’t have that choice.”
“How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives we imagined.”
“She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself.”
Teenage Sunja, the beloved daughter of a disabled fisherman, falls in love with a rich stranger at a beach close to her house in Korea in the early 1900s. He makes a lot of promises, but she rejects his advances when she learns she’s pregnant and that her lover is married. Instead, she accepts a marriage proposal from a kind, frail clergyman who is passing through town while traveling to Japan. But by leaving her house and rejecting her son’s wealthy father, she starts a dramatic story that will last for many generations.
Pachinko is a beautifully written and incredibly poignant tale of love, devotion, ambition, and sacrifice. Strong, unyielding women, devoted sisters, and sons, fathers shook by moral crisis, and others Lee’s complex and passionate characters survive and thrive against the uncaring arc of history in everything from bustling street markets to the halls of Japan’s finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Living everyday in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage.”
“You want to see a very bad man? Make an ordinary man successful beyond his imagination. Let’s see how good he is when he can do whatever he wants.”
“Learn everything. Fill your mind with knowledge—it’s the only kind of power no one can take away from you.” Hansu never told him to study, but rather to learn, and it occurred to Noa that there was a marked difference. Learning was like playing, not labor.”
“History has failed us, but no matter.”
“We cannot help but be interested in the stories of people that history pushes aside so thoughtlessly.”
Candace Chen is a routine-obsessed millennial drone who works alone in a Manhattan office building. So when a pestilence of biblical proportions sweeps New York, she hardly notices it. Shen Fever then spreads. Families run away. Businesses cease operations. The metro stops abruptly. As the fictitious blogger NY Ghost, she soon finds herself completely alone and unfevered as she captures the creepy, deserted metropolis.
But Candace won’t be able to survive by herself indefinitely. Here come the survivors, led by the ferocious IT specialist Bob. They are headed to a location known as the Facility, where Bob assures them that they will have everything they need to rebuild society. But Candace has a secret that she is certain Bob would use against her. Does she need to flee from her rescuers? Ling Ma’s Severance is a quirky coming-of-age story and satire that mocks and critiques the rituals, routines, and lost possibilities of modern life.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“A second chance doesn’t mean you’re in the clear. In many ways, it is the more difficult thing. Because a second chance means that you have to try harder. You must rise to the challenge without the blind optimism of ignorance.”
“The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.”
“The first place you live alone, away from your family, he said, is the first place you become a person, the first place you become yourself.”
“I have always lived in the myth of New York more than in its reality.”
“It was the anonymity. He wanted to be unknown, unpossessed by others’ knowledge of him. That was freedom.”
Kira Navárez fantasized about living in alien worlds. She has now awoken from a nightmare. Kira discovers an alien artifact while conducting a normal reconnaissance mission on an uncolonized planet. She is initially thrilled, but when the ancient dust surrounding her starts to move, her joy quickly turns to horror.
Kira embarks on a galactic voyage of exploration and transformation as conflict breaks out among the stars. She had no idea what to expect from the first encounter, and subsequent occurrences test the very boundaries of what it is to be human. Kira is dealing with her own tragedies as Earth and its colonies are on the verge of extinction. Now, Kira might be the last and best hope for humanity.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“The path to our goal is rarely straight. It tends to turn and twist, which makes the journey far more enjoyable than it would otherwise be.”
“when air, food, and shelter are assured, only two things matter. Work and companionship. To be alone and without purpose is to be the living dead.”
“The universe wasn’t ideal, but it was hardly a prison. After all, you had to exist somewhere; it might as well be here.”
“There’s no such thing as safety. Only degrees of risk.”
“The hardest lesson in life is learning to accept that there are some things we can’t change.”