October 2017 Wrap Up

Last year I didn’t read any books in October. I said that it was because I was busy but really it was the pressure I put on myself. I could have taken the time to read and I should have. I should have slowed down for five minutes and do something that I enjoyed. I’m so glad that I was able to read more than one book this month.

The sun and her flowers, Rupi Kaur 5/5 *favorite*

“I stand on the sacrifices 

Of a million women before me

Thinking 

What can I do

To make this mountain taller

So the women after me 

Can see farther”

From Rupi Kaur, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of milk and honey, comes her long-awaited second collection of poetry. A vibrant and transcendent journey about growth and healing. Ancestry and honoring one’s roots. Expatriation and rising up to find a home within yourself.

It was so hard to pick one quote from this book. If you are going through a reading slump or want to feel empowered as a woman I suggest you pick this up. Like Milk and Honey I was able to get through this book in one sitting. It is so beautiful to watch someone go through so much pain and then rise at the end. There were so many times in the book where I had to stop and process what I was reading because it hit me so hard. Rupi Kaur clearly has a beautiful soul and has been blessed with the gift to write. I am so glad that I get to read her poetry.

2. When Breath Becomes Air, Paul Kalanithi 5/5

“Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade’s worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi’s transformation from a naïve medical student “possessed,” as he wrote, “by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life” into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

What makes life worth living in the face of death? What do you do when the future, no longer a ladder toward your goals in life, flattens out into a perpetual present? What does it mean to have a child, to nurture a new life as another fades away? These are some of the questions Kalanithi wrestles with in this profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir.

I skipped class one day after having an anxiety attack and went to the library. I was going to force myself to calm down by reading a book. I told myself I wasn’t leaving the library until I read a book. I randomly found this book, saw how short it was and read it at the library. This book makes you feel like you’re going on the journey with Paul and his wife. It puts everything in perspective. The fact that we don’t have much time here and we need to enjoy the time that we do have. By the end of the book I was crying despite the fact that I knew what was going to happen.

3. Turtles All The Way Down, John Green 5/5 *favorite*

Thoughts Before & After 

DFTBA

-AB