Book Review: ONE BOAT by Jonathan Buckley

One Boat by Jonathan Buckley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The Question of Questions wasn't 'Why are the stars in the sky?' but rather 'Why is anything anywhere?'"

I dove into the 3rd Booker Longlister's ocean of melodic phrases, swam amidst its memorable characters and emerged excited for the possibilities of language, especially its ability to preserve the fleeting flash that is one human life.

In ONE BOAT by Jonathan Buckley, our heroine (a lawyer with literary ambitions) is a divorced English woman who revisits a Greek provincial town after 9 years. The first time she was there, she met some of the townsfolk, healing a broken heart through the pursuit of human connection. The second time, she seeks a similar salvation through conversing with these same people: an old lover, a poet/philosopher, and the former waitress-turned-owner of the local tavern.

The story is simple enough, and yet there is a great deal unsaid, a lot of the story shimmering beneath the surface. What is the real reason behind the mysterious injury of the town poet? Did the random stranger confessing to planning murder actually carry out his revenge?

And through it all, thoughts of the female lead's dead parents arise. How she longs to share her experiences with her beloved mom and less beloved, yet dearly missed dad. How absence is presence, the blessing of memory. And how transitory a human life is, brilliant in its brevity until we all go "into the great indifference."

The novel becomes very meta towards the end, as all throughout the writer reinterprets her experience as she records her thoughts in her diary, later submitted for publication. I smiled as the editor (himself a Booker Longlister, who rewrote his book five times) suggested ways by which our heroine might try "increasing the 'narrative torque.'" But she lets the seemingly ordinary holiday remain as is, without embellishment. Because even in its most banal, a life truly lived (talking to people, looking at the sunrise, and being in the moment) is already an unearned abundance.

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Book Review: THE ANXIOUS GENERATION by Jonathan Haidt

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I finished this book on the day that a high school student shot a fellow student in Nueva Ecija, mere months after two knife stabbing incidents in local schools. Our children are not OK, and this book helps explain why, and offers a course of action.

I’ll just go out and say it: THE ANXIOUS GENERATION is perhaps this generation’s single most important book for parents, educators, and policy makers. Necessary and timely, it’s for anyone who has fallen asleep and woken up only to reach for their phone to check social media notifications, for everyone who has spent an inordinate amount of time online.

Social psychologist, parent, scholar, and professor Jonathan Haidt has written an extremely alarming book on “the psychological damage of a phone-based life.” The accessibility of his language in presenting scholarly findings makes it so that his message comes across even more urgently.

He presents scholarly research on how the deadly combination of underprotection of children online (unsupervised access to screens with Internet for hours), combined with overprotection of children in real life (preventing them from gaining feedback through overcoming meaningful challenges) has resulted in an epidemic of anxiety, depression, and mental illness in our youth. And the evidence he shows points to social media as the cause, not as a correlate.

Smart phones are “experience blockers,” Haidt explains, and the current epidemic of mental health goes hand in hand with too much screentime and too much helicopter parenting. From reducing our students’ interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience (I remember a student asking me what’s the point in going on a field trip to listen to World War II veterans when she can just watch a YouTube video online), to mass social media - induced illness (kids claiming to have Tourette’s after a German influencer who really had the condition went viral, or the sociogenic spread of gender dysphoria)... the book covers a lot of ground, but every page is important.

The book provides a historical background of a cultural shift towards “Safetyism” as well as a timeline of the rise of smart phones and social media companies deliberately targeting psychological vulnerabilities, or what he calls “The Great Rewiring.”
His closing chapter offers suggestions for collective action, on what parents, schools, and governments can do to fight this global crisis.

“The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us… There is a hole, an emptiness in us all, that we strive to fill. If it doesn’t get filled with something noble or elevated, modern society will quickly pump it full of garbage.”

The irony is not lost on me that I am posting this on social media, but perhaps this is the start: recognizing the evil that the algorithms have done in the past, yet using these same tools to spread awareness, to shed a bit of light in an ocean of doom and gloom.

And after posting this, I shall turn off my gadget and read. Or play the piano. Or do countless other life-giving activities offline.

In the book, Haidt quoted Thoreau: “The cost of a thing is the amount of… life which is required to be exchanged for it.” Life cannot and should not be lived online. Here’s to not spending a single minute on social media, more than is absolutely necessary.

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Book Review: AUDITION by Katie Kitamura

Audition by Katie Kitamura
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"I was used to people armed with tremendous will, I was frequently with people whose job consists of imposing their reality upon the world."

First of the Booker 2025 reads done and whoa, what a good start!

AUDITION is in two parts. The book is basically two different novellas, each featuring the same trio of characters, but changing in relation to one another.

We have the aging actress, her writer husband, and a mysterious young man, magnetic and beautiful.

It's a wonderfully written novel full of sharp observations and insights into relationships, the tells and minutiae of behavior that reveal the pecking order in our social lives. Kitamura writes unbelievably detailed yet piercing sentences on the power dynamics and interplay of desires that make up human interaction.

It's a reminder on how the quality of our existence depends on how we are treated by others, and how we are complicit in the narratives people tell of themselves. For in the telling of their stories, ours, too, is given meaning.

"What was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?"

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Book Review: KITCHEN by Banana Yoshimoto

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"But if a person hasn't ever experienced true despair, she grows old never knowing how to evaluate where she is in life; never understanding what joy really is. I'm grateful for it."

I used to see copies of this book everywhere decades ago, as it was one of the earliest to be translated into English, hence one of the pioneers of JLit or Japanese literature (which constitutes a lot of my reading these days).

I never liked the cover, and still don't, but finally got around to reading the novel and am happy to report that this is a prime example of never judging completely by the look of a book.

To my surprise, it's actually two works in one, a longer novella and a short story. Both talk of dealing with personal tragedy, and how one can move past the grieving and get on with the task of living.

I think this book would mean more to older readers, those who have tasted how bitter life can be, side by side with its sweetness.

There are no Hollywood happy endings, and cruel, crazy things happen to the best people without any warning. Pretty much like real life.

What I admire is how the author does not shy away from showing the consequences of tragedy, and offers a mature look into the pursuit of life amidst the trauma of loss.

"In the biting air I told myself, there will be so much pleasure, so much suffering. With or without Yuichi."

Happiness is a choice, and so, too, is sharing one's life and heartbreak with another. We need not be sad nor lonely forever, Yoshimoto shows in this short yet very wise book. There is, always, hope, with each new dawn, with each take-out katsudon. For even as we think we can't go on, sometimes it just takes a bite of ebi tempura "so delicious it makes me grateful I'm alive." Sometimes it's encountering a kindred soul who touches your life profoundly with a single conversation over coffee. Sometimes books can save lives, and I have a feeling this one has touched so many.

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Book Review: LAMPEDUSA by Steven Price

Lampedusa by Steven Price
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"To live overwhelmed by the past is its own kind of extinction... You must beware of the hardening of the heart."

It all began with watching the Netflix series THE LEOPARD, based on the novel written by the last prince of Lampedusa. A dying, childless prince writing of a bygone world (one kinder and more beautiful than the modern one that has forgotten him), Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote only one book in the twilight years of his life. It's now studied by Italian high school students, immortalized in film, and now being discovered by new readers (me included), thanks to the TV show.

This sad, beautiful book is about this dying prince, and the book that will ensure his name lives on, forever. The sadness is, however, a hopeful one, as Price writes: "There were two kinds of unhappiness, the unhappiness of those who look for the sun to set, and the unhappiness of those who look for the sun to rise." Price has written about a man whose sun was setting, hoping to offer a token of his era to the young, tomorrow's dawn.

This reader is doing a twin read of both THE LEOPARD in English translation, as well as this novel on the story of its writing. And I was immediately struck with the sense that Steven Price's book captured the mood of the original inspiration fully, to the point that I had to check whether I was reading about Giuseppe or Fabrizio.

But it's not mere imitation. The author Steven Price, also a poet, has a gift for conjuring moods with words, suffusing each page with nostalgia that becomes very nearly painful at times. And the story behind the story proved to be every bit as dramatic as THE LEOPARD, if not even more so.

"He had been a great man and a man with a fiery purpose and one who had lived in the full light of a savage god."

It's the kind of book that asks the big questions of life, of what purpose all the suffering that comes with the human condition adds up to. It makes one realize just how little time we truly have, all of us, the walking dead.

At the end of the book, Price writes to his wife: "Word by word we build this life." This is very much what Price did for the life of Giuseppe Tomasi, but he went above and beyond mere reportage.

The novel Price has written stands on its own two feet, even if one had no plans to read THE LEOPARD after (although the work is so good, I can't imagine anyone reading it and not wanting to know more about the author behind the classic novel). Wisdom and beauty are found within, as Price writes of loss and life with a grace all his own. I am grateful to have discovered this gem in the high noon of my life, an accidental find turned into a new favorite that I know I shall be rereading in the succeeding chapters of my own short day on earth.

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Book Review: GREEK LESSONS by Han Kang

Greek Lessons by Han Kang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“Are the gods perhaps beings that look, or the look itself?”

Brief but brutal, Han Kang’s tale of a woman without speech and a man going blind is a reminder on the sacredness of communication and its prerequisite: to behold the other, fully.

Having previously read Nobel laureate Han Kang’s historical tales (Human Acts and We Do Not Part), I think I came into the book expecting it to be like these two previous travels through South Korea’s collective trauma.

I’m finding out on my third Han Kang that she also writes about female rage, yet in a different, quieter way.

Both the male and female characters, never named, are dealt heavy hands by fate. She is about to lose custody of her child, and he is rapidly losing his sight despite his youth. They meet in an adult night class where he teaches Greek, and she is a student. The ending came as a complete surprise, as the two protagonists literally shared only glances before, but it’s an extremely satisfying outcome that I never saw coming.

Although… I guess I should have.

My own faith’s religious book, after all, speaks of The Word becoming flesh. And in Genesis, the way all life began was with a word, when God said “Let there be light.”

Kang is a most visceral author, and despite the brevity of this book, you feel every pulse, you bleed and you get get hurt right along with her characters. And to think she accomplishes all this, despite the gap between languages (I read it in the English translation).

One does not merely read Kang. One experiences her.

This book, in particular, resurrected memories of my late father dealing with the increasing darkness brought about by diabetes-induced eye decay, as well as the more joyful recall of teaching three-year-olds the beginnings of a lifelong relationship with the written word: forming letter sounds.

For such a short book, it says a lot about what makes us fully human, and partially divine: this breath of life in us expressed as words, that bring us close to everyone and everything, and makes new life possible.

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Book Review: WE DO NOT PART by Han Kang

We Do Not Part by Han Kang
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Before reading this book, I had an impression of Jeju being a beautiful vacation spot in South Korea. I only found out through this book about the brutal military repression that took place in 1948, where soldiers massacred women and children as well as men on the flimsiest suspicion of communist or insubordinate beliefs.

WE DO NOT PART is similar in theme, and yet so different in execution from the same author's HUMAN ACTS.

Nobel Laureate Han Kang has written a book that investigates yet another harrowing moment in South Korea's violent history: the Jeju Uprising/ Massacre.

This book has more elements of fantasy than HUMAN ACTS, with a lot of times that I wasn't sure if the narrator was dead, or if she was speaking to the dead.

This was my second Han Kang, and I'm wondering if all her other books carry the weight of remembrance that HUMAN ACTS and WE DO NOT PART contain. Heavy indeed is the pen of one who would resurrect history before it is forgotten. When we think of how many decades the government repressed the stories of the innocents who died on the beaches of Jeju, we come to realize that Han Kang is a woman on the mission to preserve what was nearly forgotten.

In an age where governments are actively trying to push their narrative of history by deleting or destroying any document contrary to the official party propaganda, Han Kang is becoming necessary reading.

It has happened before. It is happening still.

It is up to us to read and remember.

(If you could read only one Han Kang, I would recommend that you prioritize HUMAN ACTS over this book. The rage burns brighter, the tears come faster with that one... perhaps because of the author's more intimate ties with Gwangju.)

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