Book Review: When Breath Becomes Air

One of the best books I read this summer that still pushes me to self reflect and learn more about myself and the world around me is Paul Kalanithi’s memoir, When Breath Becomes Air. In his novel, Kalanithi chronicles his journey as a neurosurgeon, husband and eventually, a father after being diagnosed with stage four lung cancer at age 36. Throughout the book, we accompany him as he reconciles with his diagnosis by searching for inner peace, meaning and acceptance in his family, career, health and more. By the end of this novel, you will not only be awed and inspired by Kalanithi’s wisdom, but faced with many of the same questions and life lessons Kalanithi poses.

There are so many reasons to read this book. You will witness growth, reflection and hope. But perhaps my biggest takeaway from Kalanithi is his message on facing life and how we can really make sense of even the most confusing times. At one point, Kalanithi looks back on his years as a med student and recounts the many tireless hours of committing to his work that defined this part of his life. He explains how so much of his purpose came from treating and saving patients but notes the overwhelming confusion and struggle that came with facing death. As Kalanithi comes to terms with cancer, he is confronted by many questions about his future, including his life’s purpose after being unable to practice surgery and how cancer will affect his relationships with friends and family. We especially sense his inner struggle to reconcile with what could have been…  the plans that seemed not so far off before the cancer diagnosis.

Many of the questions Kalanithi raise are specific to his experiences with cancer, but his inner doubts about the meaning of success and one’s life purpose are not far off from what many of us wonder about, especially during challenging times. He specifically describes his journey to acceptance by chronicling and reflecting on his road to becoming a doctor, a husband and a father.

As I read this novel, I could not only sense how grateful Kalanithi was, but just how impactful he was to those around him, including his wife, siblings and even parents, who learned to appreciate and understand life because of him. One quote of his particularly struck me: “You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.” He writes this just as he wraps up recalling some important milestones in his life; he never achieved perfection but accomplished something more: fulfillment.

Whether you are going through a rough time, want a good read or looking for something to be invested in, this book will not fail you.

P.S- I encourage everyone to check out this article written by Paul Kalanithi’s wife, Lucy Kalanithi.

Feature image via.

Oh, The Places You'll Go: Shakespeare and Company

There are plenty of reasons a MODA reader might visit Paris, from food to fashion to amazing art and architecture to the Instagram opportunities and nightlife. Allow me, however, to leave all this aside for a moment and point you to my favorite place in the city of light: just across from the Notre Dame on the Left Bank is the bookstore of any literary nerd (or aesthete's!) dreams. Welcome to Shakespeare and Company.

Image via Source the Station.

Shakespeare and Company is actually the second bookstore of its kind in Paris. The original bookstore, founded by the bookseller Sylvia Beach in 1919, was a haunt of some of the greatest literary names of all time, from Gertrude Stein to Earnest Hemingway to T.S. Eliot. Today's Shakespeare and Company, founded in 1951 by George Whitman, has also seen its fair share of literary giants (James Baldwin or William Styron, anyone?).

Image via Poetry Foundation.

The bookstore has a history of incubating writers by quasi-employing them as "tumbleweeds"—people who must help in the store for part of the day, contribute a one-page autobiography, and read a book every day. The "tumbleweeds" embody an important tenet of Shakespeare and Company, summed up in a Yeats quote modified from the Bible: "be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise." It's an axiom that's deeply relevant to George Whitman's life and work—and also exemplifies Shakespeare and Company as a haven for rational discourse, civility, and intellectualism in a time like ours.

If you go, be on the lookout for the resident bookstore cat (name unknown) and the Sylvia Beach Memorial Library. Check out the photos and articles papering the walls, the vegetarian cafe next store, and—of course—the store's impressive selection of books from the Lost Generation and Beat Generations. 

Thumbnail image via Unpacking the Bookstore.

Turtles and Mental Health in Young Adult Fiction

After the explosive success of his young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars, John Green returns after six years with a painfully personal new novel: Turtles All the Way Down. High school junior Aza Holmes suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) resulting in “thought spirals” which prevent her from feeling comfortable in common adolescent experiences.  

She consistently jabs her thumb into a cut on her middle finger, causing it to release pus, only to disinfect the cut with hand sanitizer and re-apply a Band-Aid. This habit, developed as an attempt to have a way of knowing her body was real, gave Aza even deeper anxiety about the possibility of the cut becoming infected by Clostridium difficile, a disease that in the rarest of cases results in death. She cannot kiss someone without going through a thought spiral about the 80 million microbes exchanged through saliva which will permanently inhabit her microbiome for the rest of her body’s life. Inhibitory is an understatement when describing the severity of Aza’s OCD.

In the past, Green’s novels have encapsulated the adolescent experience by focusing on themes of attraction, isolation, and coming of age, however, Turtles All the Way Down presents a departure from these staple young adult topics. Mental health comes with stigma and preconceived perceptions; people often associate OCD with germaphobes and neat freaks or that a pill fixes ADD and ADHD. Stemming from the personal experience of living with OCD, Green’s novel depicts life with mental illness as an ongoing individualized process without a simple cure. Most mental illness will remain in the present tense—“I had OCD” is an impossible statement.

Categorically considered Young Adult, the novel discusses mental health with an intimacy scarcely before seen in the genre. The novel is aimed at an audience still in the process of learning the ins and outs of social communication, experiencing feelings of intense emotion, and understanding how to take care of one’s mental health. Green’s characters not only exist to give hope and verification to those living with mental illness, but also to carefully depict the reality of having friends with mental illnesses. While Aza’s friends fail to identify with her thought spirals and quirky habits, Aza fails to act as a caring friend at times as well. The relationship Green creates between Aza and her best friend Daisy shows people living with mental illness do not deserve pity and also demonstrates the need of those with mental illnesses to consider the needs of the people around them.

Green’s novel presents an unglorified account of life with mental illness, striking an articulated balance between necessary adolescent self-realization and universally applicable truths regarding the hardships of the human mind.

To hear more about John's experience with OCD, listen to him talk about it here:

Turtles All the Way Down is available wherever books are sold. Also, the book's publisher Penguin Teen has created a playlist to enjoy while reading:

Reading List: Novel Edition

Last year, for the first time ever, I accomplished my New Year's resolution of reading fifty-two books in a year. I'll be the first to admit that even though I had the longest summer break ever (thanks, quarter system!), averaging a book a week was sometimes hard to accomplish (cough 8th week cough). However, reading for fun is still one of my favorite ways to start my mornings, pass time at the airport, and give myself a break between p-sets.

If you'd like to hop on the train of reading fifty-two books in a year, or you're just looking for something fun to read on the CTA, let me be the first to welcome you to this new series. To start us off, here are some of my favorite novel picks!

1. Contact, by Carl Sagan: If I only had room for one book in my backpack, this is the book I would pack. UChicago's very own Carl Sagan gives us a story about the lack of gender diversity in science, the interplay between science and faith, the prospect of life on other planets, and the role of love in the universe. I read this the summer before tenth grade and Ellie Arroway is still one of my favorite characters ever.

2. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, by Benjamin Alire Sáenz: I judged this book by its beautiful cover, and it's one of the best impulse decisions I've ever made. I think every person can relate to Ari or Dante in some way–obsessing over the stars, feeling mysterious to your own self, falling in love for the first time, moving to UChicago. This novel is sweet and deep, like having a conversation with your best friend.

3. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz: Diaz's first novel will put you on a rollercoaster ride of emotions, and you'll be all the better for riding it. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a book that can't be put in a box–it works with more than one genre, more than one language, and more than one kind of character. It has footnotes and history lessons. Some of my favorite lines I've ever read come from this book, such as "she stood like she was her own best thing," (36) and "she laughed, as though she owned the air around her" (74).

4. And the Mountains Echoed, by Khaled Hosseini: This novel is like a quilt. Hosseini stitches together the lives of about fifteen different people to create a beautiful and warm book that you won't want to put down. Just through reading this, you'll travel to Afghanistan, Paris, California, and a bit of Boston. You'll read about people who remind you of yourself, people you wish you were, and people who help you empathize with everyone you can't stand. 20/10 would recommend.

5. The Sonderberg Case, by Elie Wiesel: You know Elie Wiesel from Night and the quote "neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim." In this short novel about an actor-turned-journalist, Wiesel takes on a murder mystery with such eloquence that you'll sometimes forget the dark premise of the story. I bet you’ll get through this book in a weekend, and then want to read everything Elie Wiesel ever wrote.