Link to Google Doc
This week has been quite gloomy, I have spent most of my time, for the last two weeks, inside in some kind of voluntary semi-quarantine. And, quite frankly, it is becoming relatively boring. I am not sure of how other perceive the situation, yet I am going to create this post with the intention of inducing some happiness into our lives.
Because of the time spent inside, and the relative absence of things to fill my days with other than reading, I have been reading a lot. I do not think that I have read this much since secondary school. Much of what I have been reading have been very good as well. Which is why I want to give some reading tips to you, my readers.
The first tip I have for these days spent inside, is the novel A little life, Hanya Yanagihara. It is perhaps the best novel I have ever read. It is an emotional read, which is hard to let go of. I could find myself thinking about the characters of the novel while working or whilst taking walks. Their lives are that immersive. And the characters are so intricately woven together into a web of life, which eventually makes oneself feel like a part of the lives of the characters. I will not go into much detail about the story itself, but I will say, with a warning (?), that the story is highly emotional, even disgustingly sad, and I found myself crying more than once while reading the book.
Another book I recommend you read is To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. An exquisite novel about the intricacies of family life, and the, almost unnoticeable, routines and exchanges on which we depend our entire existence. It is a pretty short read, but it is filled with descriptions of the small events in life that we barely notice, yet these events can be immensely important and descriptive had we just given them some thought. The story circulates around a house on Isle of Skye in Scotland, a place which I have been to, and the descriptions of the nature and the “feel” of the island made me want to go there once again.
My partner and I have also been reading aloud to each other, we are reading Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoj. We both enjoy it, and although we have not gotten very far in the novel, I recommend it, if you have not read it already. The descriptions of life in the upper echelons of the Russian society is beautiful and the characters are intricate and imperfect, just as we are in real life.
Anyways, these are three tips for the coming days of staying at home. Hope you like them! I also want to share a link to a dance performance which I and my partner saw a few weeks ago, stunning! It is the piece Echad Mi Yodea by Ohad Naharin.