Switching things up from digital to analogue (well, unless you have an ebook reader), here, our latest column titled The Regular Read which can range from sentimental to existential. Writer Chen Cuifen contemplates life in a more pensive state, collating titles that seek truth, wonder and the beauty of the human experience.
Here, recommendations by writer Chen Cuifen that call in a blissful and gratitude-filled Christmas Eve.
Miracles of the Namiya General Store, Keigo Higashino
This book combines so many things I love: Japan, time shenanigans, strange magic, and a mundane setting that turns out to be anything but. I’ve always been drawn to stories set in everyday spaces (laundromats and convenience stores, like the one in this novel, are perennial favourites) and this one is especially close to my heart.
Between Stations, Boey Kim Cheng
I remember reading the titular essay of this collection, “Between Stations”, for the first time. A good few years of my life had been spent bouncing between the UK, Australia and Singapore, and this book gave me that jolt of deeply personal recognition you feel when someone puts words to an experience of yours you didn’t know how to talk about before.
Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, Ross Gay
The subjects of the poems in this delightful collection range from spoons, to feet, to the act of buttoning and unbuttoning your shirt. There’s a real exuberance about them, a genuine joy and lightness, that feels like a much needed balm in these times. Reading Ross Gay always reminds me to be thankful.
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
I am, by training, a Victorianist—so it felt wrong not to include at least one work of Victorian fiction in this list, and The Woman in White is probably my own all-time favourite. I first read it as a teenager, and I still remember feeling totally blown away by how refreshing and original the epistolary style, the unreliable narrators and the characters felt, in spite of it being written in 1868. The themes still feel very relevant: The Woman in White was probably one of the first novels to shine a light on how unequally women were treated under law. It also kicked off a long obsession with detective and sensation fiction for me that persists to this day.
Light from Uncommon Stars, Ryka Aoki
Violin teacher Shizuka Satomi is paying off a debt to a demon: by delivering seven souls to hell. To do this, she trains ambitious violin students who become famous prodigies in exchange for their souls. She’s this close to freedom, but her last protegé isn’t like the others.This book is a loving ode to the power of music, community, and donuts (you’ll never look at donuts the same way again). To me, it also felt like a warm, friendly wake-up call that writing can and should be fun, and that no idea is too crazy—as long as you’re having a blast bringing it to life.
Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman
The subtitle of this book is “Time Management for Mortals”. This makes it sound like just another productivity book, and it sort of is, but it also really sort of isn’t. Rather than offering tips for how to get more done, Four Thousand Weeks points out from the start that in our limited lifespans (of approximately four thousand weeks), we will never finish everything we want to do. Knowing that, how do we choose to spend our days? This book will upend the way you look at time, for the better.
Less, Andrew Sean Greer
Less is about a struggling writer who travels the world in order to escape having to attend his ex’s wedding. It’s also about aging, the people we lose and leave behind along the way, the people whose hearts we break without even knowing. It’s also about dancing on Parisian rooftops and riding a camel in the desert and going home at the end of it. Less is a lot of things, but I think the only way I can sum it up is that reading it made me feel so very human in the best way possible.
Chen Cuifen’s work is featured in SAMPAN, the first anthology of writing published by LASALLE’s MA Creative Writing programme.
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