Cathy from 746 Books has been running 20 Books of Summer since 2014, and I’ve been taking part since 2015 (see all my lists and links here). And this is my first book finished (don’t worry, I’ve nearly completed the next one, too!). I acquired this from Ali in April 2023, and of the eight print books I gained then, I have now read and reviewed five, seem to have discarded two and have one on my Liz And Emma Reading Pile. Not bad going! This of course also accounts for one of my 2024 TBR project reads.

Ruth Ozeki – “The Book of Form and Emptiness”

(08 April 2023, from Ali)

You think he’s this crazy old hobo, but he’s not. He’s a poet. And a philospher. And a teacher. And it’s not him that’s crazy, Benny Oh. It’s the fucking world we live in. It’s capitalism that’s crazy. It’s neoliberalism, and materialism, and our fucked-up consumer culture that’s crazy. It’s the fucking meritocracy that tells you that feeling sad is wrong and it’s your fault if you’re broken, but hey, capitalims can fix you! Just take these miracle pills and go shoping and buy yourself some new shit!” (p. 365)

It took me a little while to get into this book, though I’m not sure why: I might have been a bit put off by having the longest book in the pile chosen for my first read!

It’s a lovely coming-of-age tale of Benny Oh and his mum Annabelle, in the months after his father dies and he starts hearing objects speaking to him, just as mum starts hoarding more and more of them (she has a peculiar job which doesn’t help with this). As Benny’s special power is seen more as a mental health condition and Annabelle’s mental health condition is seen as willful messiness, they have to negotiate their landlady’s son, keen to evict them and make money selling the house, the vagaries of school and then mental health services and then a psychiatric hospital, and some rather magical people who Benny meets who turn out not to be as magical as mental health services think they are …

Add to this the fact that Benny is in conversation with his own book throughout, the incursion of a Japanese nun who’s become a cult tidying expert and two women in the library, one of whom bears a noticeable resemblance to the author, and you’ve got a conventional coming of age / falling in love narrative and a conventional finding friends and redeeming yourself narrative (for both of them) woven into a comforting and challenging layer of Zen principles. There are some animal deaths, but I would say they are necessary to the narrative and not gratuitous.

There’s some nice stuff about reader response theory which feeds into the work I’ve done and am doing, too:

And then, when she’s finished and the book ventures out into the world, the readers take their turn, and here another kind of comingling occurs. Because the reader is not a passive receptacle for a book’s contents. Not at all. You are our collaborators, our conspirators, breathing new life into us. and because every reader is unique, each of you makes each of us mean differently, regardless of what’s written on our pages. Thus, one book, when read by different readers, bcomes different books, becomes an ever-changing array of books that flows through human consciousness like a wave. (p. 491)

In the end, a page-turner, a book I didn’t want to put down, loving Benny and his friends. Not quite as good as “A Tale for the Time Being” but definitely one I recommend.

This is Book 1 in my 20 Books of Summer 2024.

This is Book 35 in my 2024 TBR project – 106 to go!