“The secret of life, though, is to fall seven times and to get up eight times.”

In the summer after my freshman year of high school, one of my best friends recommended that I read this book. The story is an allegory, and follows the journey of an Andalusian farmer named Santiago who has a dream in a ruined church of great treasure, and goes on a quest to the Pyramids of Egypt in order to find it. The plot itself is quite simple, but the way the story is told makes it incredibly impactful. The Alchemist focuses on the idea of a Personal Legend, or destiny, that every single person has but usually fails to fulfill. It focuses on all the things that hold us back from achieving our dreams: Most significantly, the fear of failure.

“At a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”

I read The Alchemist for the first time that summer four years ago, and have re-read it numerous times since. No matter what I am going through, or even if I just find I need some positivity and inspiration, this book never fails to make me feel better. In its review of The Alchemist, The New York Times described it as being more self-help literature than an actual novel. I think it’s a wonderful mixture of both. I think most any novel you read is designed to teach the reader a lesson of some sort throughout the story; in The Alchemist, this design is just more emphasized. There are words of wisdom on every single page of the book, but it never feels as if you’re being preached at. The self-help is intertwined with the story itself, and I think it’s far more powerful that way. The plots and characters allow you to picture yourself within the story itself, learning all of the same lessons that Santiago is learning, rather than just reading them off a pamphlet. The motivational rhetoric feels less forced, and therefore more real.

I have learned so much over the years from this book. Every time I pick it up, I am able to get something new out of it. The last time I read it, I had recently been rejected from my dream university, the place I had planned to go since I was ten years old. My soul was crushed and I had lost a great deal of faith in myself, and in the idea of dreams coming true. I decided to pick up this book for some inspiration, since it had been so long since I’d last read it that I forgot what happened. In the ending, as Santiago is digging for the treasure outside of the Pyramids, he is robbed and attacked by a group of men. After they steal everything he has, one of the men mock him for searching for treasure, and saying he too once had a dream that he would find treasure in a ruined church, but knew it was ridiculous and gave up on it. Santiago then realizes that the treasure is buried in the church he had the dream in at the beginning of the novel.

Ever since I was ten years old, I thought I would find my place at a particular university. After reading this, I started to realize that my place could be somewhere else, somewhere that I completely did not expect. The Alchemist helped me to realize that in life, we end up where we are supposed to be, even if we do not think so at the time.

“That life – whatever else it is – is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”

When The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014, I was not the slightest bit surprised. It has been one of my favorite books since I first read it in my freshman year of high school five years ago. I had gotten the book as a gift for Christmas, and had planted myself in my bed for four days – hardly moving, hardly doing anything except for reading its 844 pages. The novel tells the story of Theodore Decker, who loses his mother in a terrorist attack when he is twelve years old. He is now essentially alone in life, with only one constant comfort: The painting of The Goldfinch that he ran off with in the midst of the terrorist attack. The painting becomes the centerpiece of the story, driving the plot forward even when not directly present, and always in the background of the reader’s mind.

One of my favorite aspects of this novel is the degree to which it humanizes its main character. Theo is by no means a paradigm of goodness. Sure, you feel sorry for him, but he also makes a mess out of nearly every situation. He messes up, and learns from his mistakes, and messes up again, and learns, and so forth. You watch him grow over a ten year period, and, quite simply, he gets under your skin. Theo becomes the boy who goes down the wrong path and does everything wrong (i.e. drugs, theft, crime, etc.), but despite it all, you root for him, anyway.

Another facet of the book that I love is simply the style of writing. Donna Tartt’s mastery of the English language is totally evident, and the philosophical and spiritual notions of the book are so elegantly and beautifully expressed that you just want to re-read the sentences, over and over. There is a line from the book: “And if what they say is true – if every great painting is really a self portrait – what, if anything, is Fabritius saying about himself?” In the painting, the goldfinch is chained to a desk, never to move, unable to fly away and escape. The intention of the book is to the reflect the same sort of entrapment in Theo’s life, and mirror that with the same kind of trapped feeling many of us (or at least I) often feel. The book so perfectly describes the yearning people have to go somewhere far away, and their desolation when facing the fact that they are unable to. I have re-read this book every time I just needed inspiration, or just simply needed to feel better. It deals with loss, and pain, and suffering, but presents it in such a way that makes me remember that it is human to feel all of those emotions. It is human to simply feel. I think The Goldfinch succeeds in what is, essentially, the point of every story ever told: To share a small part of the human experience with each other.

“But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. That says the way is open. That throws it right back on a man. For if ‘Thou mayest’—it is also true that ‘Thou mayest not.”

East of Eden, written by John Steinbeck, is about the lives of two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, whose generations repeatedly reenact the biblical story of the fall of Adam and Eve, and the deathly rivalry between Cain and Abel. Steinbeck was known to have called this novel his “magnus opus” – or his greatest achievement in all his writing. In reference to East of Eden, Steinbeck stated the following: “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.” Although the novel is only 600 pages long (which is by no means short, but also nowhere near as bad as Tolstoy’s 1300 page War and Peace), it took me half a year to finish reading. This was mostly because, at first, I hated it.

I guess I didn’t hate it, but I struggled to get past even the first chapter. The first fifteen to twenty pages of the book are spent describing grass and hills and water in the Salinas Valley of California (where Steinbeck grew up). As someone who had no idea what the plot was about before I picked up the book, I had absolutely no patience to read numerous descriptions of the change of seasons and how it affects the level of water of some stupid river in California. I put the book down, not sure if I’d ever pick it up again.

Fortunately, I did pick it up again some months later. I figured that there had to be SOME sort of plot after Steinbeck finished describing the fertility of the soil in the Salinas Valley of California. And I was right. The story never moves too fast, however. Steinbeck took his time with the story, and I think that was what made it so impactful. In my opinion, one of the greatest triumphs of East of Eden is how humanizing it is. None of their characters are placed on pedestals of morality. They actually all did pretty terrible things at different parts of the novel, which more often than not, leads to their downfall. But through all the pain and misery in the book, all the death and revenge and evil, there were still glimmers of hope in the characters. There were moments when they knew they could be more than what they believed they were destined to be.

One of the main themes of the story revolved around the quote that began this blog post – “Timshel”, or Thou Mayest. The whole point of this novel is that the children are doomed to repeat the sins of the ancestors, over and over again. The quote’s role in this story is that it defines that we have no predestination; no determined future. Instead, we have a choice. We have a choice of who we want to be and what we want to become. Our fate is not written in the stars. We write it ourselves, with our choices, with our words, with our actions.

I read a quote somewhere that said we should never try to make ourselves out to be any more than someone who is trying to do the right thing. Because when we put ourselves on pedestals of morality and goodness, we take away the aspects that make us dynamic humans. Without our blemishes and scars, Steinbeck could never have written a book like the one he’d made. And I did love the characters. Possibly all of them. Because in their ignorance, and mistakes, and jealousy, and vengeance, they tried their damned hardest to be good. And that’s what we all want. To be good. We’re all just trying. And that’s okay.

I once dismissed East of Eden as a novel too detailed, too long, and too dull to be worth reading. It was long, and slow at many parts, but the message it shared needed that time. No one could’ve cultivated so strong and impactful a phrase as “Thou mayest” as Steinbeck did. I am glad I read it through. I now consider it to be one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read.

“Every book has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.”

This quote is from another one of my favorite books, The Shadow of the Wind. The book is, in large part, about books themselves and the power they have on everyone they touch. Written by the Spanish novelist Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind is set in Barcelona after the Spanish Civil War, and follows the story of a young boy. The boy, Daniel, stumbles upon a book called The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax and falls in love with it, but when he goes to find more copies of Carax’s work, he learns that someone has been systematically destroying every last copy of Julian Carax’s novels, and he may have one of the last novels left in existence. “Before Daniel knows it his seemingly innocent quest has opened a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets, an epic story of murder, magic, madness and doomed love. And before long he realizes that if he doesn’t find out the truth about Julian Carax, he and those closest to him will suffer horribly.”

Obviously, this book has a lot going on in it. I’ve read it twice now and I still think I need to read it another time or two before I can actually fully grasp everything that is going on in the novel. The Shadow of the Wind is also written as a story within a story – and sometimes, it can get a little bit difficult to actually keep all the information you’re reading straight and in the correct storyline. Nevertheless, the stories are woven together so creatively and unexpectedly that you’re CONSTANTLY guessing at what will happen next. In a time where most stories are just made up of different cliches, Zafón manages to take all the cliches in the book (doomed love, murderous revenge, gruesome deaths, femme fatales, etc.) but utilizes them all in surprisingly fresh and unique ways. As someone who often does not read mystery novels, I found The Shadow of the Wind difficult to put down both times that I read it.

I think that my favorite element of the novel is the quality of the writing. Zafón is an immensely talented author, and almost every single line he writes is filled with poetic metaphors and imagery. He has a masterful control over language that makes the reader feel every emotion he conveys in his writing. And I think, to that point, it makes sense that the language in the novel would be so beautiful, as the book itself is Zafón paying homage to all books and the power they hold on anyone fortunate enough to have them.

I have yet to read any of Zafón’s other works, although The Shadow of the Wind is considered by many to be his best. If you have time and happen to like mystery novels (or even if you don’t), I strongly suggest checking it out.

So far, for my passion blog, I’ve shared stories about places I’ve been able to travel to over the years. Traveling, as I’ve said countless times before, is one of my absolute favorite things to do. However, for when I can’t be lucky enough to explore the world around me, I often instead explore the world of books.

Reading has been one of my lifelong passions, and for this blog, I will be writing about some of my favorite books and how they affected me. I wholeheartedly believe that books have the ability to make us think differently, and view the world around us differently. By sharing some of my favorite novels, I will be paying tribute to the stories that have shaped me into the person I am today.

To begin this blog, I’m going to talk about one of the very first books I read that truly made me passionate about reading: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen.

Although published in 1813, it is, to this day, one of the most beloved novels in the English language, and for good reason. It provides a humorous outlook on societal life and standards of 19th century England, features complex, flawed, well-developed characters, and tells a good love story, to boot. Perhaps my favorite aspect of the novel, however, was that it showed a complex, clever woman at the center of the story in a time where women in novels did little else but cry and faint.

I first read Pride and Prejudice when I was nine years old. Desperate to be exactly like my fifteen-year-old sister, I devoured any book she claimed was worth reading. I read, all day and night, for four days straight. Of course, I hardly understood a word of it, and had a dictionary by my side, which I turned to nearly every other line. Once I actually understood the plot and the characters, I fell in love with it. I wanted to be exactly like the protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, when I grew up. In fact, to this day, I think there are very few female protagonists in novels that are as well-written as Jane Austen’s characters. For that fact alone, I will always love Austen and her novels. She did something no woman was expected to do, and created characters that have shown women for over two centuries that we can be far more than side characters who cry and faint in the background. It also features one of the best love stories ever told – even though it is about far more than who marries who. I think one of the greatest strengths of the novel is not simply the “falling in love” part, but the growth of the characters – Elizabeth Bennet and the infamous Mr. Darcy – who can actually love each other. The novel has a way of stealthily maturing the characters without the reader even realizing it, which perhaps just makes them more human and more realistic.

For these reasons, among many others, I love this novel. I think there’s always going to be a special place in people’s hearts for the books that made people fall in love with stories. I’ve reread this book at least twice each year since I was nine years old, and even though I can practically recite each line by heart now, there’s always a bit of magic that flows like a current from the book each and every time I pick it up.