2025 Books
Happiness Falls | Angie Kim
… but human society in general— how we equate verbal skills, especially oral fluency, with intelligence. And when you lose that, …it changes you.
Don’t let what you already have be the baseline. Think of yourself before you gained what you have, and remind yourself how much you want that, what you already have— your spouse/partner, your family, your house, your job. Imagine you in an alternate universe where you don’t have your family, can’t have your kids or your partner, how desperate that alternate-you would be to get what you have. Or if you don’t believe in the multiverse, the you from five years ago.
If you set the epistemological bar high enough, there are things that can never be proven; extreme skepticism leads to nihilism, the erasure of meaning.
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 | Cho Nam-joo
From her superior, a female: “The women take on all the cumbersome, minor tasks without being asked, while guys never do. Doesn’t matter if they’re new or the youngest— they never do anything they’re not told to do. But why do women simply take things upon themselves?”
From her husband: “Of course, one can’t go through life only doing what one wants to do. But Jiyoung, I’m doing what I want to do. I can’t advise you to do something you don’t want to do when I made you quit the job you enjoyed while I continue to do what I want to do.”
From her therapist, a male: “My wife is still doing the maths workbooks, and I wish she’d do something more interesting. Something she';s good at, that she likes, that she really wants to do, not something she does because there’s nothing else.
…
Even the best female employees can cause many problems if they don’t have the childcare issue taken care of. I’ll have to make sure her replacement is unmarried.”From her mother: “…Don’t stay out of trouble. Run wild! Run wild, you hear me?”
Jiyoung became different people from time to time. Some of them were living, others were dead, all of them women she knew. No matter how you looked at it, it wasn’t a joke or a prank. Truly, flawlessly, completely, she became that person.
The world has changed a great deal, but the little rules, contracts, and customs had not, which meant the world hadn’t actually changed at all. She mulled over Daehyun’s idea that registering as legally married changed the way you feel about each other. Do laws and institutions change values, or do values drive laws and institutions ?
Remarkably Bright Creatures | Shelby Van Pelt
Sunrise on the Reaping | Suzanne Collins
The Psychology of Money | Morgan Housel
The Vegetarian | Han Kang
