On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous opens Goodreads in a new tab

My thoughts

dec truly the best time for me to do my annual rereads of favourite books. 5 🌟 still 5/5stars //reread 2022: still one of my fav books ever! “In Vietnamese, the word for missing someone and remembering them is the same: nhớ. Sometimes, when you ask me over the phone, Có nhớ mẹ không? I flinch, thinking you meant, Do you remember me? I miss you more than I remember you. No words can even remotely come close to describing what an exceptionally beautiful work of art this book is. It's a reminder to me that this is exactly why I LOVE BOOKS, the sheer beauty of the writing style, it's poetic, it's flowery, it's raw, it's earth-shattering, it's gonna make you feel all the feels. I am thinking of beauty again, how some things are hunted because we have deemed them beautiful. If, relative to the history of our planet, an individual life is so short, a blink, as they say, then to be gorgeous, even from the day you're born to the day you die, is to be gorgeous only briefly. For a debut novel, this books has surpassed all standards and bars and is most definitely the best writing style i've come across in a long long time. It's a book that will stay with you for many days and weeks. It reads like a collection of poetry each capturing a unique beautiful image/idea/memory. This book is a long, confessional letter from a young Vietnamese immigrant to his illiterate mother, the novel explores race, otherness and queer identity. And it's safe to say it's one of the most beautiful letters I have read in a long long time. Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us? CWs for the book: Addiction, Animal violence, Bullying, Cancer, Death (grandparent), Drug use, Homophobia (including slurs), Parental abuse, Racism, Sexual assault, Trauma, War (past)