How Much Of These Hills Is Gold - C Pam Zhang
I keep a physical reading journal that I write in after each book I read. Sometimes I don't have the energy to then transpose what I've written into a review that I post online, so a lot of what I write sits in my journal for me alone.
Because we're coming up to the halfway point of the year I was looking back over my reading and trying to put together a list of my favourite books of the year so far. As I was doing so I remembered this book and decided to take the opportunity to type up what I wrote about it when I read it back in April.
This is easily the best book I've read this year so far, and that remains true as I type up this review two months later. I don't really know what to say about it other than that I loved it. It's beautifully written, sparse in its language, leaving gaps around meaning for you to interpret as you see fit - even going so far as to use all our knowledge of what's come before to answer the question of the ending for ourselves. What does Lucy ask for at the end? I don't know, and I don't even know if she knows what she wants until she asks for it.
This is about the stories we tell ourselves and others, the stories about who we are and where we come from and what we want. It's about the fluidity of identity, and how we remake ourselves anew every time we speak, every time we meet a new person and come to a new place, about all our opportunities to begin again even as we try to cling to where we came from (or bury it, or both).
This is an incredible book.