Scan barcode
apriladventuring's review
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
📚 2024 #32: “Other People's Words” by Lissa Soep
📕 This book is about deep platonic love and loss. Soep shares the stories of two cherished friends that are taken away; one slowly and one suddenly and unexpectedly. They live on not only through memory, but letters written, voicemails left, and favorite phrases uttered in conversations. Soep beautifully demonstrates the connection language has with our every experience, able to bring us back to another place and time -- and even to ones we've lost.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4/5: I loved the varied formats of text in this book: Soep's commentary, passages from books and letters, conversations held over email and text. It's clear Soep and her friends have a huge appreciation of language, which makes reading their words particularly moving. Seeing the decline of language in one of the friends was heartbreaking. This book made me want to send handwritten letters to all my friends and spend my mornings filling journals.
🤓 You should read this if you're grieving the loss of someone or simply want to read a beautiful story of change and aging.
🥰 Thank you to NetGalley and Spiegel & Grau for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.
📕 This book is about deep platonic love and loss. Soep shares the stories of two cherished friends that are taken away; one slowly and one suddenly and unexpectedly. They live on not only through memory, but letters written, voicemails left, and favorite phrases uttered in conversations. Soep beautifully demonstrates the connection language has with our every experience, able to bring us back to another place and time -- and even to ones we've lost.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 4/5: I loved the varied formats of text in this book: Soep's commentary, passages from books and letters, conversations held over email and text. It's clear Soep and her friends have a huge appreciation of language, which makes reading their words particularly moving. Seeing the decline of language in one of the friends was heartbreaking. This book made me want to send handwritten letters to all my friends and spend my mornings filling journals.
🤓 You should read this if you're grieving the loss of someone or simply want to read a beautiful story of change and aging.
🥰 Thank you to NetGalley and Spiegel & Grau for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.
recycledwords's review
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
fast-paced
4.5
This book took me a few attempts to get going. I'm not entirely sure what finally made it click but on the fourth attempt I finally made it past the first ten pages and was hooked. Soep reflects on the conversations, both verbal and written, she has had with friends who have passed as well as those they left behind. Intermingled with the vignette-style memories are snippets of conversational theory from the philosopher Bakhtin, which Soep uses to reframe past communications in order to imagine the voices of the dead to continue speaking.
The short chapters reminded me of little notes, as if Soep jotted down memories or ideas as they came to her and then built them out. The chapters are chronological but as it is a reflection on communication in the past there are many references to past conversations, letters etc. Revisiting past communications in such depth as a way of coping with grief was a new idea to me and one that I would like to explore further. This will be a tough read for anyone whose grief is still fairly new, but I would highly recommend it for anyone who is currently in the anticipatory grief stages or who has had some time to process the initial stages of grief and feels ready to explore their relationship to the person they have lost in a new way.
I have deducted one star only because it took me a few attempts to get started.
Thanks to Netgalley, and the publisher for the ARC.
The short chapters reminded me of little notes, as if Soep jotted down memories or ideas as they came to her and then built them out. The chapters are chronological but as it is a reflection on communication in the past there are many references to past conversations, letters etc. Revisiting past communications in such depth as a way of coping with grief was a new idea to me and one that I would like to explore further. This will be a tough read for anyone whose grief is still fairly new, but I would highly recommend it for anyone who is currently in the anticipatory grief stages or who has had some time to process the initial stages of grief and feels ready to explore their relationship to the person they have lost in a new way.
I have deducted one star only because it took me a few attempts to get started.
Thanks to Netgalley, and the publisher for the ARC.
More...