What Are Some Books Like 'It Happens All The Time'?

Other books that capture a similar sense of positive energy in the midst of life’s ups and downs are Lauren Wolk’s Echo Mountain, which is quieter and also extremely powerful, and The Truth About Twinkie Pie by Kat Yeh. That book is chock full of recipes and finds a positive way to depict sisterhood and includes a big-hearted story at its core. All of these books take a look at life’s lemons and find a way to make them into something sweet.

It’s a bittersweet ending to the story in the end. The couple’s love endures and they continue to show affection to each other in different ways and even come up with a plan to continue seeing each other. They are able to continue to participate in their rituals, but on the other hand, the couple gives up the passionate, adventurous and freeing full-weekend trysts of secrets in exchange for something more cautious, even medical and everyday. In other words, they give up the romance and go for a more companionable relationship. And you’re left wondering whether it was a good trade-off or not. The story makes you feel full but also empty at the same time, much like you feel at the end of a long-term relationship, especially one that was forbidden. The ending doesn’t provide any easy emotional closure, but it does make you feel like you’ve experienced the complexities of such a relationship.

The next book I wanted to read after Falling Upward was another book on transformation. Even though The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho is mostly fiction and an allegory, it is another very good book on transformation. Learning to Walk in the Dark by Barbara Brown Taylor is another book that portrays darkness as a place of transformation, and ways that we can grow there. Like Rohr, she shows how we can transform our messy lives into something beautiful.

Ending a relationship often requires geographic distance from the environment in which the relationship’s dysfunction was established. The entire setting — the city, his apartment, that cafe where they always sat — functions as a host of triggers to immense pain. And so, in order to heal, she takes the train and travels the distance between them. Each mile puts her further and further from the past and when she arrives in the new city she has no choice but to start from scratch. She is no longer his ex nor “that girl.” She is simply another new face in the city. And that is liberating.

I’ve read recently – with much pleasure – The Pisces by Melissa Broder. As I said earlier, Notes on Heartbreak is a deeply emotional read and whilst The Pisces is a vastly different book, it also deals with the depths of heartbreak and the journey of the person left to pick up the pieces after. The book is wild and crazy and at times surreal, but it’s also very real and is a very humorous take on the typical heartbreak stories that we read about. Annie Lord is another author who tackles tough subject matters with honesty and Unflinching courage in her writing. For an even more twisted take on relationships, you have to read Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan. The book is a smart and quirky dissection of the stresses of dating in your 30s and follows a protagonist as conflicted and as stuck in limbo as the narrator of Notes on Heartbreak. It’s fun and often laugh-out-loud and the dry humor has got me reading passages aloud to my flatmates to get their take. Even more, though, it’s good to have this sort of relatable take on a series of relationships, whole from the really bad to the just plain stumped. If you are looking for something a little more lyrical but equally painful, I highly recommend Graham Greene’s classic The End of the Affair. The story is of a man whose obsessive love of a woman that ended in an affair culminates in her unexpected death, and in the years that follow, he struggles with his jealousy, anger and conflicts with his Christian faith. As with Notes on Heartbreak, the novel is intense and leaves its reader shaken. It is a stunning exploration of love, and is written with incredible precision and beauty. Finally, I picked How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs because it’s different but also explores themes of love. This is a collection of short stories that follow a variety of characters, all dealing with love and relationships in different ways, from identities of families and cultures to how people are dealing with being diasporic. I find that this book is similar to Notes on Heartbreak in that the emotional range of the stories goes from extreme love to extreme hate, and in between there is a lot of love and it is so beautiful and relatable that it will make you feel all the emotions and hopefully see a little bit of yourself in the characters. Like with Notes on Heartbreak, reading How to Love a Jamaican will leave you feeling wrecked but better in the end.

None of the above. What works for me is translating. So, I take a song that I like, a page from a manga, or a short news article and try to translate it into English or the other way round. Translating is a really hands-on way of learning as it requires you to really hunt for the words and to think in a really active, problem-solving way. As you grapple for the word to express a particular nuance, you learn a lot about the hierarchies of synonyms and connotations of words. It’s really time-consuming and very frustrating at times, but the words you learn through this process become a part of your vocabulary for good. It’s not really the typical way of learning languages, but it’s really rewarding for language lovers and very effective.

Sometimes you can find similar things in totally different media. The podcast “Scene on Radio” had a series of episodes called “Seeing White”, a really in depth and philosophical exploration of the construction of whiteness. For me, those episodes of “Scene on Radio” had the same feeling of having a hidden mechanism of society explained as the Soyinka poem. Or the song “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday, a really powerful and lyrical song about lynching that uses the poetic imagery to force the listener to look at the atrocity described in the song. The strategies of art to expose uncomfortable truths are different in these cases, but the end is the same. So don’t limit yourself to books on the topic. Follow the feeling to music, to podcasts, to documentaries on the subject.

Finding ‘Waldo’ for grown-ups is a whole mood. Okay, fine. I get it. You are looking for something more than a guy in a striped shirt. However, many of the ‘I Spy’ books for kids have been upgraded to sophisticated offerings for adults, such as The Where’s Waldo? of Art, Museum Activity Books, and even new Explorer anthologies by Kazu Kibuishi and The Arrival by Shaun Tan. Journey by Aaron Becker is another wordless novel that demands great close attention as you follow the main character through space. If you want more of a puzzle-type activity, you could start with the book that started it all, Masquerade by Kit Williams, a classic hidden-object treasure hunt. But, honestly, finding ‘Waldo’ for adults is less about finding one character and more about a very complex visual that provides great reward after considerable time and patience. It is a specific kind of relaxation, you know? It’s a specific kind of relaxation, you know?

'Blissed: The Shampoo Effect' is just the kind of light, summery, character-driven novel I’d recommend to someone who loves this sort of thing. If you want to read more from this same author, I’d recommend ‘Pineapple Street’ as it has more of Jackson’s unique voice. For a light, brighter take on a family on vacation and their marriage, ‘The Vacationers’ would be a good read. If you want something with more of a satirical bent for a really unpleasant, wealthy family, ‘The Nest’ would be the way to go. These novels all have somewhat similar elements to them – ensemble cast, witty one-liners, the analysis of adults behaving poorly. All in all, I think it is worth readers’ time, particularly those who enjoy both great social comedy and deeper, emotional looks at characters. I enjoyed this very much and felt both entertained and, in the end, somewhat introspective – which is just the sort of reading experience I like to have and which has me already recommending this to three people.

Recommendations are often too vague and I prefer people to say “Like” and then recommend something specific. For example, if someone loved learning about a shocking and complex interconnected history, then they might enjoy “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson, a national epic that chronicles the Great Migration of African Americans from the South and will change the reader’s perspective of American history through the individual stories of three people. 'Big-picture' stories about the collective human experience also provide great insights into our nature and the wider forces that drive us as a species, such as Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, which tells the history of our species from a novel perspective. Or The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan, which successfully re-centres world history on Asia. While neither of these books is an exposé, they are both ambitious attempts to present a big new synthesis of history, to challenge our conventional understanding of the world and its evolution.