📖 3 Books That Changed My Brain Chemistry Forever 📚 Book Recommendations

Hello, Folk of the Hollow!

You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about books 📚 lately (shocker, I know!) and I began thinking about the books that I came across during formative times in my life, or perhaps I found them later on in life when I had matured enough to really appreciate what they had to say. Everyone who reads a lot has books like that come and go through their lives, I imagine, and I certainly am no exception.

I’ve had a lot of books come into my life and fully change it—so this is hardly a comprehensive list. If I made a full list of books that altered my brain chemistry forever, this would be less of a blog post and more of a novel in-of itself. So for the sake of brevity, I’m only going to talk about 3 of the many books that have changed my brain chemistry forever. There is a higher-than-average chance that I might do more lists following this one that will include the others, but for now here are the three that have been on my mind lately.

Kamikaze Girls is a 2002 Japanese novel written by Novala Takemoto about an unlikely friendship between a frilly Lolita fashion devotee and a rough-and-tumble motorcycle gang member in rural Japan.

This novel was one of the best depictions of female friendship that I have ever read. I discovered this story through the movie when I was in high school, and of course I had to get the book when I found it as an adult.

I deeply connected with the clearly flawed, but still well meaning, characters of Momoko and Ichigo and Takemoto’s writing clearly captures the way it feels as a young woman to be an outcast.

Momoko and Ichigo represent to sides of the “strong female character” spectrum, which I really enjoy because it does not marginalize one side over hte other. Both are equally strong, regardless of if they’re a girly-girl or a tomboy.

Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha follows the life of Chiyo Sakamoto, a young girl from a poor fishing village who is sold to a geisha house (okiya) in Kyoto's Gion district and her journey to becoming a Geisha.

I’ve come back to this novel every year since I discovered it in high school. The narrative voice is so lyrical and engaging, fully partaking in a highly aesthetic setting without sacrificing pacing.

One of my biggest praises of Golden’s novel is that, while it is a Cinderella retelling, he doesn’t make that fact overly obvious. It is only when you stop and think about the character archetypes within the novel and the motifs used that you begin to see this is a very subtle retelling of Cinderella.

This is the novel that made me love fairytale retellings, especially ones that aren’t obvious about it. The framework this story tells is immaculate, and is always going to be cited as one of my elite, favorite books.

This 1998 novel by Ruth Ozeki explores global capitalism, industrial agriculture, and media through the parallel lives of two women on opposite sides of the world

Wildly different than the other two in this list, My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki is a relatively new addition to my list. I was introduced to it at the beginning of my Masters in Literature degree program last year, and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it ever since.

My Year of Meats takes an artistic approach to its narrative prose, blending first-person narration with epistolary insertions (via things like emails) in a way that makes this novel feel like a real art piece.

Ozeki makes you feel incredibly devoted to both and Takagi-Little and Akiko Ueno, who represent two distinct perspectives on the beef corporation sponsored TV show My American Wife! (Exclamation point part of the title) and on the meat industry in the 90's in general.

Like I said, this is hardly a fully comprehensive list, but simply the ones I have been thinking about right now. I hope you liked this post! Let me know what books you’ve read that changed your brain chemistry forever—I’m always open to book recommendations!

Until next time ~