A Little Life

My best friend and I exchanged beloved books with the intention of annotating/making notes for each other. This was the first time I have ever done something like this and I had a lot of fun doing it.

As for the book itself, I thought it was great, even though it's definitely the most depressing book I have ever read, and Yanagihara is a beautiful writer, but I would have enjoyed it so much more if it was at least 300 pages shorter. I made a couple of notes at different intervals expressing my disbelief that I still had so many pages left. I remember thinking a lot of that one booktok video, where the creator was basically like “I love reading but it's never this serious” showing war and peace with its like 2000 pages “like what story needs this long to be told” or something like that, and I felt that constantly; there was no reason this book needed to be over 800 pages. I thought so much of it was unnecessary. To be honest, I didn't need JB's perspective at all, and quite frankly, he and Malcom didn't even need to be in the book. They could have just been characters mentioned by name like the Henry Youngs that maybe had a touch of backstory but nothing more.

After reading, I am still not sure what the goal/point/message of the story is and what Yanagihara was trying to achieve by writing it. Obviously, not every story is a fairy tale with a clear message for the readers, but this is clearly a personal story that has a huge impact. There has to be a reason Yanagihara set out to write the book beyond “this idea came to me and I think it would make for a good read”. I also don't know if, as readers, we are supposed to know the point of the story or if those reasons are for Yanagihara alone, but some kind of direction would be nice. If the purpose of the story is that Jude has a terrible childhood and deserves peace and happiness, it could have been told in a much shorter time frame. Maybe the purpose is to show examples of human cruelty...for some reason...but the same thing applies.

Also, I know this is petty, but the fact that this book didn't come with its own extensive list of trigger warnings really bothers me. There are so many moments that people should know about in advance so they can prepare themselves.

I honestly don't see myself recommending this book, unfortunately.