I do not remember where this recommendation came from, but the description looked intriguing, and I purchased the audiobook. And in the beginning, it sounded awesome: Baba Yaga died in Kyiv and left her House on Chicken Legs to her youngest female descendant 70 years after her death. An attorney finds the descendants in the US, and the House on Chicken Legs arrives in a container, stretches it’s legs to the horror of the witnesses, and the story goes on. Then, there is a mysterious Russian who tries to follow the House, and we are not sure what his evil plans are.
I thought, it would be a great story, but then, the historical inaccuracies start to pile so high, that it was impossible to ignore them, and the story becomes uninteresting. Baba Yaga suddenly becomes a Jewish woman who lives in the pale of settlement. I could live with that, but next, in 1919, there are “Russian soldiers” who are “protecting the tsar”, and simultaneously, there is an October Revolution, Denikintsy, the White Army, the ‘Russian soldiers” defending “the tsar and Fatherland” and the ”government sanctioned pogroms.” Yes, I understand that the book is about historical memory, and keeping history alive and so on, but when the history is so brutalized, it’s difficult to come to terms with “presenving history.”

I felt this reading as a completely wasted time. I still listened to the end, because I couldn’t believe “that’s it.” And there is a good idea at the end, but one paragraoh is a poor justification for a long book.

This list was published a couple of weeks ago (see here), and out of these one hundred books, I read only two and heard about four more, which sounds like a miserable outcome. I am not sure there are that many people who would be able to read a hundred books in a year, and they do not have to be from the must-read list, but still. I feel like in the previous years, more titles sounded familiar.

I would be curious to know how many books from this list other people read.

Recently, I returned or deleted several books in my audio library that were bought impulsively or by mistake. When I started listening to them, I soon realized I didn’t want to continue. That being said when I started to listen to Happiness Falls, I thought that this book would end up in the same virtual dumpster. To my surprise, I realized that I wanted to keep reading! Moreover, I used each and every single free minute to keep listening until I finished the book. 

I was especially surprised that I ended up liking it so much because one of the main themes of the book resonates with the central theme of Everything is f*cted, the book which I didn’t like at all. The idea is that happiness is relative, and the higher the “base level,” the more difficult it is to reach a high level of happiness. Sure, the objective measuring of happiness is a separate issue, but at least subjectively, many (if not most) people agree. 

I do not like this idea because, for many years, inspired by my mom’s attitude, I was always super anxious for this very reason. When I wanted something to happen, or I was anticipating something good coming/happening soon, I tried to lower my expectations so that I wouldn’t be disappointed. This way of thinking evolved quickly into experiencing severe anxiety before these potentially good events. I imagined all sorts of things that would prevent good things from happening. Likewise, I was never fully immersed in being happy, always thinking that “there will be consequences.” 

It took years after I moved to the US (which meant being away from my mom and also observing a very different attitude to life) until I started to realize that I was harming both myself and my loved ones and that I started to learn to think and live differently. It took a while, but I made this change, possibly because, by nature, I am a happy person, and I was a happy child until I was taught to be unhappy. 

The most important thing I loved about this book is another theme: reflections about how a non-verbal person is judged in our society as mentally incapable. The author draws a parallel between being a foreigner who does not know the language of their new country and a person with motor skills deficiencies that prevent them from using spoken language. 

Language (and accent)-wise, I’ve written about it so often that I do not want to repeat it. I had it both ways: being a subject of “those who speak with an accent think with an accent” and subconsciously having the same attitude toward others. I am deeply ashamed of the latter, but I can’t deny that I had that attitude at some point in my life. 

Also, I couldn’t stop thinking about one Russian family whom I have known for many years, where the mother discovered a similar way to communicate with her son with severe cerebral palsy. I remember both her struggles and disbelief and denial from the doctors and general public, all the accusations of “faking” her son’s communications with others. I could not stop thinking about them all the time I was listening to this book.