I had read All over creation several years ago and enjoyed it so was delighted to be able to read Ruth Ozeki's latest book. This one is about a widowed mother and her teenage son, navigating their rocky path through grief after losing their husband and father respectively. Ruth's writing is beautiful and her style is quirky and moving. This book covers many important topics whilst also being an absolute joy to read. Such a lovely book.
With grateful thanks to NetGalley and Canongate for my copy in exchange for an honest review.

On one hand 'The book of form and emptiness' is the coming-of-age story of a young teenage boy, Benny, who we meet after the sudden death of his father when he starts hearing the voices of inanimate objects. On the other hand it’s a subtle Zen parable about consciousness, language, connection to the material world, and the nature of reality. Is Benny hallucinating when he hears things communicating with him? Is it magic realism? Or is it possible to have such a level of sensitivity that the quivering masses of atoms and energy that constitute material objects can actually be perceived as voices? And if humans are indeed made of stories as well as quivering masses of atoms, then a mycelium-like web of invisible sentient books that narrate those stories, together with all other books, written and unwritten, is a logical proposition. In a story featuring the recurring question of ‘What is reality?’ this is all perfectly reasonable.

There’s a glorious cast of multi-faceted characters: Benny is an entirely believable awkward/vulnerable early teen; his mother Annabelle, a barely keeping it together after losing her husband and a lovable mess; The Aleph, a enigmatic young artist who Benny meets on the psych ward, creator of dystopian snow globes and cryptic ‘interventions’ in the public library where the cosmic action is set, and the delightful Slavoj, a one-legged Slovenian philosopher. And then there’s The Book, who narrates, in conversation with Benny, and takes care of the Zen/metaphysical exposition. Also a Japanese Buddhist nun/accidental decluttering celebrity, and a non-binary ferret.

It’s a huge, rich, humane read, with lots of thought-provoking Zen wisdom, moving relationships, moments of heart-stopping drama and emotional insight, brought together in a vivid web of interconnected imagery and wonderful prose. Absolutely loved it and can’t wait to read it again.

It took a while getting into it but once I found my rhythm, it felt like an acid trip. The character development is impeccable I wanted to cry. This is an impressive novel.

I am a bit late with this one. Firstly because it took me longer than usual to read and secondly as I really needed to process it after I finished it.

Two weeks later and I am still unsure about my thoughts on this one. Weighing in at 550 pages this book is a lengthy coming of age tale that explores a wealth of thoughts and ideas. Benny Oh, our protagonist is a teenage boy, his father a jazz musician ,has died in horrible circumstances and its just him and his Mum, Annabelle. Annabelle also overwhelmed with grief allows her life to shrink down to her love for her son and the walls. Neither character have close friendships and while Annabelle, turns to compulsive hoarding, Benny turns to books and things and soon he begins to hear objects speaking to him and is introduced to his own book, who narrates his life to him.

Its difficult to summarise this book. It is ambitious in its scope and incorporates so many themes and ideas from jazz music and climate change to Zen philosophy. and mental health. Much like the characters, I was overwhelmed by several of the themes and then underwhelmed by others. The authors imagination is incredible and this is the first book I have read in a long time that I had absolutely no idea where it was going. I found it quite a disjointed read though, I would find myself becoming enthralled by an element in the story only for the next chapter to focus on an entirely different subject and it took me a long time to feel a connection to any of the characters. I had to push myself to keep reading at several points but I am glad I persevered as the last 100 pages where very enjoyable although I almost felt relief when I finished this one.

Thought provoking at times, moving at others and sometimes frustrating, an interesting and very unique read. I think it would work well as an audiobook but I am not sure if I would recommend. In saying that, its stayed with me.
I am on the fence , I think I would get more from this book on a second read but I can't see myself returning to the world Ozeki created.

3 star.

My feelings about this book are really mixed. On one hand, I appreciate the diversity and complexity of the story, and I agree it is a masterpiece. Ozeki brings at the forefront of her story themes that are so important and relatable, such as the vicious cycle of hoarding or the pressure of fitting in.

On the other hand, for me it was not a very pleasant reading experience – it was quite saddening, as there’s a lot of grief and anxiety, and the book felt super long. It really is long as number of pages (500+), and I felt like I was slogging through, especially in the second part.

The Library was one of my favourite elements of the book. Benny goes to the library to hide, but also to meet his (imaginary?) friends. It seems the only place where he feels protected and understood.

The Book of Form and Emptiness is a worth-reading book that covers a multitude of topics – there are very high chances that you will related to at least one of them! The only disclaimer is that it might seem too long if you are usually enjoying faster-paced books.

This is a book to become completely absorbed in. It is a beautifully written original novel that will end up on many a favourites list I have no doubt - it's on mine!

What a truly beautiful book. I can totally understand the hype.
This is one of those magical books that doesn’t come around very often, so you have to treasure it. Despite the length, it would be tempting, and easy, to fly through the story. But this book deserves to be savoured slowly and thoughtfully. It will stay with me for a long time.

Well worth reading this outstanding novel. A beautiful and thought provoking coming of age novel that raises important questions and perspectives and also addresses mental health issues sensitively.

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki is outstanding. At first sight it appears to be at home in he fantasy genre but as you progress through the book you realise that what you are reading is ‘real’. The novel explores mental health in various forms, religion, politics and family. Everyone should read this!

Unfortunately this book didn’t work for me. It focuses on the loss of a parent, the difficult relationship between mother and son along with the mental health struggles of our protagonist Benny. Ozeki’s writing style is truly beautiful and I would definitely try another of their works. However, the ending of the book felt too perfect almost and I didn’t connect with the characters overall so this won’t be one I’ll reach for again.

I'm really struggling to determine my feelings about this book. Overall it wasn't what I was expecting, and a lot of it I loved, but there were some things I didn't love so much.

This book started so strong for me. It begins with the death of Benny's father, and over the grief sticken period Benny begins to hear the voices of objects. It goes on to explore the mental health of both Benny and his mother, their relationship which becomes more and more strained, and the relationship we have with objects and the material world.

'Stories never start at the beginning, Benny. They differ from life in that regard. Life is lived from birth to death, from the beginning into an unknowable future. But stories are told in hindsight. Stories are life lived backward.'

I realise now I really didn't know what this book was before I started it. All I needed to know was that it was narrated by a book that the main character could hear and I thought that sounded amazing. That's not really the focus of the book though, especially as you get further into it. I think I was expecting something that felt more like The Starless Sea, which I didn't get. But of course that's not the books fault.

So what did we get? A lot. And that's perhaps one of the issues I had with it. It's very ambitious in the amount of themes and topics it discusses and I could go on and on about them, but it made for a very long 500 page book that for me could have done with being cut down.

One theme Ozeki wrote in an impactful way was children's mental health, how it's handled, and the effect it has on parents. Benny's story felt quite YA, coming-of-age, and gave me Perks Of Being the Wallflower vibes. I just didn't connect with Benny the way I did Charlie because Benny is a much more flawed character who I at times struggled to sympathise with, especially later on in the book.

His mother however I found incredible. I really felt for her as she struggled to deal with the death of her husband and becoming a single parent. It was heartbreaking to see her trying to do the right thing for Benny, and his increasing distance from her. She also has her own mental health issues including hoarding of material objects which is how Ozeki explores out relationship with consumerism.

But the moments that I loved all came from the book talking about being a book. I could read a whole book of just that. There was one moment when the book was talking about how books are used to waiting for someone to pick them up, they know we live busy lives and have learnt to be patient, and they bide they're time until we are ready for them. That moment spoke to my soul.

There's a lot to love about this. I think my rating comes from my weird lack of connection to the story. For a book filled with so much emotion and turmoil, it never drew out any emotion from me.

I have never read anything like this book before!!! It was EPIC! (In scope as well as number of pages!)
This was my first Ruth Ozeki book, but I would definitely read her other books now!

I really enjoyed reading this book. The characters were so relatable (even if they were not always likeable) and I empathised with all of them. Ozeki's writing style was so vivid and I could picture every moment so clearly. I would love to see a film of this book.
This book made me laugh, and broke my heart. It has so much within it - including lots of magical realism. What was real? What was not?
There were times when the pacing did feel a little slow, but this was only a handful of times. However, this is why I couldn't give it the full 5 stars.

There is so much to this book, and it could cover multiple genres - I just don't know where to start with a review because of this. All I can say is that its brilliant, and a book I will be recommending to all.

I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Women’s Prize, although I would have read it anyway as I was a fan of the author’s Booker shortlisted “A Tale for The Time Being” and indeed asked my first audience question at the In person Booker shortlist readings about that book (on the quantum mechanical aspects).

And in a Women’s Prize longlist which seems to be ratcheting up its focus on alternative voices: three tales of ghosts and magic to offset a bias towards reality: two books with talking animals to counter the resulting anthropocentricity: a book with a talking tree to make the case for the plant world against the colonialism of the animal kingdom: this book takes things a step further by having at its very heart a backlash against (my term) animatenormativity by giving inanimate objects the voice they have long been denied in fiction - here both with a novel effectively narrated by itself and in active dialogue in its own pages with the teenage boy whose story it is telling, and with the key characteristic of that boy being his unwanted and often deeply troubling ability to hear the cacophony of voices of the everyday objects that surround him physically and crowd him aurally.

Amusingly even within the inanimate kingdom it seems that further hierarchies occur with the book making the case for a human manufactured division of matter into "two camps, the Made and the Unmade" - although I think this does rather neatly capture how many present day tensions and injustices (from the caste system to skin colour distinctions) are the legacy of colonialism.

Like a number of other books on the longlist it has a child/teenage protagonist and putting that together with what at times is a rather didactic approach (with the voice of the book often switching into a rather portentous lecturing style - as the above shows) does I feel mean that this book read perhaps more like a young adult book than a literary novel. Although there too I am perhaps showing that my genre snobbery one also held by books it would seem as the book comments on how "we have our preferences and prejudices, too. Of course, we do! Biases abound on library shelves. The scholarly tomes disparage the more commercial books. Literary novels look down on romance and pulp fiction, and there’s an almost universal disregard for certain genres, like self-help."

This is nevertheless one of the more intriguing books on the longlist - a lengthy and varied book which perhaps as a consequence is at times very successful and at others can feel in dire need of a traditional editor’s blue pen. However when a novel speaking as a character in its own pages itself strongly makes the case for (my terms) a bibliocentric view of novels with authors largely as intermediaries between books and readers; it is perhaps not surprising that the editing of this book feels like it concentrated more on encouraging and expanding and rather than reducing the wide ranging scope of the novel.

This is also a book which has as its main female lead who is both: a collector of facts and news (via her job as a “scissors lady” working as a reader and print clipper for a media monitoring agency - an agency with an obsession with document retention which only too easily fits this employees own proclivity); an increasingly obsessive hoarder whose tendencies there are not helped by the loss of her jazz musician Japanese-Korean husband who perhaps acted as the one check on her and whose very death introduces an additional need to memorialise.

So it is perhaps not surprising to see similar tendencies in the author herself and in her writing if the book.

When writing her previous Booker shortlisted novel - the author changed tack half way through (I think as a result of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and Tsunami) and did not use around 300 pages of material on an eccentric cast of characters (a young female and rather troubled radical conceptual artist, an alcoholic wheelchair bound Slovakian poet philosopher) who inhabited a large public library with a possibly haunted bindery at its heart. But in the best tradition of hoarding this material was neither deleted or discarded but kept for when it could might prove useful in the future. And in what is perhaps a radical departure from the more obsessive hoarder that moment actually arose and the material was successfully deployed in this project.

And having the “scissors lady” at the heart of the novel also gives the author all the excuse she did not really need (as it is I think an inherent tendency) to throw in current affairs (particularly climate change, anti capitalist activism, the Trump electoral win and its aftermath of protests and police brutality) and any other scraps of information that intrigue her (for example on space exploration).

The novel I think shows a spectrum of research in its myriad of influences: personally experienced (the role and worldview of a Buddhist Priest); rather overworn and cliched (the Marie Kondo decluttering trend); very empathetic and detailed (Hearing Voices and the world of municipal libraries); intermediate (the life and works of Walter Benjamin); rather superficial (the jazz of Benny Goodman).

In terms of some missteps I would include the frequent references to “hobos”, the two very stereotyped Chinese characters and the voice of the poet "Poetry is a problem of form and emptiness. Ze moment I put one word onto an empty page, I hef created a problem for myself."

But overall there is enough here to make it a very worthwhile read.

This is a book about Benjamin Oh, and his family friends and the things around him.
It is not all pleasant, some of it is difficult , but then life is often hard. I was struggling at one point to get into the book, but thus is often the way when a good book is developing.
At the moment I think that this is the best book that I have ever read, I couldn't say just why, but it resonates with me and I wouldn't expect any of the storyline to do so.
At the end I felt that if I never read another book again in my life (just this one over and over) I would be happy.
The characters are great, the storyline is unusual but great. The writing as always with Ruth is fantastic.
I wish it was all true.
Thanks to the publisher for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

I was slightly daunted by Ruth Ozeki's 'The Book of Form and Emptiness', both in terms of its length and the philosophical ideas it promised to explore. However, I found it a much more readable and engaging novel than I had expected, due to its central focus on the Oh family - jazz clarinettist Kenji Oh, his wife Annabelle and their teenage son Benny. The brief happiness we glimpse of the self-styled "Cheery Ohs" is disrupted at the start of the novel when Kenji dies after being run over by a truck, after which Benny becomes increasingly troubled by the voices he starts to hear from the objects around him, while Annabelle becomes overwhelmed by the possessions she is hoarding.

Although these two characters' struggles are at the heart of the novel. there is a lot more going on than this; the novel is mainly narrated by 'The Book' which tells the story of Benny's life, in response to which he periodically offers his own thoughts; Benny spends a lot of time hanging out in the public library, where he encounters Slavoj, a homeless and alcoholic poet, and Alice (also known as The Aleph), an artist and drug addict; meanwhile, Annabelle comes across a book by a Zen Buddhist monk entitled 'Tidy Magic' and starts to correspond with its author, and as well as exploring Zen Buddhist concepts, there are also frequent references to the writing Walter Benjamin and Jorge Luis Borges. All of this makes for a novel which is clever, playful, ambitious and rather unusual.

The novel also offers many interesting reflections on our relationship with our possessions in a very materialistic and consumerist world. However, it felt like it took quite a long time to make these observations, and Annabelle and Benny's characters were both following a fairly similar trajectory for the vast majority of the novel (especially Annabelle's). Nonetheless, both characters were very well-drawn, and I found this an enjoyable novel overall, as well as a brilliant celebration of the value of books, stories and libraries. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review!

Ruth Ozeki's writes an extraordinary philosophical and offbeat novel touching on fundamental issues and challenges faced at both at an individual and global level, our disconnections and the impact of our fraying connections, grief, love, loss, approaches to mental health, family, technology, books, libraries, consumerism, politics, environmentalism and climate change. When Japanese/Korean jazz musician, Kenji Oh, a man with a close personal affinity with crows, dies tragically after being run over by a truck, his wife, Annabelle, and young son, Benny, named after Benny Goodman, spiral in their own separate ways into a state of grief that is to pose a threat to their capacity to see each other, building into a dark cloud with the capacity to destroy their family unit. Annabelle who monitors the news, print and then online, puts on weight and becomes an out of control hoarder, unable to discard anything, yet cannot stop buying items that catch her eye.

Benny begins to hear voices of inanimate obects, a problem exacerbated by the growing number of items in his home, there is a distinct difference between their chaotic voices and the voices of the unmade (nature). It doesn't stop there, additionally there is the book of his life, relating his past and present, to which Benny attributes power and agency over his life, only for it to remind him this actually lies in his hands, Books are beginning to lose their trust in humans. The voices lead to Benny ending up in a children's psychiatric ward, under the care of Dr Melanie, where he meets Alice (the Aleph) a homeless artist who leaves notes and captivates Benny, she makes bleak, dystopian, apocalpse snow globes, she is to come and go in his life, along with vodka drinking Slavoj, a wheelchair bound poet with a prosthetic leg. In the meantime, a book with a Zen approach to tidying keeps turning up at crucial times in the isolated Annabelle's life, without a support network there for her, and only when she has such a network will matters start to improve.

There is magic, compassion and humour in a narrative that simplifies complex issues, as Benny finds refuge at the library, Benny asks his own fundamental discovered question, what is real? It underlines the impermanence of everything and everyone, illustrated with an earthquake that hits Japan. This is a difficult book to capture in a review, to which the only answer is to read it and experience it for yourself! A beautiful and thought provoking coming of age novel that raises important questions and perspectives that asks us to look at the world anew, inviting us to perceive the impermanence of form and the empty nature of all things, it made for a joyous read, and a book which I think many readers will love. Highly recommended. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

This was such an interesting read it was both heart-warming and compassionate at the same time as being heart-breaking and dark. It was well written with a powerful prose that at times was almost lyrical, a good storyline and well developed charcaters that made me feel so many emotions along the reading journey. I cannot even describe how good this book is or how it made me feel. I really enjoyed it.