Today is the twenty-second day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I will be writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "a book that makes you cry".
Hello everyone and welcome back to another post that I am desperately trying to bang out before we get to midnight and it officially becomes late (again). I'm mentioning this partially so that you'll forgive the poor, rushed, and probably typo-filled state of this post, but also so that if you think it's even marginally good then you can think to yourself, "wow, considering she wrote this in such a small amount of time, this isn't completely terrible". And thus, by setting the bar incredibly low, I can manage to preserve a sense of achievement without ever really accomplishing anything. It's the perfect plan.
It's just a little unfortunate that today's prompt is 'a book that makes you cry', given that emotional weight doesn't generally go that well with shoddy and self-deprecating writing, but these are the cards we have been dealt. So, let's see what we have to work with.
The book that I have chosen for today's post is Sky Burial, by Xinran.
I'm rushing and don't have time for a segue, so: I now present to you *drum roll*…. a [redacted] summary!
As a young girl in China Xinran heard a rumour about a soldier in Tibet who had been brutally fed to the vultures in a ritual known as a sky burial: the tale frightened and fascinated her. Several decades later Xinran met Shu Wen, a Chinese woman who had spent years searching for her missing husband who had been serving as a doctor in Tibet; her extraordinary life story would unravel the legend of the sky burial. For thirty years she was lost in the wild and alien landscape of Tibet, in the vast and silent plateaus and the magisterial mountain ranges, living with communities of nomads moving with the seasons and struggling to survive.
Hopefully the additional length of that summary will do something to make up for how brief I'm going to make this post - which I do feel a little bad about, given how I genuinely love and care about this book, but I'm just going to push that emotion to the back of my mind while I write this.
First of all, I'd like to mention that I'm not entirely sure if Sky Burial is a true story or not. I've seen it variously classed as fiction or non-fiction, and I can't tell if the way it's presented as being told to the author by Shu Wen herself is based on Xinran's real life or if it's just a framing device of the "this story was once told to me" sort that some authors use. If it is 100% true, I'll feel terrible for doubting it, but I felt I had to mention that I'm honestly not sure about it here.
So, as you can see from the summary above, Sky Burial is an epic story about a woman who sets off into Tibet to find her missing husband. The book spans decades, although its physical length (less than 200 pages) warps the passage of time so that it can come as a shock when we suddenly realise, when reading, that years have passed when it felt like only a few days. Sky Burial's emotional weight works in much the same way - it builds up slowly, then suddenly hits you all at once. The power of the story is likewise not in flowery prose, but in the simple poignancy of the events it depicts.
Unfortunately, I can tell you very little about these events, as to do so would be to spoil the book. This is especially true as the part that I find most emotional and the most tear-inducing is right at the conclusion of the book. I won't tell you what happens, and I would encourage you not to look it up either, as it might deprive you of some of the emotional shock of discovering it organically through reading the book. I will say that the ending is shocking, tragic, and yet somehow also beautiful. It is this part of Sky Burial which reduced me to tears, and which has earned it its place in this post.
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