Top 5 books to read when you want to feel something

I love to read. Often, I've forgotten how much I love to read. However, I have found that it is something that I continuously can come back to without judgment as the years pass by.

When I think back to all the words that I have read over many years, I have probably hit about every genre, length, and type of book at this point. Yet, each one has resonated with me differently, depending on what point I am at in my life. SO...I give you some of my favorites that have one commonality.

Each of these books made me cry. Each of these books made me a better person than I was before I read it. And each of these books made me want to read even more.

Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

I read this book this time last year, and I loved it. I was a little late to the party on this one. My high school librarian, who I still keep in touch with, recommended it to me, and I kept it on my list for quite a while before I got to it. I will be honest when I say that I found it slow first, but once I was in, I was all in.

This is the story of Kya Clark, who is known to most as the Marsh girl. She lives in a marsh, outside of town, and the locals judge her by her isolated lifestyle and unconventional living. However, there are a selected few who show her kindness, friendship, and even love.

But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the sand's gulls and lessons. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life – until the unthinkable happens.

As a young woman myself, I found the messages of this story palpable. Although we often feel alone, I saw through reading this that the ideas of isolation and loneliness are two separate entities that can be felt singularly or in unison. I admired Kya, and her character can evoke a sense of emotion that is not quickly done in many books these days. Your heart will hurt, and then it will break. But then, you'll find by the time you close the book it has been put back together.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

I just recently finished this book after I received it as my Book of the Month for June. It took me a while to get to, and in turn, get in to. But the message behind it all was important and prompt given the part of the world that is surrounding us that deserves attention the most must not vanish. This novel is powerful and riveting and something everyone must hear.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults; it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the twins' fates remain intertwined. The two sisters' plotlines of life intersect many years later when their daughters, products of their own opposite worlds, find themselves face to face.

In the age of the Black Lives Matters movement, I read this book intending to finish it more educated than I was before. It appealed to me in several ways, one being that my sister and I have taken very different paths in life ourselves. Not nearly as complex as the Vignes sisters, but enough to form some sense of empathy.

This story conveyed a strong message about remembering and honoring who we are, no matter where life has brought us in regard to that fact. There is a certain amount of our life that is in our control. But at the end of it all, the DNA that is expressed throughout our body is unchangeable.

Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

This book. This friggin book. I do not know how to describe the process of reading this book but the utter definition of an emotional roller coaster. Whenever people ask for recommendations, this is always one of the first ones I give. I read this a couple of summers ago, and it has remained towards the top of my list ever since. Small Great Things falls into a group of books that I hold near and dear to my heart. These are the books that have been read on the dock at the lake that I grew up on. I have read many books on this dock, and I make it a point to save a couple just for this special spot each summer.

Ruth Jefferson is a labor and delivery nurse at a Connecticut hospital with over twenty years of experience. During one of her shifts, Ruth begins a routine checkup on a newborn, only to

be told a few minutes later that she's been reassigned to another patient. The parents are white supremacists and don't want Ruth, an African American, to touch their child. The hospital complies with their request, but the next day, the baby goes into cardiac distress while Ruth is alone in the nursery. Does she obey orders, or does she intervene?

Ruth hesitates, before performing CPR and, as a result, is charged with a serious crime. Kennedy McQuarrie, a white public defender, takes her case but gives unexpected advice: Kennedy insists that mentioning race in the courtroom is not a winning strategy. Conflicted by Kennedy's counsel, Ruth tries to keep life as healthy as possible for her family — especially her teenage son — as the case becomes a media sensation. As the trial moves forward, Ruth and Kennedy must gain each other's trust, and come to see that what they've been taught their whole lives about others — and themselves— might be wrong.

The novel follows these two strong women, one who is weathered in her career and the other just beginning. The book follows the story through their own eyes and words and highlights the point of view of the nearly impossible white supremacist father of the deceased newborn. The three overwhelmingly contrary views take us through this story filled with race, privilege, prejudice, justice, and compassion.

I honestly could not put this down. To hear the same experience through such different eyes allowed me to gain a new understanding of how differently people can feel about the one singular thing. Also, it taught me that nothing is ever quite what it seems.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

My favorite. Ever. Top of my list always. My copy has made its trip to many of my friends, and I still hand it over eagerly because everyone deserves to read this book. I don't think that I can adequately put into words how much I love this book and how much it means to me. Once again, it was one of those prized dock reads. I am telling you there is some good juju or something. The scene is set in 1939 France.

In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn't believe that the Nazis will invade France…but the inevitable occurs, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne's home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive.

Vianne's sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can…completely. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance and never looks back, risking her life, time and again, to save others.

This book must have hit me at an emotional time because it has resonated with me ever since. As I said earlier, it is always the first book I take off my shelf when one of my friends asks what next to read. It taught me that at the root of everything is love because it is the one thing that is truly unbreakable. And the next closest thing, to be a powerful young woman, is to be the most dangerous threat in the world.

When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

I have been moved often while reading. However, I have found that I am affected most when reading unequivocal words of truth. A few years ago, I read this piece for my freshman humanities class in college to use for my final paper. My Papa had just passed away, and it was my first experience with losing someone close to me. I feel like when everyone goes through this unavoidable experience, it is guaranteed that they begin to evaluate what all of this means. How do we live, and more importantly, keep on living when we know that we are dying?

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, and the next, he was a patient struggling to live. And just like that, the future he and his wife had imagined evaporated. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a naïve medical student "possessed," as he wrote, "by the question of what, given that all organisms die, makes a virtuous and meaningful life" into a neurosurgeon at Stanford working in the brain, the most critical place for human identity, and finally into a patient and new father confronting his own mortality.

Paul Kalanithi died in March 2015, while working on this book, yet his words live on as a guide and a gift to us all. "I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed nothing and everything," he wrote. "Seven words from Samuel Beckett began to repeat in my head: 'I can't go on. I'll go on.'"

I visibly remember finishing this book in the back seat of the car driving to the panhandle for spring break my freshman year, sobbing like ugly tears. There is something eerie about a dead man's words feeling so alive. I suppose that is how Dr. Kalanithi keeps living, though, through his feelings and experiences he so eloquently put on paper. This book taught me that although it is crucial to look towards the future, it is equally, if not more important, to look thoroughly at the present.

So, in closing, keep reading and keep learning. Most importantly, when you feel empty, pick up a book. You'd be surprised how many feelings you can find on those pages.