my memorable books
JunHee Kim
My Memorable Books
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My Memorable Books VOLUME II
Junhee kiM v
To my family and friends
All photos were taken by JunHee Kim
My Memorable Books Copyright Š Text and design 2020 by JunHee Kim All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact JunHee Kim 8220 Crestwood Heights Dr McLean, Virginia 22102
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Table of Contents
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What I Know for Sure by Oprah Winfrey
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The Power of Meaning by Emily Esfahani Smith
10 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson 13 Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis 16 The Scapegoat by RenĂŠ Girard
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What I Know for Sure by Oprah Winfrey As I was reading, I felt like the book was written exactly for me. I felt so grateful to the author that I wanted to treat her to a nice dinner. As the saying goes, we’d eventually meet those whom we’ve supposed to meet. It’s Oprah Winfrey. It’s called What I Know for Sure. As I was halfway through it, I couldn’t help noticing her beautiful writing style. I want to give this book to all those who work as hard as they can, but still have a hundred questions to ask about it all, without anyone to ask them to. Let’s say that we have a question up here. We need to go deep down to get an answer. It takes a lot of time and painful work. If someone else goes down into the depth for us and brings us all the answers how wonderful it would be. This book exactly does that. I was deeply touched while I was reading. Oprah went down on my behalf with all the questions that I’ve had for so long. Also, Oprah mentioned in the book that she often cries when she listens to a song called I Hope You Dance. 1
“When you’re standing at the crossroads in your life, When you get the choice to sit it out or dance I hope you dance I hope you dance with confidence That’s the path you’ve to choose” I felt encouraged greatly welling up in me and understood what Oprah felt. I felt like I could overcome any obstacles and burst into tears. The book is filled with her own life story. In spite of all the difficulties and challenges in her life, she didn’t give up and grew only stronger. She started making money when she was still in her teens. She began her career in broadcasting and dreamed of becoming a good influence on others. She was determined to begin each day with courage and joy, wiping her tears away and fought against the journal every 2
single night when she got back home. I think that’s the source of her inspiration and insights. What I learned for sure from this book was that holding the shame was the greatest burden of all. When we have nothing to be ashamed of, when we know who we are and what we stand for, we stand in wisdom. Oprah tells us a deep truth in the book. As long as we avoid the shame, it will keep you down and make you scared all the time. As soon as we stop running from it and confront it, healing will begin right there. Even if we couldn’t take courage to bring it up ourselves and someone else exposed it with malicious intentions, we still have a choice: to crawl into the bigger shame or get healed. What we choose at that moment reveals how strong we are. That’s when we need real courage. It must’ve been scary for Oprah to face the crisis, but she went it through with deep and spiritual strength. Also, this book introduces how to love ourselves. 3
What I know for sure is that a lack of intimacy is not distance from someone else. It is disregard for myself. We’re one choice away from seeing ourselves as someone whose life has inherent significance so choose to see it that way. We don’t have to spend one more second focusing on a past deprived of affirmation. We should have gotten it from our parents. At that moment, I stopped reading and shed tears. We may think we’ve only run toward our goals, but we also have made many holes along the way. Eventually, they’ll trip us up, and we’ll ask ourselves. “Why on earth am I here?” We inevitably end up making holes in our lives. For Oprah, she used journaling as her way of filling up her own holes. It’s to write a journal. As we set a time apart to keep a journal and look inside ourselves. Oprah kept a gratitude journal for a full decade without fail. If we can add the gratitude part to our journal, it’ll get even better.
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The Power of Meaning by Emily Esfahani Smith It’s such a huge topic. Who am I? How should I live about? After reading the preface of the book, I thought this book is worth reading. I was drawn to this book because of the questions. “I strive so hard, why am not getting any happier?” “Pursuing happiness actually makes people miserable” A happy life is different from a meaningful life. There’s a greater value than happiness. Should we be happy? However, I couldn’t stand against the word “happiness” and answer the questions. The question I never been able to answer for a long time is that the author answers it for me. The book persuades the readers gently and theoretically, but sometimes it’s very determined. There’s a more precious value than happiness. What is that? It’s a meaningful life. The book says, happiness is one of precious values. It’s an emotion. Like when we get sad, depressed, hurt, stressed, and angry, happiness is just a feeling. So that’s why the happiness index does not actually represent people’s actual happiness. They check emotion. That’s why we have so many emotions we don’t feel like 5
that. While I live a meaningful life, I got to experience pain, sadness, stress and many other feelings including happiness. If we determine something within the frame “Am I happy?” there’s a huge possibility that we might make a bad choice. Someone determined everything within a frame of happiness and tried to pursue the answer of life. Someone started to live a life of someone’s own. Someone started to filter everything that doesn’t fit in the frame of happiness. After that, someone only had himself pursuing happiness. Living like that for a while, he couldn’t live an emptier life than that. Filtering everything out to be happy, he lost the meaning for life. In this book, pursuing only happiness is considered as selfish. In other words, those who pursue happiness want to be takers than 6
givers. According to the researchers, happy but meaningless lives show traits of relatively superficial, self-centered, and selfish life. They avoid difficult and challenging things. In contrast, meaningful life makes the people into givers and they intervene into and contribute to things they are not related to. Thus, meaning and happiness may contradict each other. Meanings can lead to more profound happiness in the future. There are four ways of how to make sturdy columns. The first is connectedness. In the situation where a person is exchanging meaningful emotions with another person, people firmly lay the foundation of why they live. Even though we are well off but have a strong self-will, at some point there is a high possibility that we will lose the meaning of our life. The second is the purpose. Living with a purpose is like having a lighthouse. It means that 7
we should make a purpose well when we are working, the thing that devalues our meaning and drag us down is our wrong attitude toward purpose. The third is reconstructing myself through storytelling. Storytelling is editing our story positively and telling it in front of others. All people have miserable and difficult happenings in their lives. If we tell those stories to others through positive editing. What would you receive from them? A positive feedback comes back. Then what would happen if that positive story and feedback come together? It 8
becomes my past and I can build a foundation and stand on top of it as a solid person with meaning and purpose. The last fourth column is transcendence. It’s about changing perspective. When astronauts leave the Earth, the Earth becomes this small. What could they feel overlooking the Earth? They feel humble. We get generous. This is the experience called transcendence. This book is suggesting to go with nature. If we go closer to nature, human beings will be more generous and modest. That is small but simple, be myself with meaning. Living by my own terms. That’s a good life. 9
12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson I don’t like to read self-improvement books. Rather than being sincere advice for those in hard times, they tend to instigate people with sadness, wrap it in a wrapper called ‘healing.’ The speaker acts like he or she doesn’t have any greed for money, which made me think they are hypocrites. After all they make their statements, and they don’t have enough explanations as to why we have to listen to their advice. Jordan Peterson was different. He admits to having greed for money, he earned his money confidently and he tried to convince people why they have to follow what he says. This book has mostly some stories we might’ve heard from other books or advice from someone we know. His way of putting it was different. He didn’t try to induce a fake impression or so like others. He drily suggests clinical test results, statistics, philosophy as his reason and with that he’s persuading the readers, which I liked very much. I had several parts hard to understand, and that made me read 10
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the same part over and over again. The core assertion he’s trying to make is “Admit that life is pain, and try to accept it wisely.” I’ve had a very low self-esteem. Now I’ve got way better. There were times I used to be terribly disgusted by me. Not that my foolish aspects made me hate myself but it was the lack of the will to fix the problems. I had deeply resented myself who didn’t try at all. Many stories like mine are shown in this book as well. Honestly, some sentences hit me hard. I almost thought this book was written for me. I mean there were so many convenient truths I had to face. I realized I still got a longer way to go. So, I made up my mind to put it into action. In fact, it’s almost impossible to change myself all in once. Step by step, I decided to start with the easiest one among 12 laws. The law is “Before you blame the world, clean your room first.”
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Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis Mere Christianity was written by C. S. Lewis in Great Britain during World War II. The book consists of a series of relatively short, easily digested, lectures written in which Lewis carefully develops his argument for Christianity. He is an intellectual and not a member of the clergy. The approach is non denominational. He has a way of conveying ideas that I can say understand. A good example is his explanation of Pantheism in Book 2, Chapter 1. I have read about Pantheism but it never seems to sink in Lewis gives a very elementary description that really helped me, without seeming pedantic. Then in the next chapter, titled “The Invasion,” He does the same thing with the concept “Dualism”. I feel as though I am receiving gentle instruction, not being pounded over the head. Similarly, in Book 3, Chapter 2, he gives a very lucid explanation of the Cardinal Virtues. In Book 3, Chapter 7, there is a presentation on Forgiveness that I found very helpful, Chapter 8 is one of the best 13
discourses about Pride that I have ever read. Chapter 9 is an explanation on the concept of Christian charity and is excellent. There is also an explanation that something happens to us if we actually act out in a hateful manner toward someone else, there is an actual effect on ourselves. This book has a conservative viewpoint. He defends certain ideas that are not now popular in society. He also talks about other issues discussed in scripture such as the lending of money with interest. He states he is not sure of where that leaves us in regard to a modern economic system. I have, heretofore, contemplated all of that
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myself at one time or another and have been left in the same state of uncertainty. I also felt that when I read this book carefully I constantly came across examples of real life that I have encountered. Issues about justice, honesty, respect, fairness, and situational ethics that he describes occur all the time. The book helps me understand what it means to attempt to be a Christian and act in a Christian manner, and why it is difficult. While I was reading, I could get through the status of my faith and completely enjoy it.
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The Scapegoat by René Girard This book is extraordinary. I could not put it down. I have been reading the Bible for a long time. I thought I knew it well. I had to go over and over each sentence to understand what he meant. It was worth it. By the end of the book I had a new appreciation for the Christian faith and the way the Gospels have influenced Western civilization without people realizing it. I liked the fact he brought new meaning to old familiar truths. Also, I enjoyed having to keep a dictionary ready at hand to look up words I wasn’t familiar with. This is a book I will return to over again for many years to come. Rene Girard’s treatise on the process of scapegoat is fascinating. He traces the roots of scapegoat to ancient human history. After reading and studying his thesis I have a fresh vision of the commonality of scapegoat in everyday human interactions from politics to race relations. Unfortunately, even those who acknowledge this human tendency are blind to the power of the scapegoat mechanism in themselves but can easily see it in others. 16
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A long time ago, I thought about the violence of God in the Old Testament. The book solved my perspectives about the violence of God. I found his explanation of Satan being divided against himself to be revolutionary as well for how Satan has used violence to cast himself out, and thus, solidify his own power in the world. This book explains in great detail the aspect of Girard’s mimetic theory which causes mimetic violence to break out toward an innocent victim, referred to as the Scapegoat. Girard shows how collective persecution and what he called the mimetic theory of desire are related to Christianity and the ground shattering event - Jesus’ death and resurrection. This is a must read for historians, anthropologists, theologians, and any lay person who wants to better understand Christianity’s importance to the world.
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