Bookseller and psychotherapist Max Arambulo recommends three books about healing to read in 2024
Originally aired Dec. 29, 2023.
Max Arambulo has had a long career in books. He worked in publishing for many years until he left to become a psychotherapist with a specialty in spiritual care.
These days he combines his psychotherapy practice with his work as a bookseller and manager at independent bookstore Type Books in Toronto.
As we enter into the new year, the Toronto-based Arambulo spoke with The Next Chapter's Ali Hassan to review three books that focus on healing and renewal in the face of life struggles.
One Native Life by Richard Wagamese
"Wagamese was an Ojibway author who died in 2017. This is his memoir in vignettes throughout his life. The book explores how Wagamese uses his Ojibway culture to deal with various challenges in his life to move forward and as a way to navigate through the world.
It starts off when he's a six-year-old in foster care in Canada, goes to his teens when he was not living in a home, when he was unhoused, sort of living on the streets, living in his car, and doing a lot of manual labour.
The book explores how Wagamese uses his Ojibway culture to deal with various challenges in his life to move forward and as a way to navigate through the world.- Max Arambulo on One Native Life by Richard Wagamese
"There's one line in the book where he says something to the effect of: 'One good thing about living long enough is that you get to see yourself in different lights — and you get to smile and laugh wistfully at the people who touched you.'
"The lights I personally see myself in the past are not so smiley or laughing yet, but the way he writes about really hard things in his life gives me hope of how I might want to sound in 10 years."
Stay True by Hua Hsu
"I've been a fan of Hua Hsu's writing in The New Yorker. I loved reading how he went from this sort of snide pop culture kid writing about music in this annoying, cool way, to becoming this writer who writes like every piece means something and matters.
"Stay True covers Hua Hsu's life from when he was a teenager, as the son of Taiwanese immigrants in California. It moves through to his college years, where he's creating music zines, writing music reviews and trying to find identity through pop culture.
Culture can help you heal — and help you celebrate and feel closer to who you are.- Max Arambulo on Stay True by Hua Hsu
"It's in college where he meets a Japanese American named Ken. They are both Asian, but very different. Hua described himself as sort of a cool hipster and Ken sort of being this more straightforward preppy type of person — but they connect very deeply [through culture and music].
"But after about a year and a half of friendship, Ken is killed in a random incident. So a lot of the book is trying to work through the grief.
"The book explores how [shared] culture seems to be the stuff, the energy … that will stick with you when you need it the most. Culture can help you heal — and help you celebrate and feel closer to who you are."
Tremor by Teju Cole
"Teju Cole wrote [the award-winning novel] Open City about 10 years ago. He's a American professor, he's a photographer, he's an artist. And Tremor has a character named Tunde at the centre of it, who is also a person of Nigerian descent and a photography professor.
"This book follows his life. It opens with him at an antique store in the States and finding an African item. And the first few pages are him wondering: How does an African antique item arrive to the States? What does it mean? What's the history of it?
What if we met the version of ourselves who didn't leave where we were from?- Max Arambulo on Tremor by Teju Cole
"It's a very meandering book. Maybe the connections don't make total sense right in the moment, but the connections pile up and aggregate to mean something. The main character, Tunde, goes to Mali. There, he dances, listens to music. He reflects on friendships that he had in the past. He wonders about his current relationship with his wife.
"One thing that the book does a lot, though, is it talks about who we might have been if we had stayed in our ancestral lands.
"When Tunde travels to France and encounters some African men outside the Louvre — maybe it doesn't explicitly wonder, but I wondered — does he think that could have been him, or what made him different from those people? I think that's what the book might be about, for me at least: What if we met the version of ourselves who didn't leave where we were from?
"Cole writes about experiencing the African rhythms in Mali and feeling like the 'normal' life he lives now might be good for his intellect, but maybe not the best for his spirit."
Max Arambulo's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
