what i'm reading
Kiran Desai’s book, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, made Barack Obama’s top books of 2025 list, and it’s certainly on mine. Here are two quotes where the protagonists, barely having glimpsed each other, offer their own commentary on loneliness.
Sunny sat still for hours. It wasn’t his heart that hurt, it was his throat, as if his heart were trying to clamber out of his wounded windpipe.
And by evening, he silently wept, noticing that to be abandoned produced a contradictory feeling: a huge emptiness and a tiny trap”
p. 295
This is Sonia. She returned from America because it’s lonely,” said Babita. “It wasn’t simply loneliness,” said, Sonia, understanding that this woman she did not know wanted to embarrass her. “It was all the things I’d have to do alone”
p. 253