Coming to the end of 2025, most readers begin sharing their reading recaps and the books that lighted up their year. As I scrolled through Twitter, I noticed several people mentioning To Rest Our Minds and Bodies. My curiosity was sparked, and I decided to pick it up. This review is a reflection of that choice, one I’m genuinely glad I made because how great this book is.
To Rest Our Minds and Bodies tells the story of a final-year university student and captures the typical dilemmas, fleeting moments, and thoughts that often define this phase of life. It beautifully explores the life of university years: the strange mix of independence and uncertainty, and the somewhat illusory freedom that comes with studying.
The main narrative is driven by the narrator’s friendship with Luke. Shortly after they meet, Luke breaks up with his girlfriend, and the two grow close. To him, their bond is platonic: deep, but firmly friendly. To the narrator, however, things feel very different. She begins to want more from the relationship, and those feelings slowly grow into something intense, almost obsessive.
Maybe some of you get the impression that the storyline is the typical teenage novel stories that easily slip into awkwardness or second-hand embarrassment. But not this book. Instead of feeling cringe, it captures this phase of life beautifully. It gives language to emotions that are often left unnamed, especially during the final year of university, when everything feels temporary, fragile, and overwhelming all at once.
Some readers might find the pacing relatively fast, but for me, it felt perfectly balanced. What I admire most is how, even at this pace, the writing never feels shallow. The words are more than enough to fully express the narrator’s point of view: her longing, confusion, and emotional intensity come through clearly and convincingly.
This main storyline of this book reminded me of the teenage novels I used to read and love when I was younger. Yet the way it’s presented feels much more mature, closer to the kind of fiction I’ve been drawn to in recent years. That blend made the reading experience feel both nostalgic and deeply satisfying, especially when viewed through the lens of my personal reading journey.
I admire To Rest Our Minds and Bodies because, while its storyline might resemble popular teen fiction on the surface, there is so much more happening between the lines. Subtle observations and quietly powerful sentences make it understandable to a wider audience. I found myself highlighting several lines along the way, some of which I’ll be sharing below, because they lingered with me long after I finished the book.
My Favorite Bits
- I was grateful of course but it did worry me: was the fact that nothing bad ever happened to me linked with the fact that nothing happened to me at all. Somehow through existing
- My value was so far from all the others that the old man said we could infer that the person who produced it wasn’t trying at all, they weren’t taking the activity seriously. This really depressed me. I would drown so easily.
- I really hated the literary society but somehow I stayed hopeful, I was still so full of hope for the literary society, I kept feeling that one day I might learn to love that society and really flourish in it. I kept feeling all the time that something might change and open up and I would suddenly become a part of things and really let go in the literary society and bring something great to the table.
- I did very badly want to know what things fundamentally meant. I still felt that everything around me had some hidden core, I felt that the most important and central meanings were concealed and had to be effortfully unearthed. I really couldn’t wait for all those meanings to be revealed to me, I would do anything to have all of those meanings revealed.
- All my life I had assumed, in some unconscious way, that truly overwhelming emotion was false, that it was some person’s false invented category, some false construct like femininity or borders or like the specific layout of a particular city or the random tastes which were supposed to be found inside some wine. I had spent my life believing that emotions were the products of cerebral meta-narratives people constructed about their lives, a means of fabricating meaning and elevating life to a more human or more noble level. But here it was, true devastation, and it had nothing to do with meaning or narrative.
- The woman who made my coffee told me that her name was Seda which meant Echo and I didn’t even tell her my name, I just said Your name is beautiful and I really did mean that, I loved that name and the things that it meant, some echo endlessly bouncing between mountains somewhere, leaping from one thing to another without dying, without being lost at all.
- One night I went for a walk outside the libraries and lecture halls, very modern library and lecture hall buildings which really looked beautiful in the dark like that and so majestic, all those glass buildings towering above me. I felt as if I was drunk or as if I was inside some movie looking up at all those buildings in the dark. I was surrounded, suddenly, by large and powerful things, and I felt that those things would hold me. That was really how it felt, that night.
- I went to a lecture on embodied cognition. Embodied cognition turned out to be the way in which our bodily experience impacts our thoughts. (…) The embodied cognition lecture was very discouraging to me. It pretended to be about human thought being enriched by embodiment but all it really said was that having a body makes our thought completely biased and stupid. Obviously the body was something very limiting, it wasn’t in any way enhancing. I knew this fact already but I didn’t want it to be pedagogically drilled into me, I didn’t want to have to write an essay about the great tragedy of having a body.
- Nothing is final, nothing is ever destroyed, I didn’t know where I was pulling these ideas from or if I really meant anything I was saying but in that moment it did feel true: nothing could die, everything would live on forever in some possible future and each future was real.
- There were ideas like abominableness and holiness hidden within everything, even things that seemed like nothing. In the end everything would be weighed down with meaning. People would look back and see that they had missed the point completely, that they had really understood nothing.
- There was pain but I didn’t care at all, there were so many things so much more important than pain.
- I was surrounded by so many unsolvable problems that I couldn’t think at all, I couldn’t arrange anything into any kind of pattern or structure. That had always been something I was good at: finding patterns and creating structure. Suddenly life had lost its shape, events had no coherence. (…) I would never be able to talk or even write about it, everyone would criticise what I wrote, they would find it so incoherent and so stupid, just endless random things happening on and on forever without bringing anyone closer to anything. Neither art nor science could save me, there was no meaning to things and no truth either. That was some terrible place to be, that place with no meaning and no truth.
- Anxiety was a state of excitement, or there was the potential for excitement within it: anxiety was uncertainty. I wasn’t uncertain at all, I knew exactly what was coming. The fact that my body thought there was some reason to be hopeful made me even more depressed.
- I was always annoyed with myself for simplifying my thoughts into some neat actionable conclusion. Any plausible solution was very far beside the point, and very trite.
Author: Harriet Armstrong
Publication date: 1 January 2025
Number of pages: 254 pages
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