Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Face: A Time Code | 2015 | Ruth Ozeki | Buy |
The Face: A Time Code (2015) is a short and somewhat unusual book — part essay, part meditation, part companion text to a film Ozeki made looking at her own face for nine hours as a Zen practice. The writing that emerged from that exercise is characteristically precise, moving between her Japanese and Canadian heritage, her Zen training, and the specific strangeness of studying your own appearance long enough for familiarity to break down.
The book was published by Restless Books as a small-format hardcover and is shorter and more personal than Ozeki’s novels. Readers who know her fiction will recognize the same attention to how identity is constructed through external perception and internal practice, but here the exploration is explicitly autobiographical rather than channeled through fictional characters.
At one book, this is the entirety of Ozeki’s nonfiction output to date. It sits comfortably alongside her novels for readers interested in how her philosophical and personal concerns show up in a more directly self-reflective mode than fiction allows.