To be honest, I had no idea what The Face: A Time Code was about when I started it. Knowing the author to be Ruth Ozeki was enough to get me excited. But in case you need some more information, The Face is about an experiment, where the author decided to stare at her own face for three hours straight and record the thoughts that came up during that time. I absolutely adored it, as I feel like I got to know my favorite author in a personal way and now I also see her novels in a whole new light. In addition to the personal memories of her childhood and such, the text is just full on insight.

"Although lacking the brocade and elements of ancient sacred ritual, a novel can be a kind of mirror room, too. It, too, is a liminal space, silent, bound by certain rituals and full of magic. The writer enters and seats herself in front of her reflection in the mirror. She collects herself and focuses her attention, and then she picks up a mask. She gazes at it and positions it on her face, and at that moment she is transformed into the protagonist of her story, looking out through its eyes at her reflection in the mirror, made strange by the face of another. It’s a complex sensation, impossible to describe exactly, but, oh, such lingering sweetness!
Then, because the world of novels is an endless hall of mirrors, that moment of transformation of writer into character is echoed by the reader when he or she opens the book and enters the mirror room, dons the mask, and becomes the character, too. This is why we read novels, after all, to see our reflections transformed, to enter another’s subjectivity, to wear another’s face, to live inside another’s skin.”