Even more library books!!!
Dec. 9th, 2023 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chocochipbiscuitBooks (Fiction)
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin - Sam and Sadie are childhood friends and partners in game design, during the highs and lows of their relationship and creative process. It’s about different types of love and relationships, including the joy and vulnerability of connecting with others, especially through games. (Dare I call it a ‘literary gamer novel’?)
I feel like I’m terrible at summarizing this novel because I just loved it so much, it emotionally carried me through. It’s playful and creative, going nonlinearly through memory and history and the different worlds they design, including one Very Big Tone Shift halfway through in the aftermath of tragedy, and it’s just! It’s incredibly good, the characters are richly detailed and flawed and slamming their hands on their own self-destruct button in places but I couldn’t help rooting for them. There’s only one character I truly hated, but it’s ‘hated’ in the sense that he was incredibly well-crafted as a character to be hated, but also moved the plot and the emotional fallout is important to the development of other characters I like much more!
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang - I absolutely devoured this book, but don’t actually recommend it!
Nutshell summary: An emotionally brittle, self-described ‘basic white girl’ who envies a Chinese-American literary darling and former classmate is the only one present at the more famous woman’s death. She calls the cops, then steals the dead woman’s new unpublished manuscript and revises it before passing it off as her own work. It’s about literary yellowface (duh) and appropriation and…. Honestly feels much more like an entire novel as literary clickbait than anything more substantive. Like it was deliberately provocative rather than actually incisive about its critiques of publishing as a whole or systemic racism, and part of that was because by choosing a very flawed and biased POV character for an entirely first-person novel, we're limited by the limits of that character too.
That said…there were definitely moments I ugly-laughed in recognition of topics being discussed, but it’s also incredibly frustrating. R.F. Kuang is a Chinese-American author writing a bitter white woman’s POV about intracommunity issues she learns about through her dead frenemy and from Google. Asian MRAs, the gripe about ‘yes, the white kids made fun of your lunch, but do you have anything more interesting to share about racism in your personal life?’, the expectations (and emotional burdens) of marginalized ‘successes’ to mentor others, what types of ‘diversity’ are seen as more palatable…the list goes on, but I found myself ugly-laughing in recognition rather than because the book had anything interesting to say about them. And a lot of it (admittedly filtered through the unreliable narrator) is especially frustrating because it frames racism as a series of just ‘wah, people are mean to me’ events rather than anything broader.
And then it went pretty off the rails with the ending too, so. Eh.
I have a strong feeling that this book will date itself relatively quickly, since so much of the drama and topics hinge upon social media.
The Stand-In by Lily Chu - Fabulous Chinese-Canadian romcom goodness! Gracie Reed’s just been fired by her gross and handsy boss, but a mysterious SUV shows up…with Chinese cinema’s hottest couple, Wei Fangli and Sam Yao. Gracie Reed and Wei Fangli’s uncanny resemblance means the actress wants to hire her as a stand-in! And with the money they’re offering, Gracie might actually be able to afford moving her mom into the nursing home of their dreams!
Of course, there’s tension between Gracie and Sam…and more reasons that Fangli desperately needs Gracie’s help. It’s incredibly sweet and charming and yes, many tropes are incredibly obvious (oh no, why do Gracie and Fangli look so alike? Hm, just how is Sam both so infuriating and attractive?) but it’s a warm cozy bubblebath of feels and very satisfying. I loved it, and really appreciate more romances featuring characters across the Asian diaspora, especially with Gracie being biracial and feeling annoyed at having to justify herself as being no less Asian than Sam, and with the characters discussing mental health.
The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji - So! I told a friend that I wanted to read more mystery novels and more translated works. He went “I gotchu!”
This is a translation of a Japanese novel written in 1987, in which seven students who belong to the same university mystery club travel to a deserted island for a week-long retreat. This island is also the site of several unsolved murders: six months earlier, the owner was killed, along with his wife and housekeeper. Soon after the students’ arrival, they realize that someone—possibly one of their own—is trying to kill them.
Back on the mainland, a former member of the mystery club receives a letter saying that the death of a girl who died at a club party was actually murder. And the girl just happened to be the daughter of the killed island owner. When he starts investigating, he realizes that he wasn’t the only one to receive this letter.
…and it’s hard to say more about mystery novels without spoiling the beats, but this was a lot of fun! It’s set up like a locked room mystery at first, but it plays with the form by alternating chapters between the island and the mainland, and I found the use of the novel’s literary conventions made for a fun twist that would be very difficult to capture in another medium!
The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter - This book was weird and delicious! It’s a futuristic dystopia following two women: one an aspiring chef who escapes from a religious community that centers around abstaining from food, another a would-be artist who follows a tech scholarship to the big city until her funding gets pulled, so turns to a life of crime. Each of them are searching for freedom in their own way, in a society that is both extremely sexually open and incredibly repressive around food, both in different ways controlling women’s bodies and sexualities.
Idk man. I really liked it but feel like I would need a second read to fully chew on it more. It’s also extremely casually queer and it struck me as interesting in how in a world where being gay, bi, pan, or polyamorous isn’t seen as worthy of comment, one of the few characters who expresses no sexual interest is a source of consternation for the (admittedly infatuated) young chef.
Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo - This book!!! I wish I could have read this when I was a teenager. I’m still glad I read this now.
Nutshell summary: This is a Chinese-American lesbian coming of age story, set in 1950s San Francisco. Lily Hu is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, living through the Red Scare and coming to terms with her own sexuality. It’s a love story (there is so much love!) but not a romance, in the sense that it’s a story about love but doesn’t follow traditional romantic beats, and it also includes so much warmth and texture and the Chinese-American community living in Chinatown and the city and has chapters going through other members of the family and the generational traumas and divisions and it’s just!!! I loved it. I loved it. I loved it. It’s rich and immersive and yes, it makes it a bit slower-paced, but I just loved sinking into the weight of time and place.
Yes, it’s hard. There’s racism and homophobia and Lily being a double outsider, both as a gay girl who’s Chinese and as a Chinese girl who’s gay. It’s about living outside the margins and coping with a family who loves but doesn’t understand, and the pressure to conform for respectability’s sake. It’s also beautiful and hopeful and I just. I bought a physical copy of this book because I loved it so much and I want to reread it and cry over it.
Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo - Third novella in the Singing Hills Cycle, but thankfully all the novellas are stand-alone and the order truly doesn't matter! Cleric Chih and their companion, Almost Brilliant, enter the riverlands to collect stories and local history. After a chance encounter with two young women far from home and an older couple who are more than they seem, Chih finds themself more deeply entangled with the legends and history of the riverlands than they ever anticipated.
This summary doesn't truly do it justice. It's short and gorgeous and has some amazing story telling, both for the ripples between fact and legend and how stories shift and change over time, reflecting different truths or faces depending on the teller. Also some amazing martial arts scenes. I also find it hilarious how Chih conveniently forgets to remind people that they're supposed to be vegetarian and eats meat every chance they get outside the monastery!
Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia - Montserrat is a sound editor, often overlooked and as a woman, left out of the boys' club of the '90s Mexican film industry. She's best friends with Tristan, a former soap opera star. Tristan's new neighbor is a cult horror director, who claims that his unfinished "lost film" was actually meant to be a spell fashioned by a Nazi occultist. He claims that the bad luck that's haunted his life is a result of never having finished the film, and convinces Tristan and Montserrat to help him finish the scene.
Obviously, things don't go according to plan. Tristan begins seeing the ghost of his ex-girlfriend, and Montserrat is followed by a dark presence. There's murder, magic, and mystery, and it's chilling fun.
I really enjoyed this for a book that I was tempted to DNF after the first few chapters! Slow start, but once it picks up speed, it moves! I really love the snappy, occasionally vitriolic banter between Montserrat and Tristan, the sort of prickly friendship where no one else can annoy each other quite as much, but also no one else has their back through so much. I love Montserrat (single-minded, dedicated to the point of obsession when trying to understand something, casual disregard of locks or other social niceties) and was surprised by how much I enjoyed Tristan. He starts as an insecure playboy who blithely takes his best friend for granted, but the narrative doesn't expect the reader to like him (...as opposed to some romance novels with the "alphahole" archetype) and he actually gets character development! Go him!
Books (Nonfiction)
The New Guys by Meredith Bagby - A book about ‘the new guys,’ the first class of NASA astronauts that included more than the standard ‘white male ex-military pilot’ type that comprised previous classes! It covers the history and thrill of discovery (isn’t that why we all love astronauts, on some level? That sense of wonder?) but also the deep flaws in the culture, the less-shiny parts of it as it shifted from (essentially) military hoo-rah and swagger to something a little more diverse. Not perfect by any means—there’s plenty of interpersonal chafing, plus the sexism, racism, and general sneering the ex-military types did at the civilians who came from academic backgrounds rather than military—but I found it more interesting for that nuanced look.
I also found it interesting because even though I like reading history, this is much nearer history than I’m used to; it was disquieting to realize that I was reading about certain people as if they were characters in a book, all while knowing their real-world fates, such as the Challenger or Columbia disasters, or an upcoming divorce.
Anyways. I greatly enjoyed this, and highly recommend for anyone interested in this sort of thing.
An Immense World by Ed Yong - A book about animal senses and how they use them to interpret the world around them! This book really made me re-examine every major sense and think about how radically different an animal perceives its world, from how it navigates it environment to how it allows it to adapt or hunt in remarkable conditions.
Just one example: we humans are primarily visual, and vision is immediate and present. When we enter an empty room, we can only guess at who came before us if they left any visual remnants of their passing. A dog who entered that same room could catch lingering odors and know who was in the room, and perhaps have an idea of what they were doing! How does that collapse (or explode) our sense of time and recency? How does that hunting differ from a snake, who uses their excellent sense of smell to find trails and dens for their favored prey and may wait in long ambush for the creature that laid that scent trail to return along that path? And that’s just one example, in a book of many. Which I’m saying because the point isn’t ‘oh wow, animals can do so many cool tricks’ (even though they can!) but it’s about how remarkably alien and wonderful it is that they have so many different modes of sensation and how they inhabit or look at the world around them.
I mean. There are so many other interesting examples (infrasonic communication with elephants! The way that butterflies and bees can see ultraviolet and many flowers have UV patterns that attract them! The many sense of sharks, who use their sense of smell to find blood in the water, sight once they’re closer to prey, and then an electric sense to close in on the kill as they shut their eyes in self-protection when they mash their face up against the target!) but mostly I’m just overwhelmed on practically every page because it makes me consider just how differently these creatures we share our planet with experience this same world.
Each chapter focuses on a different sense, including some I wouldn’t have thought of: smell and taste (linked in the same chapter because they’re both chemically-based senses, and many animals don’t distinguish between them!), light (part of vision!), color (also part of vision, but…well, there are so many ways of seeing color!), pain, heat, contact and flow (basically…yes, touch, but a specific type of touch), vibrations, sound, echoes (yes, bats and dolphins are most famous for this! And yes, it’s part of sound, but because they’re so specialized they and some other animals get their own chapter!), electric fields, magnetic fields, and a few more chapters talking about sensory integration and how each sense must be taken together as composite, before discussing how human activity has already changed and continues to threaten the sensecape of other animals.
I am flailing and could yell about a million other things, but this is my favorite science book I’ve read this year.
Memoirs
Eat a Peach by David Chang - A memoir by David Chang, famous chef and founder of Momofuku, and someone whose name I heard a lot in foodie podcasts but didn’t actually know much about! I was mostly drawn in because a) famous Asian-American, and b) the cover image is a man rolling a peach up a hill, much like Sisyphus. (Yes, I picked this up from the library in part because of its cover. All judgment!)This is not a cookbook or ‘how to’ guide to running a business. I was surprised by how raw, candid, and self-deprecatingly funny the author was, as well as his discussions of his bipolar disorder and self-destructive behaviors affected not only him, but the oft-hostile and volatile environments he created, and the way he channeled that suicidal depression into an unhealthily intense work ethic.
Frankly, he was an asshole. And he acknowledges it in many parts of the book, including the fact that by publicly sharing this information, it sounds like an excuse for what he did and the people he hurt.
And while it's not a cookbook or a guide to running a restaurant, this is also a man who clearly loves food and thinking about food, the way food reflects culture and the narratives around 'inauthenticity' vs 'fusion' in the dialogue around cultural appropriation, and how recipes differ within families or generations, the Eurocentrism of traditional food dining. All which are absolute catnip for me.
This book also contains an afternote about how the book’s publication was set in 2020, and how much COVID was going to change the restaurant industry, and the fact that many of the experiences he talks about in the book might very well be considered historical oddities by future readers.
I found this incredibly compelling and not at all what I was expecting when I picked it up, but am glad I read it.
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel - Graphic novel and memoir about Alison Bechdel, famously of “Dykes to Watch Out For,” exploring her fraught personal history and upbringing as she grew up and came out as a lesbian, compared to her closeted gay father and the pain and intensity of that relationship.
Normally graphic novels are quick reads for me. This was not. Both because of the subject matter but also the wordiness of the pages; this is not a detraction, but just something I found interesting compared to other comics and graphic novels I’ve read. It sometimes bordered on prose work with illustrations (sometimes I found myself thinking: how would this read if every caption, every dialogue balloon, every piece of text was simply written out as prose?) but I found it really engaging, just. Emotionally heavy in places and for many reasons.
I feel like it’s something I need to read again to fully ‘get.’ I don’t even know if ‘enjoy’ is quite the right word, but this is something I appreciated. Heavy, occasionally dark humor (example: “Fun” home because they lived in a funeral home, and growing up with a sense of macabre) and thinking about weaving together narratives of personal history in context of queer history and complicated family dynamics.
I feel like I’m dramatically underselling this, just because I don’t have the words at this time to express how I liked it. But this was good. Definitely recommended reading.
Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller - Part memoir, part science history, all fascinating. Lulu Miller has popped up on Radiolab a lot and was how I first heard of this book!
Lulu Miller writes about grief and uncertainty and how upon learning about David Starr Jordan— a taxonomist credited for discovering nearly a fifth of the fish known to humans in his day— and how when his collection of over a thousand specimens was destroyed, he simply picked up the first specimen he could identify and stitched its name to its skin. That willingness to try again in the face of devastation could be viewed as hubris, foolishness, or a model of perseverance. In her course of learning more about David Starr Jordan's life (including his loves, obsessions, belief in eugenics, and possible involvement in a murder!) she shares her own changing understanding of history and how we understand the world.
So maybe fish don't exist. Maybe "fish" as a scientific clade is non-existent. But we still have scaly things swimming around the ocean and we still have a world to explore and discover and maybe that gets us a little closer to understanding ourselves.
Original Work (Short Stories)
So You Want to Kiss Your Nemesis by John Wiswell - 939 words - “Welcome to the Intimate Blade. We find the edge for that special someone in your life. My name is Robin. How can I help you today?”
Umeboshi by Rebecca Nakaba - 3k words - Chain emails, auguries, and disconnection. This is weird and hurty and fucks me up a little.
The Lily and the Horn by Catherynne Valente - War conducted via poisons and antidotes, and two women separated by years and obligation.
I feel like certain patterns in my reading are pretty obvious; I'm always interested in more queer stories of course, but I'm actively trying to read more books written across the Asian diaspora. I love fantasy and science-fiction, but also enjoy historical novels and am trying to broaden my reading genres.
Currently, I'm reading Network Effect by Martha Wells. I feel like I'm one of the few people who doesn't love Murderbot (I just bounced off the short stories and dislike the style. I can recognize the craft in the story, but it's not something I enjoy) so I'm trying the novel instead to see if it works better for me this way.
If you have read or are interested in any of these books, gimme a shout! I love talking books. :D Tell me if you're reading anything interesting too! I can always add to my miles-long TBR pile!
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Date: 2023-12-09 08:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-09 09:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-12-11 02:44 pm (UTC)Oh thank fuck I'm not alone lol. I read the first book after seeing so much praise for it and just could not get into it at all 😠I hope Network Effect is a better read!!
I just recently finished Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. Damn. That was a great book. It took me a while to get into it, but once the characters got out of college, I just couldn't put it down. And omg That One Incident was so well-done 🥺 I read it one morning while drinking tea and it's been a long time since a story moved me to tears holy shit. I just stared out the window for ten minutes, just processing what I read and how the author conveyed it. So damn good!! And so glad to hear your enjoyed it too.
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Date: 2023-12-12 08:23 pm (UTC)Re: Network Effect: I enjoyed the plot and trying to figure out what was happening/going to happen next, but still not my cuppa! At this point I'm glad I can at least say I gave it a shot (both for a novella and for the novel) but it's just not my thing.
YES I WAS IN TEARS FOR THIS TOO!!! Just had to put the book down and sob for a bit! Plus I just thought it was such an interesting choice to move to 2nd person POV because just...narratively it turns him from a 'NPC' (and we can argue about how much the worlds we love to play in are inhabited by NPCs, that I fall in love with NPCs and characters more than clever mechanics or plot twists!) to THE player character, like an interactive novel, but it still follows the doomed narrative and tragedy of it all!!! Absolutely broke my heart.