Books recs! So many books!

[chocochipbiscuit]

It's been another six months since I've yelled about books! I've been very fortunate that a lot of library books I've been waitlisted for have come in, and it finally got me off my butt to write about them! Or more accurately: to post the thoughts I've already written!

Books (Fiction)

 

The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk - Alternate world Regency (alter-Regency?) fantasy! Women with magic are required to wear marital collars that lock away their gifts, but sorceress Beatrice Clayborn would rather pursue her magical studies than be forced to submit to that control. Unfortunately, her family is in massive debt, and only an advantageous marriage can save their finances. She conspires with another an impulsive luck spirit, another sorcerous ingenue, and (gasp) the very handsome, charming, and fabulously wealthy brother of said ingenue, in order to try to thread that desperate needle so she can save her family while still securing her own freedom.

Magic! Intrigue! Absolute quicksilver sparkle and pacing! This was so much fun, I absolutely devoured it! It’s deliciously melodramatic and tropey…which is a way of saying that yes, it absolutely worked for me because I had fun, but if you’re expecting more subtlety in your villains or for the teenage main characters to take a moment to think before leaping into action, then you might want to take a pass.

(Also, admittedly: I had fun reading it, but had to scratch my head at some of the worldbuilding too because how does having a large society of magicians, many of whom can command impressive powers, not fundamentally change the fabric of society and alter progress? Which might be part of why this works better as an alter-Regency story, because this actually isn’t set on our own world! None of the countries are real, even if they have obvious real-world inspirations!)

 

The Water Outlaws by S.L. Huang - A sprawling queer epic based off the classic Chinese fantasy The Water Margin, featuring heroic (and antiheroic) bandit outlaws breaking the law to create their own form of justice! Also pretty great even if you have no familiarity with the original work, much like me!

Lin Chong’s an expert arms instructor, one of the few women to have achieved that role, and carefully toes the line in order to maintain her hard-won security. Until the Imperial Grand Marshal, a powerful man with a grudge, rips it all away. She’s disgraced, tattooed as a criminal, and ends up recruited by the bandits of Liangshan. The bandits of Liangshan are a diverse group of progressive thinkers and would-be heroes… as well as murderers, thieves, and smugglers. They’re mostly women (including some characters who are trans, fluid, or simply outside the gender binary) and it’s so much fun watching the various characters grow and change over the novel, having to confront their ideals and question their loyalties as they go up against corrupt government officials. The wuxia-inspired fight scenes are absolutely epic, and I love that because there are so many women, they get to have a variety of opinions and backgrounds.

There are a lot of characters (30-something bandits alone!) but I found it absolutely riveting, and the way the author had multiple POV characters across different locations in the book really helped me appreciate the scope of the novel. If anything, my main criticism is that with a cast who all have such widely varying opinions, politics, and relationships to power…it reads strangely imperialist/pro-empire from a modern perspective. Many of the bandits claim that they are true citizens of the empire and still loyal to the Emperor, and are only striking at “corrupt officials” while assuming the Emperor is kept ignorant by those around him. Even though one of our main antagonists is explicitly only as dangerous as he is because he's one of the Emperor's closest friends.

(I also admit there's some nuance to be had with the fact that the Emperor is literally believed to have the mandate of heaven, and in this fantasy setting with magical artifacts and demons, the gods are going to be just as real. And the fact this is based on a much older story might also explain some of the modern dissonance, but… tbh I'm half expecting that if there ever is a sequel, it'll diverge even more from the original text by having the bandits start a revolution or depose the emperor.)

Also!!! Honorable mention to Lu Da, the Flower Monk and ‘Big Guy’ of the group! She’s young, brash, and extremely loyal to her friends and to protecting those in need. She’s described as towering over all the other characters and is twice as broad as any two of them put together. Her arc is about having immense strength but struggling with control, and it’s just! It’s so refreshing to see this sort of character written as a woman. Plus. Uh. I absolutely love Big Dudes, I cannot lie, and it’s just so rare and good to see a Big Lady. :’)

 

Morning Glory Milking Farm by C.M. Nascosta - THIS IS THE MINOTAUR MILKING MONSTERFUCKING ROMANCE BOOK!!!!

…or if you haven’t heard about it already, summary is: 20-something Violet, desperate for a job that can pay off her rising credit card debt, gets a job ‘milking’ minotaur clients for a pharmaceutical company. (Basically, it’s like sperm donation; the minotaurs get paid, the pharmaceutical company uses the ‘product’ to create magical Viagra. It’s treated as a physically intimate job, sort of like masseuse, but not actually sex work). It’s sheer abashed fun as the writer takes a crack smut idea and runs with it, and is surprisingly sweet and heartfelt. (Not to mention absolutely filthy!) Very low stakes and conflict, just letting us focus on the characters being cute and our human protagonist falling in love (literally, figuratively) with the community of magical beings as well as her favorite client, Rourke.

I love how absolutely tongue-in-cheek it is (at one point, one of the Violet’s friends laughs about how all the human women can’t go back to boring human men after nice monster boyfriends!) while also dancing around more serious issues in the worldbuilding and setup, like the fact that housing to accommodate so many different nonhumans can be quite expensive, and how dominant human culture is. (Also, when the main characters do start dating, they explicitly discuss and take a step back from the professional milking sessions so they don’t mix their personal relationship with their business relationship.) It’s also surprisingly gentle regarding the Rourke’s ex-wife; I’m used to romances that vilify either main character’s ex, but neither Rourke or Violet speak negatively about her. Even when Violet snoops online, she comments that she recognizes when a woman’s trying to remake herself following a drastic change, and Rourke simply says that they grew apart.

That said, there are some weird jumps with the plot progressing off-screen (and then referred to in past tense), which…I think the purpose is to keep the book solely focused on the characters, but it does make for some very odd progressions. The worst offender was a chapter that ended with heavy flirtation about how Rourke was going to get his nose ring removed that Friday (basically symbolically putting himself back on the dating/relationship market), then jumping ahead two weeks with him asking what happened to Violet, who had taken some time off because a relative died.

And because I’m me and I can’t turn off the analytical brain even for something that’s sheer candycoated fun: the worldbuilding is both really fun and oddly sparse in many ways. I enjoyed reading about various clothing and housing accommodations for various species, but the fact that the apparently history hews so close to our own without any major divergences (like…it is mentioned at one point that minotaurs consider themselves descendents of King Minos, which! Okay, obviously we’ve got some Greek myth vibes but HOW MUCH DOES THAT DEVIATE). What are traditional elvish vs orcish territories? How much would the history that shaped our world have changed with all these other species??? How exactly did humans gain dominance, since they’re explicitly mentioned as the majority species with the most economic and cultural clout???

Which is all fun and games until thinking about how species diversity whitewashes for lack of human diversity. It reads very straight, very generic white American; there is legit one reference to challah bread and otherwise it’s very obvious that the human cultural dominance means white humans seen as the default. And while the author does have other non-het romances in this series (specifically nb/f romances) and I’m willing to chalk it up as early installment weirdness…it does feel a bit odd that ooh yeah, everyone can horn up on the werewolf orgies and nagas double-dicking their human girlfriends and big buff orcs with their petite elf girlfriends (because so much of the appeal is obviously meant to be size kink), but I’m just like. Hello? Big monster girlfriends too please?

All that said: this book was sheer fun. I enjoyed it. I also fully admit I’m thinking about the ways this book left me unsatisfied because I’m someone who can’t just leave aspects of my identity at the door when I read; even when this absolutely appeals to the filthy monsterfucker in me who loves a good size difference. But I can’t leave behind the parts of me that are also queer and visibly non-white.

 

The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo - “When 11-year-old Ren's master dies, he makes one last request of his Chinese houseboy: that Ren find his severed finger, lost years ago in an accident, and reunite it with his body. Ren has 49 days, or else his master's soul will roam the earth, unable to rest in peace.

Ji Lin always wanted to be a doctor, but as a girl in 1930s Malaysia, apprentice dressmaker is a more suitable occupation. Secretly, though, Ji Lin also moonlights as a dancehall girl to help pay off her beloved mother's Mahjong debts. One night, Ji Lin's dance partner leaves her with a gruesome souvenir: a severed finger. Convinced the finger is bad luck, Ji Lin enlists the help of her erstwhile stepbrother to return it to its rightful owner.”

This book is lush and absolutely atmospheric. I love the prose, I love the way it builds atmosphere and a sense of time and place, I love the stylistic differences between Ren and Ji Lin’s chapters and the way the narrative weaves in traditional myths and juxtaposes the realities of a rapidly changing society and country under colonial rule with the older superstitions that still drive many characters. The characters are rich and interesting and I keep thinking about the ways they intersect and play off one another.

That said, the ending itself feels too pat in some ways (like a particular character’s death, and the reveal of a hidden identity) even though it leaves some of the final relationships open-ended and the possibility of various characters reuniting. I am also really not a fan of the pseudo-incest romance arc, though it was telegraphed enough that it felt inevitable (if disappointing) rather than a complete shock.

More on the pseudo-incest arc: Ji Lin and her stepbrother, Shin, are not biologically related in any way, but are often treated as twins because they were born on the same day. Their dynamic is really fun; antagonistic but mutually supportive, but also strained by distance and Shin’s failure to return her letters while he was away at school…school that she badly wanted to go to, but which her stepfather refused to pay for, due to her being a girl. They grow closer over the course of the novel (including her being very confused, both questioning and disgusted by how her feelings for him could have changed, because she initially regarded him as her brother rather than a love interest) until he finally reveals that he’s been in love with her for a long time, and was waiting until he had enough money saved that they wouldn’t need their father’s support. In fact, one of the biggest fights Shin had with his father was his father recognizing the way Shin was looking at Ji Lin, and ordering him to stop.

Which! Admittedly makes me rethink a lot of the novel as well. Their father is absolutely abusive. And I am not justifying that abuse in any way, but it also makes me think about that chilly distance between them, and how in his own way, he was also protecting Ji Lin. (I would argue that both Ji Lin’s stepfather and Shin were trying to protect her, albeit with very different ideas of what that meant.) And even when Shin does declare his love and tries to be physically intimate with her, he frames it in terms of possession, of needing to ‘have’ her; he had previously tried to bury his own heartache with other women but Ji Lin was expected to remain chaste, because virginity is seen as a bargaining chip should she get married. It’s classic double standards and sexism.

I’ve seen some readers criticizing it as a love story; I don’t think it actually is. My reaction to this wasn’t ‘oh, this is so romantic! Forbidden love!’, it was ‘oh geez these two young people share a traumatic upbringing and I can understand why that could bring them together in ways that are socially unacceptable,’ especially with a mention of an old belief that mixed-gender twins were actually deeply in love in a previous life, and reborn so they wouldn’t have to be apart. Ji Lin explicitly says that it’s yuck, but again: part of the ongoing story is about where the supernatural intersects with the real world, whether it’s weretigers, people named after embodiments of virtue and bound by fate, or dreams of an afterlife train station. So the novel’s framing leaves it open for interpretation.

A more minor frustration: the book’s need to over-explain aspects of Malaysian culture and food. No, I’m not an expert on 1930s Malaysia. But some of the explanatory asides felt like the author was worried that the (presumably white) audience would have no frame of reference or couldn’t pick it up from context.

Example: Ji Lin at one point sets out “two portions of nasi lemak, coconut rice wrapped in a banana-leaf packet with curried chicken and sambal chili, on the table.” No writer has ever felt the need to say that someone set out “two plates of spaghetti marinara, fresh basil and tomato sauce over long noodles, on the table.”

It’s something that makes me feel weirdly outside the text, since for something that’s in Ji Lin’s POV…why is she explaining nasi lemak to the reader? And maybe I’m coming from a place where I fully expect the reader to look up something they don’t know (I mean, I do it all the time!), but I don’t feel like the author needed to ‘explain’ each food. Or perhaps it could have been worked into the text better, like Ji Lin describing how she unwraps the banana leaf to scoop up bites of curried chicken. I have no idea whether this was something the author did intentionally or whether it was something an editor suggested, but it just strikes me as incredibly weird. Just doesn’t leave a good taste in my mouth (pun intended).

I still really enjoyed this book and will be thinking about it for a while. I also decided to borrow The Ghost Bride, Yangsze Choo’s first novel!

 

The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo - Li Lan, the sheltered daughter of a once well-to-do but now bankrupt family, receives an unusual proposal from the wealthy Lim family: to become a ghost bride for their only son, whom recently died. After visiting the family’s mansion and meeting the Lim family’s handsome new heir, her ghostly suitor begins haunting her dreams and drawing her into the shadows of the afterlife. When she ends up separated from her body, she must traverse the parallel world of ghosts and spirits in order to find her way back home and escape her unwanted suitor.

I ended up enjoying this more for the descriptions of the Chinese afterlife—paper money and burnt offerings, infernal bureaucracy and demons—than the actual story and characters, which…again, this was a debut novel. It very much reads like a debut novel; there’s little subtlety to the characters, and some of the later reveals and betrayals were so heavily telegraphed that it took away the joy of surprise. (The kindest interpretation I can think of is that Li Lan herself is so sheltered that, in a first person novel from her POV, Li Lan herself is absolutely unable to read these very obvious clues.) It’s also (and again, keeping in mind the POV character is a sheltered girl from a ‘good,’ if impoverished, family in 1800s Malacca…) very whorephobic, for lack of a better word. ‘Good’ women like the protagonist are beautiful, modest, and demure, while the ‘bad’ ones (like two of the beautiful but malicious spirits) who are beautiful and play up their appeal to men are shameless and seductive. It was a jarring turnaround from The Night Tiger, where Ji Lin’s work as a dancer, while not sex work, is considered adjacent enough to be considered not respectable, and Ji Lin is much more sympathetic to her coworkers who go on calls.

Tl;dr: I enjoyed the setting and the supernatural elements, really wasn’t sold on the characters or the actual plot. But I always have a soft spot for stories that deal with the supernatural, specifically non-Christian afterlives, and this was exactly that.

 

The Inugami Curse by Seishi Yokomizo - In 1940s Japan, the wealthy head of the Inugami Clan dies. The family gather in anticipation of the reading of the will, triggering a series of gruesome murders.

Or: lurid and monstrous family drama, full of hidden identities, forbidden liaisons, and overwhelming heterosexuality!!! (I'm not kidding about the last part. It's incredibly over the top in its descriptions of how beautiful one particular character is, and how men are so overwhelmed by her transcendental luminosity.)

Plus a lot of baked in sexism about “unfeminine” strength and behavior, or how the book’s narrator describes an otherwise kindly man as only able to “vent his sexual energies” with three mistresses…never mind that the reason he kept those mistresses (and treated them with such coldness that one of his daughters described it as being treated like “chattel”) at such an emotional distance was to maintain his emotional fidelity to a different woman that he couldn't marry. (In fact, I’d argue that a lot of the tragedy of the book was in the fact that he created the tragedy; in trying to treasure and protect those he cared about, his callous disregard for the family and children he fathered turned them into the sort of brutal, selfish monsters that allowed him to justify despising them even more.)

I still really enjoyed it. There's a lot of pleasure for me in reading books that were translated from another language, thinking about word choices made by the translator and cultural nuance. Plus there's something immersive about reading books that are set somewhere I'm not used to, whether historically or geographically. It very much reads as a product of a different time and place.

Also as an aside: the author is remarkably unsubtle with descriptions of various villains, who look exactly as evil as they are. It makes some of the more lyrical, poetic descriptions—especially of nature and the environment, like the wind blowing ripples across the lake, or the mountains in the snow—especially evocative in contrast. It was almost a palate cleanser between scenes, or using the serene beauty of one to make the other even more shocking.

 

Aunty Lee's Delights by Ovidia Yu - A really charming cozy murder mystery set in Singapore! The titular lead is a wealthy widow who runs a cafe, and just can't resist meddling when she thinks she can help. She's very much an aunty, the kind who likes to feed everyone who needs it and views those she feeds as a family that she must take care of. Food and Aunty Lee's love of feeding people, including her belief that you can tell a lot about a person not just by what they like to eat, but how they eat, is an enormous part of the novel.

The novel is also very good at establishing character and complicated family dynamics, including a sympathetic look at LGBT issues in a country where homosexuality is still illegal.

Spoiler: One of the murdered characters is a lesbian, and there is a heartbreaking scene where her mother and girlfriend finally meet. The girlfriend had wanted to meet the parents before, but also worried about them not accepting their relationship. The mother agrees that no, she wouldn't have accepted them—at first. She compared it to the fact that she didn't like her other daughter-in-law, but once her son chose the woman, they were family. It was surprisingly tender and made me think of my own mother and her opinions on various partners (and exes) my sister and I have had.

 

Graphic Novels

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang - I’ve been meaning to read this for ages, and it happened to be on display at my local library! Serendipity!

I went into this with no spoilers or real idea of the contents; I remember vaguely thinking it was autobiographical, then was surprised by the first chapter opening with the tale of the Monkey King. It’s actually three entwined narratives; the Monkey King striving to be seen as a god rather than ‘just’ a monkey, Jin Wang as one of the three Asian-American kids at his school and with a desperate crush on a popular white girl, and Danny, a popular white jock who is visited by his cousin ‘Chin-Kee’ (yes, it’s exactly as racist as it sounds) every year and has to transfer schools due to the mortification. All three stories are about identity, ostracization, and (eventually) self-acceptance.

Story-wise: Some aspects feel heavy-handed or outdated, which reminded me to check when this was first published…2006, so yes. It’s been eighteen years since it came out. I’m not really interested in questioning ‘authenticity’ (especially because one of the things about being members of a diaspora is that experiences are varied, our various intersections and lived experiences are different, etc) but it does make me think about how much (and how little) has changed since the book was published. Specifically, the fact that some aspects of Asian cultures are now considered ‘cool’ or have become popular for (white) consumption. (I mean, I went to a school that had a lot of Asian students…and having to explain to members of the anime club that nah, I’m Chinese, not Japanese, and the general frustration with trying to explain that no, we’re not interchangeable.) Or (paraphrasing a food podcast I listened to), the fact that “the white kids who used to make fun of the food I ate for lunch are now posting that same food on Instagram.”

Art-wise: the style is deceptively simple. At first I thought it was too simple/cartoony, but it really grew on me! It made for a quick read, and there’s just something about the way emotional nuance or expression can be conveyed with clean lines and flat color. Plus it matches the story; deceptively simple story lines with some very heavy material, but keeping it flowing in a way that I found aesthetically pleasing. Especially with seeing how the creator draws multiple East Asian characters in ways that show yes, they are people, not caricatures, and then…well, Chin-Kee. I found it viscerally uncomfortable in a way that also made me think about how many racist tropes get thoughtlessly regurgitated in art (anyone else seen those Tumblr guides on how to not draw Asian people as literally yellow?) and how it feels to see it deliberately confronted in a character that exists solely to be a caricature.

Anyways! This was a quick read, but one that lingers with me.

 

Nonfiction

Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar - How parking explains our modern world! The author's main arguments are that despite the common complaints about parking (or lack thereof), as Americans we actually have much more parking than we actually need! It's just inefficient (ex: a bar and a dentist's office have different hours that they'll need parking. Why can't their parking allotment overlap instead of each business having a mandated parking minimum?), inconvenient (who wants to park two smelly blocks away from a popular downtown area?), or wildly underpriced (because we expect it to be free).

I found this a really interesting book on city planning and land development, with plenty of absurd (and sometimes depressing) anecdotes of the situations that arise. Like the ice cream turf wars of Mister Softee vs Master Softee, fraud and embezzlement in parking garages, and the constant tension between a stated desire for walkable cities and the refusal to give up or lose parking spaces.

 

Unmasking AI by Joy Buolamwini - Part memoir, part call to action for ‘algorithmic justice.’ I first heart about the author’s work on science podcast, discussing the way that bias is built into algorithms. For example, facial recognition software is often trained on ‘pale male’ faces, meaning that they do worse on pale women, people of color, and especially dark-skinned women of color. We also have examples with everything from the fact that many automatic hand dryers may not even ‘read’ darker skinned people trying to dry their hands, and the fact that many doctors are trained to recognize cancerous lesions on pale skin, more than dark, and how this gets encoded into algorithms that are starting to get used in the medical sector.

Dr. Buolamwini writes about her passion for computer science and technology, and her experiences as a grad student uncovering the ‘coded gaze,’ evidence of encoded discrimination and exclusion in tech products. One of the examples she brings up is a project that was meant to recognize faces, but she couldn’t make it recognize her own face until she put on a white mask. From there she goes on to talk about the various ways that people are “excoded” from the data sets, or that systems are built to benefit those in power who make up a substantial portion of the data set, as well as the ethics around the way that data is obtained. In a society with increased surveillance, is it really a benefit to be more easily recognized? There are also existing societal harms, like people who have been wrongfully ‘recognized’ by AI facial recognition to be criminals, or with facial recognition being used for entry into buildings rather than keys, and people who rightfully belong being excluded because the software didn’t recognize them.

I don’t know as much about this topic as I would like, and I found this very interesting and accessible. (Even if, alas…despite Dr. Buolamwini being the self-titled ‘Poet of Code,’ I don’t actually enjoy much of the poetry that was in the book! I ended up looking for her ‘AI, Ain’t I A Woman?’ video, and found it much better as a performance than as words on a page.)

 

Good books! Good reads! Even with the occasional good frustration!

I have one more book from the library (Mott Street by Ava Chin, which looks at Chinese-American history through family memoir) and then...I expect I'll need a break from reading. I have a few exchange assignments to finish up, then I look forward to diving into a video game. Probably Bastion, unless Control seduces me first. :')

Please let me know your thoughts if you have read any of these! I love yelling about books!!!!