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I’ve been on the go in February, so my Kindle has been getting a lot of lovin’! Finishing a book on a Kindle is not quite as satisfying as finishing a physical book, but I do love how easy it is to whip out a Kindle, whereas with physical books, I really need to get settled.
An unexpectedly positive development from reading on my Kindle is that my impulse to buy books and obtain ARCs has cooled off. I suppose that ebooks take away the distraction of shiny new covers, which is what makes a good part of bookstagram hype, and brings the main focus back to the writing.
All that said, there’s something romantic about a physical book that just can’t be beat.
Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong
★★★★ // Goodreads // Buy it // (eARC)
Patiently educating a clueless white person about race is draining. It takes all your powers of persuasion. Because it’s more than a chat about race. It’s ontological. It’s like explaining to a person why you exist, or why you feel pain, or why your reality is distinct from their reality. Except it’s even trickier than that. Because the person has all of Western history, politics, literature, and mass culture on their side, proving that you don’t exist.
Essays exploring Asian American identity that blend memoir, cultural criticism, and history:
- “United“: On the “vague purgatorial status” of Asian Americans and the need to prove the self into existence, as explored in the case of David Dao, who was dragged off a United Airlines plane.
- “Stand Up“: On exploring stand-up comedy to break from the requirement of writing to pander to white audiences (at least if you want it to reach mainstream), as evident in the popular narrative surrounding the 1992 LA Riots.
- “The End of White Innocence“: On the privilege of innocence, and the importance of confronting and being held accountable for the reality of history.
- “Bad English“: Bad English as a tool to other English; Bad English as a tool to expose the reality of how racial groups have overlapped in history; Bad English as a part of heritage.
- “An Education“: On female friendships in college and coming-of-age as an artist/poet.
- “Portrait of an Artist“: On Asian female invisibility, and the lack of coverage around the rape and murder of artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
- “Indebted“: On the conditional existence of Asian American consciousness; on activist Yuri Kochiyama.
My favourite essays were the first three. In the last few years, given the hot topics of diversity, race, and identity in this cultural and political climate, I’ve been confounded by the purgatorial status of Asian Americans, so the first essay especially resonated with me. It’s the conversation I’ve been searching for, through pages and pages of black and white.
I’m so thankful for books like these that spark conversation, that fill a void in cultural discourse, that remind me that I have a stake, that prove my existence. There is so much more to go.
The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu
★★★★ // Goodreads // Buy it // (eARC)
Sometimes understanding comes to you not through thought, but through this throbbing of the heart, this tenderness in the chest that hurts.
I loved Ken Liu’s sci-fi/fantasy short story collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and was so excited when I heard about this next collection coming out. Liu has a unique way of blending the historical, futuristic, and fantastical, transcending genres; I especially loved the stories with cultural influences.
My favourites from this collection:
- “Ghost Days” follows three characters who are connected 400 years apart by an ancient artifact:
- Nova Pacifica, 2313 – Ona (an alien) is given a human artifact to present about for school.
- Connecticut, 1989 – Fred Ho and Carrie Wynne attend a high school Halloween dance.
- Hong Kong, 1905 – William and his father prepare for Yu Lan (Ghost Festival).
- In “Maxwell’s Demon,” a Japanese-American physicist is released from the Tule Lake War Relocation Center to work as a double agent in Japan during WWII.
- “Byzantine Empathy” explores using blockchain and virtual reality as social technologies to generate empathy but also commodify pain. (I can see how some people could potentially find this story a bit more technical than their usual taste, but this story also tackles very relevant moral questions. For example, the challenges in this story can be applied to the topic of trauma porn, which has been discussed widely in the bookstagram and publishing communities lately.)
- In “The Message,” a xenoarchaeologist explores an extinct alien civilization and reconnects with his estranged daughter. (To be adapted by the team that brought Ted Chiang’s “Story Of Your Life” to life in Arrival!)
(Q&A with Liu for “Ghost Days” here, “Byzantine Empathy” here.)
Amongst the stories in this collection are three that make a novelette—”The Gods Will Not Be Chained,” “The Gods Will Not Be Slain,” “The Gods Have Not Died In Vain“—and those made my favourites as well. They explore the idea of singularity, which involves the fusion of man and machine by consciousness uploading, introducing a human vs. post-human world.
Some concepts in the novelette were explored in other short stories in the collection as well, and these were interspersed between the three parts of the novelette, so the three parts were not placed in the collection consecutively.
Around this point in the collection (the middle), a few stories blurred and became repetitive. I don’t mind exploring the same themes, especially when they’re explored in different ways that add complexity, but there were some stories that I found much meatier and others that were only meaningful to me as bonuses in a collection but that I probably wouldn’t have been invested in if they stood alone, though there’s definitely potential for that and I would love to explore those ideas more deeply.
That said, this is a collection, so perhaps that’s an unfair criterion. But if every short story in a collection could stand on its own, that would really be quite exceptional.
(So in summary, the middle of the collection was a bit of a muddle for me, but the novelette at the core of the middle was super interesting. The stories in the first third and last third were the easiest for me to distinguish; 3 of my 4 favourites were in the first third, and the 4th favourite was in the last third.)
(Disclaimer: I’ve skimmed several Goodreads reviews that have reviewed each story in this collection individually, and it seems that people’s preferences are quite mixed, but hey, I’ll throw mine in the mix.)
If you haven’t read Ken Liu before, I would recommend starting with The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. The Hidden Girl and Other Stories was good, but I liked The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories more.
The Toll by Neal Shusterman
★★★★ // Goodreads // Buy it // Reading buddy: Sheena
I am in turmoil. The world is vast and the cosmos more so, yet it is not the things outside of me that leave me so uneasy; it is the things within me.
The final installment of the Arc of a Scythe trilogy! I would highly recommend this trilogy to anyone who’s into YA dystopian sci-fi. It takes place in a world where humans have conquered death, and now scythes are the only ones who can take lives (for population control). We follow Citra and Rowan, who are chosen to apprentice a scythe. The first two books both ended in such cliffhangers, and I was dying to get around to The Toll.
The Toll was unexpected. It didn’t follow Citra and Rowan as much as the first two books did, so it almost felt like I was reading a separate story from the first two books, but part of that feeling may also be due to the fact that I read the first two books consecutively in 2018 and didn’t get around to the final book until now.
Because I was so invested in Citra and Rowan from the first two books, I did find the third book a bit slow since there wasn’t as much of them, but there were some wonderfully intense moments, and it was satisfying to finally see this trilogy resolved.
Twas the Nightshift Before Christmas by Adam Kay
After reading Adam Kay’s This Is Going to Hurt, I had my heart set on reading this follow-up. Both books are made up of Kay’s diary entries during his time in medical residency, but Nightshift, as you may suspect from the full title, curates a selection of his entries from the holiday season.
This Is Going to Hurt was a true joy to read and it made me laugh out loud several times. For that alone, I debated between rating it a 4 or 5. As I read on, I found that in addition to being hilarious, it was also really insightful and shared a heartfelt message, which tipped my rating to a solid 5.
I knew it was going to be hard to top This Is Going to Hurt, so I didn’t have super high expectations for Nightshift, but I hoped that it’d at least be a fun, light read. I didn’t need it to be meaningful, and I simply looked forward to reading more of the short, punchy entries I loved so much. I’d have been satisfied if just two or three entries made me laugh out loud.
However, Nightshift lost the charm that This Is Going to Hurt had for me. This holiday special was only 144 pages, but it still felt longer than it needed to be. The entries didn’t have the same short, punchy style as in This Is Going to Hurt; they were longer, but nowhere near is funny or meaningful. The book felt a little forced. My laugh-out-loud count was zero ):
I’m still glad I read it because otherwise the curiosity would have killed me and I would have felt FOMO. It wasn’t a bad book, but there wasn’t really any ~point~ to reading it. I wouldn’t advise buying the book, but if your library has it, you could give it a quick read if you felt so inclined. But you’ll probably be better off reading Calypso by David Sedaris as Isabel recommended to me if you’re looking for your next fix after This Is Going to Hurt.
Saint X by Alex Schaitkin
★★★ // Goodreads // Buy it // (Gifted)
I guess the thing I’m most afraid of is that my life won’t be what it can be. I have everything, everything going for me. I have no excuses. And what if I still blow it?
Years after her sister Alison’s death, Claire encounters one of Alison’s suspected murderers, which drives her to figure out once and for all what happened to Alison and who Alison really was.
The most helpful thing I knew going into the book (thanks to early reviews) was to not expect a thriller, but rather a literary mystery.
This story centers on the main event of Alison’s mysterious death. Not only does this story explore the consequences in the aftermath of this event, but it also attempts to piece together all the individually inconsequential moments that ultimately led up to this one big moment.
I did not expect the ending. Usually a story that catches me like that is exactly what I’m looking for, but in this instance, I was actually hoping for the big reveal to gradually dawn on me. Given all the little pieces (all the points of view, all the backstories, the copious details), I wanted to be able to see how they fit in the big picture—not obviously so, but progressively and logically so.
I think the story may have tried to tackle too many themes at once. It touched on themes of race, sex, class, but didn’t really further the conversation; it was only relevant to those themes insofar as to say they exist.
But I suppose something could also be said for how privilege is portrayed in this story unapologetically. If you’re new to conversations around privilege, you may recognise how the privileged characters navigate the discomfort; the characters aren’t likeable, but there’s honesty in that. If not, you miiiiight not have the patience.