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I don’t usually bother acknowledging when I post late, because what’s new? But I have a confession. The reason for this recap’s delay is because I spent the last couple days browsing secondhand books online. Man oh man I miss a physical book, especially as I don’t even have the borrowed pages of a library copy to preoccupy my fingers anymore! I read my one and only library checkout this month and then was left to fend for myself. I dealt with it badly and may soon be in possession of ten delicious sets of musty pages…
Spaceman by Mike Massimino
My whole life I’d thought of Earth as this place where we’re in control of our lives. I’d wake up, go to the grocery store, take my kid to a baseball game. It was this safe, stable cocoon. Now it wasn’t that anymore. In space I could see the Earth in relation to the stars and the sun and the moon. The Earth is a planet. It’s a spaceship. We’re zipping around the universe, hurtling through the chaos of space with asteroids and black holes and everything else, and we think we’re safe but, boy, we are right out there in the middle of it.
An astronaut’s memoir. My favourite read of the year so far! I would recommend it to anyone!
This guy was the first person to Tweet from space, serviced the fourth and fifth (the final!) Hubble missions, and went on four spacewalks! Hold up. An astronaut who’s only gone on four spacewalks? (I mean, who am I to talk?) I had no real concept of what it meant to be an astronaut or go on a spacewalk. I’m so used to seeing pictures of space, the idea of satellites making our world work, and the rapid development of technology in general that I forgot how incredible spaceflight is.
Obviously the astronaut selection process is competitive, but before that you have to get through the astronaut candidate selection process. Many dream of going to space. Some get as close as they can and become scientists. Fewer go on to be explorers. And Mike Massimino, he made it all the way to the Hubble!
I’m sorry, I’m incomprehensible. I’ll probably rewrite this ten more times and/or do a whole separate post on this book. My last notes: This book gave me a greater understanding of what it means to be part of a team. It talked about overcoming failure in a way I needed to hear it. It was exhilarating. It made me cry. Mike is so fun and such a down-to-earth guy (hah…). Yeah, I called him Mike!
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling
Harry Stunned the Death Eater as they passed: Malfoy looked around, beaming, for his savior, and Ron punched him from under the Cloak.
I finally finished my first reread of the series in my entire life! I started this challenge in October 2018 lol. It took me a long time to get to the next book every time I finished one, okay?? Anywho, rated this one a 5. Are you allowed to give the Harry Potter books any other rating??
Things I realised I forgot: Dudley, Percy, and Kreacher’s redemption. Kreacher had it tough.
Bless Neville and Dumbledore’s Army. Dobby was a real one.
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay by JK Rowling
NEWT: People like you, don’t they, Mr. Kowalski?
JACOB: (startled) Oh—well, I’m—I’m sure people like you too—huh?
NEWT: (not very concerned) No, not really. I annoy people.
I fell asleep the first few times I attempted to watch Fantastic Beasts but I eventually made it through. I sped through this screenplay in an evening, right after I finished reading Deathly Hallows. Not too much suspense about it because I had already watched the movie and this is the original screenplay after all. Not a necessary read, but still enjoyable!
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
★★★★ // Goodreads // Buy it // Reading buddies: Evie, Sonia
The worst part was that the rain was affecting everything and the driest of machines would have flowers popping out among their gears if they were not oiled every three days, and the threads in brocades rusted, and wet clothing would break out in a rash of saffron-colored moss. The air was so damp that fish could have come in through the doors and swum out the windows, floating through the atmosphere in the rooms.
One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the history of the isolated town of Macondo and follows seven generations of its founding family, from the daily drama of their lives to big political events. It wasn’t until after I finished and researched the book that I learned that many of the events in the book were real historical references, so that this story is like a fictionalised history of Colombia.
I was first introduced to magical realism in high school and it was not my jam. Despite trying the genre several more times in hopes that I’d at least develop an intellectual appreciation for it, it never clicked for me. So One Hundred Years of Solitude was an intimidating one to start.
It wasn’t an easy read for me. I finished it a week after my reading buddies. I lost track of the political developments in the book a few times (politics have never been my strong suit haha). But I fell in love with the magical realism. It was my favourite part. The imagery was so beautiful, and at times reminded me of The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (an unconventional comparison, but if anyone has read both of these books, do you get what I mean??). Then to understand magical realism as a genre of political subversion and to learn about the real historical references in the book… I finished the book and already began to appreciate it in a whole different way. It’s a masterpiece that will be due for a reread eventually.
I could get into an analysis of it (or try to)—of solitude, love, language, history, fate, time, memory—but for a first read, just enjoy it. I went in blind (except for getting the heads up that the characters get confusing, so I was extra vigilant about getting the characters straight and referred to the family tree at the beginning of the book a lot) and I’m so glad I did. It immersed me in “the subjectivity of experienced reality” (thank you Sparknotes for that concise phrase haha).
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo
★★★★ // Goodreads // Buy it // (eARC) // Reading buddy: Hannah
The women take on all the cumbersome, minor tasks without being asked, while guys never do. Doesn’t matter if they’re new or the youngest—they never do anything they’re not told to do. But why do women simply take things upon themselves?
A novella that blends fact and fiction to create a sketch of the patriarchal structures of Korean society, following Kim Jiyoung from childhood through adulthood. As I’m familiar with East Asian culture, this book wasn’t revelational, but it was validating to see the gender inequalities articulated and with stats to back it up. Yes, fiction with stats!
The writing style was unique from anything else I’ve read, and that may have to do with the fact that this is a translated work and I don’t read very many translated works. It was a very direct sort of writing, packing a punch in less 200 pages. Some may find it dry or distant, but I found it efficient. It wasn’t subtle about the everyday inequalities, which often are subtle and internalised from years of tradition. It didn’t guide you through how Jiyoung experiences the world differently than her male counterparts, but simply that Jiyoung experiences the world differently than her male counterparts, if that makes sense.
The novella begins with Jiyoung at 33, and we learn that she is afflicted with a strange psychosis in which she impersonates voices of other women. Then the novella takes you to back to her childhood and proceeds chronologically until we are back where we started. I thought the mystery about Jiyoung’s psychosis would be a bigger part of the novella and carry most of its suspense, but this is not a plot-driven mystery novel (as you might suspect from reading the official blurb).
Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami
I went into the bathroom, and while I sat there, I looked out the small window. As I did my business, I mused that there must be a poem about how depressing it is to look out the window in a toilet and see blue sky. I would say that a window in a toilet would definitely make you depressed.
Two solitary people in Tokyo find an unlikely companionship.
My third translated read of the month. This was a strange little novel. I wasn’t really charmed by either of the two protagonists. Didn’t love or hate them. They kind of just… existed. I felt distant from most of the story, but the one aspect I connected to was the reflex to pull back emotions in reaction to… almost an anxiety of emotions. Anxious emotions can be good and bad. They can leave you giddy or disappointed.
A bit too slice-of-life for me, but if you enjoy quieter stories, this could be for you. It’s a popular translated work and it’s short, so I wouldn’t discourage anyone from giving it a try.
Grown Ups by Emma Jane Unsworth
DNF-29% // Goodreads // Buy it // (Giveaway win)
Grown Ups follows 35yo Jenny as she navigates adulthood in the digital age. Her life is falling apart. She’s a hot mess and is way too obsessive over Instagram. Told in prose, script dialogue, texts, emails, and social media messages.
I get it. I’m neurotic about Instagram too. In the first third of the book (as far as I got), Jenny went through all the motions of the stereotypical Instagram addict. But there wasn’t anything more to it. She was a character.
I heard that the second half of the book is better and makes sense of the first half, so I contemplated pushing through, but the writing was too hard to bear. It’s written in first person, so it’s reflective of Jenny’s neurotic, self-obsessed personality with complete lack of self-awareness (even the blurb describes the book as a “neurotic dramedy,” so I suppose I was warned). I’m pretty sure that later on there’s character development, Jenny redeems herself, and there’s some lesson about social media not being real life but, well, cool, I guess.
But despite the familiar topic, I think that those who enjoyed the book especially enjoyed the humour. If you flip through the first few pages and find that it’s your kind of humour, you might be able to appreciate Jenny’s neurotic personality better than I did and find some relief in this light read.
The Magical Language of Others by EJ Koh
DNF-48% // Goodreads // Buy it
After living in the States for more than a decade, Koh’s parents returned to South Korea for work, leaving Koh and her older brother behind. Over the years apart, Koh’s mom wrote her letters, which she compiles and intersperses within this memoir.
This is probably a wonderful memoir, as Sisilia and Margaret (I think that’s her name lol, being on the internet is weird) have attested, but I think I wasn’t ready for it yet. I thought the memoir would deal more directly with the mother-daughter relationship and the letters, but it encompassed more than that, sharing anecdotes from different times in Koh’s life, which is a gift, but lately I’ve needed books that are more focused. Additionally, the circumstances of this memoir are certainly heart wrenching and the overall mood is quite melancholy, and I’m not currently in the zone for that right now either.
Would recommend checking out Sisilia‘s and Margaret‘s glowing bookstagram reviews (short).
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell
DNF-32% // Goodreads // Buy it // Reading buddy: Sheena
At first, based on the title alone, I wasn’t interested in this book. It sounded like another one of those self-congratulatory “self-care” books (“Take a bath!” “Light a candle!” “Paint your nails!” “Do a colouring book!”), but then Jia Tolentino (author of my favourite Trick Mirror) recommended it, which quelled my suspicions. In fact, in the book, Odell wrote:
That’s a strategic function of nothing, and in that sense, you could file what I’ve said so far under the heading of self-care. But if you do, make it “self-care” in the activist sense that Audre Lorde meant it in the 1980s, when she said that “[c]aring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” This is an important distinction to make these days, when the phrase “self-care” is appropriated for commercial ends and risks becoming a cliche.
Especially in the digital age, and especially especially now that even more of our lives have moved online, it’s important to recognise and resist the attention economy for our own self-preservation. But as important as I found this topic, I couldn’t get through the convoluted academic writing. I found myself getting distracted by chunks of references that felt like tangents, not unlike what I’ve experienced in many of my liberal arts professors’ classes haha. A third through the book, I gave up because I kept glazing over. It took too much work to get to the point.
I think the main ideas of the book could have been expressed just as well in one streamlined essay. Rather than drawing chunks of research from various sources, the book could have focused examples/evidence from Odell’s own experience and observations, building her analogy of gardens and bird watching (two personal experiences she referred back to often) with doing nothing, and only use external references in snippets as supporting points but not as the points themselves. This suggestion might not necessarily leave her arguments as robust, but it would certainly help with clarity and readability.
My main takeaways: The mainstream perception of productivity is capitalistic. When “every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living…time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing.'” But “nothing” is necessary for meaningful thought/speech/action, self-preservation, cultivation of sensitivity (vs. connectivity), and care and maintenance of the self (the antidote to the rhetoric of growth).
If you’re interested in exploring the ideas above, check out Odell’s article “How to Do Nothing.” Though titled the same as the book, the article only covers the first chapter of the book, which gets as far as making the case for doing nothing. The rest of the book talks about retreat as the natural reaction to resist the attention economy, the impossibility of retreat, and the method of refusal-in-place as the only way to resist the attention economy, by withdrawing attention and investing it somewhere else. Check out Odell’s article “The Only Way to Resist the Attention Economy” for more on that part.
I’ve heard that this is a good book to listen to on audiobook, and even though I don’t usually go for audiobooks, I might give this one a shot in 2021 or something, because I genuinely want to hear what Odell has to say.
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What’s your ranking of the 7 Harry Potter books? My impulse answer: 3, 6, 2, 4, 1, 7, 5.
Do you have a(n early) favourite read of the year yet?