Nothing like last month’s midterms to get me into the procrasti-reading groove! I found more in-between moments to sneak in some reading outside the house throughout the day, which have been rare to come by since the pandemic as I really only ever go out for errands or horse riding now — not much time to kill outside. But now finals are coming up and I’m trying not to procrasti-read this time around, so I might not get that much reading done these next two weeks, though all I want is to do is hide away with The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne. I’m 50 pages in and I’m already sad and I love it.
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr // ★★★★
An epic novel spanning three timelines: in the 1400s we have Constantinople under siege, in 2020 a bomb threat at a library in Idaho, and some time in the future an interstellar journey. Took me 400 pages to get into it, but it came together in the end! Did it need to be 600+ pages? No, especially considering how plain and tidy the message. But it came together and it was sweet — a love letter for the miracle of stories, the way they are passed between people and so easily lost but find their way to us against all odds. Three stars rounded up for the last 200 pages.
The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina by Zoraida Córdova // ★★★★.5
Orquídea invites her descendants to her funeral to collect their inheritance, with a side of family secrets and curses. Magical realism with some body horror. Took me 180 pages to get into it, but after that I. LOVED. IT. It was giving me The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern but with more drama, and The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert but less catty. Had a reading hangover after this one. Highly recommended for fall/winter!
How We Disappeared by Jing-Jing Lee // ★★★★
This historical fiction weaves in a few timelines and perspectives but centers around sexual slavery during WWII and the Japanese occupation in Singapore. Had really high expectations and was a little disappointed, but overall a solid read. The present day chapters didn’t capture my attention as much as the chapters from Wang Di’s past. Wang Di in particular experienced suffering upon suffering, but I kept wishing to more know about her as a human being beyond the circumstances inflicted upon her. A book I loved also about sexual slavery during WWII and the Japanese occupation but in Korea was the nonfiction graphic novel Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim.
Friendship for Grown-Ups by Naocola Yamazaki // ★★★
This chapbook of three short stories caught my eye on Instagram from the title and cover alone. There are so many romance novels out there, but I’d really like to read more friendships! This chapbook, however, felt more about romantic relationships, but the stories were too brief for me to connect with those relationships. Didn’t feel like I got much out of these stories, but it could also just be that I’m not familiar with reading chapbooks.
Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford // ★★★★
Was assigned this for class and actually found it really interesting. It discusses bias and ethics of AI, which are familiar topics, but it also discusses topics that are not as immediately present (at least for me), namely, the geological cost and cost of human labour that is involved. The wastefulness of technology is obvious when you think of gadgets and how normal it has become for people to constantly upgrade their phones, but less obvious is the cost of data storage and data processing. In particular, Crawford elucidates the myth of clean tech, how “metaphors like ‘the cloud’ imply something floating and delicate within a natural, green industry… rarely [considering advanced computation] in terms of carbon footprints, fossil fuels, and pollution.” Tesla is estimated to use more than 28,000 tons of lithium hydroxide annually (half of the planet’s total consumption), and running a single natural language processing model can produce more than 660,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions (the equivalent of five gas-powered cars of their total lifetime including their manufacturing, or 125 round-trip flights from NYC to Beijing).
I Forced a Bot to Write This Book by Keaton Patti // ★★.5
A friend shared an article with me about someone who made a bot watch 1,000 Hallmark Christmas movies then write a script and I died — it was hilarious! Only the first page of the script was available, so I tried to hunt down the rest of it and found out that the creator had a whole book of bot-written scripts (unfortunately still with only the first page of each script), which I promptly read. However, as I read, I realised that these scripts were not created by a bot at all but in fact written by the author pretending to be a bot, which was a huge disappointment. There were a few gems in the book, but the highlight was definitely the “bot-written” Hallmark Christmas movie!
The Unrequited by Saffron A Kent // ★★
Pretty much erotica. Okay, okay, so, I’ve been really into watching bookwithchloe’s Youtube videos, and she’s a huge fan of romance novels and does romance readathons every once in awhile, so I started feeling the itch to read a romance, but this one was a bust (not Chloe’s fault, I stumbled on this title all on my own, to my own misfortune). It’s a student-teacher romance, the student has stalker tendencies, and the teacher is married. Yup. Everyone is crazy. I should have read the blurb closer.
With one more month left in the year, what are you hoping to read before the year ends?
