March 30, 2002: Biking in my backyard.
(and 7) I excavated a storage file holding papers from my elementary school days in Los Angeles while decluttering my home in Beijing at the beginning of the year. I had planned to make a project of digitising all those documents—diaries, short stories, drawings, homework—but my family and I left Beijing in a hurry before the epidemic shut down the country. I did manage to copy down entries from two diaries before I left though.
– I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review. –
Published by Little, Brown and Company on 04 Feb 2020
Goodreads
For weeks, Rachel has been noticing the same golden-haired young man sitting at her Brooklyn bus stop, staring off with a melancholy air. When, one day, she finally musters the courage to introduce herself, the chemistry between them is undeniable: Thomas is wise, witty, handsome, mysterious, clearly a kindred spirit. There’s just one tiny problem: He’s dead.
Stuck in a surreal limbo governed by bureaucracy, Thomas is unable to “cross over” to the afterlife until he completes a 90-day stint on earth, during which time he is forbidden to get involved with a member of the living — lest he incur “regrets.” When Thomas and Rachel break this rule, they unleash a cascade of bizarre, troubling consequences.
Set in the hallucinatory borderland between life and death, The Regrets is a gloriously strange and breathtakingly sexy exploration of love, the cataclysmic power of fantasies, and the painful, exhilarating work of waking up to reality, told with uncommon grace and humor by a visionary artist at the height of her imaginative power.
Ah, right. Time is a thing. No longer marked by minutes, days, weeks. But by increasingly bright dinners as summer settles. By emptying and replenishing a jar of instant coffee like an hourglass. By stamps on a boba shop loyalty card. By the blossoming colours on my paint-by-numbers canvas. By an incriminating pile of newly bought books inching taller and taller, a physical manifestation of library withdrawal…
We’re halfway through the year??! As per usual, I shall ignore the existential dread by sticking my head in a book. I read 10 books this month (the most books I’ve read in one month so far this year!), bringing my total books read this year to 39, which means I’m exactly 75% through my 2020 Goodreads reading goal of 52 books, so I have that going for me.
I found my groove halfway through the month and I’m excited to keep rolling. I read my first Agatha Christie novel ever and am reading my second one right now; there’s an ARC I need to get to ASAP; after that I’m going for Exhalation by Ted Chiang and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee. So there’s my preliminary July TBR!
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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…
An inconsequential month.