Books of 2024

This year I read less than I typically do, 79 books but a big portion in December. Between pottery, personal stuff, and my brief wow addiction I didn’t read very consistently and took lots of breaks, but I still had a lot of fun reading! I especially enjoyed the nonfiction I read this year, and I had a really hard time picking my favorite, because almost everything I read I learned a lot from.

I also started my book review account @wodubooks on instagram at the start of this year, and I’ve been really happy with it. It’s been very fun writing book reviews one at a time. I’ve also been slowly iterating on the format and I think I have landed on something that is enjoyable and isn’t too cumbersome to maintain. I need to think more about my audience and my goals, but in the meantime I have about 20 written / half written reviews that I still need to post, so I will be working on that in January. Please let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions!

Next year I would like to read more consistently, if my energy and time allow it, and I hope to also learn and study Classical Chinese. Also, I wanted to read more great nonfiction last year, which I did this year, but I didn’t read as much fiction that I really liked. Next year I will continue chasing that elusive perfect year of reading.

As always, if you recommended me any books, read anything I recommended, read any of my book reviews, or talked with me about books this year, thank you for your time and attention and respect!

2024 in books:

My favorites of the year:

• My favorite fiction this year was In the Distance by Hernan Diaz and The Scholomance Trilogy by Naomi Novik, but if I can pick a book that I’ve already read before then it’s Moshi Moshi by Banana Yoshimoto.

• My favorite nonfiction this year was Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City by Jorge Almazán and 台灣菜的文化史：食物消費中的國家體現 by 陳玉箴, although there are many runner ups.

My 27 favorite books this year:

• If you are interested in redemption, prison abolition, restorative justice, and in loving through, then read Chain Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.

• If you are interested in pleasure or activism, in authenticity and setting boundaries, or in living without shame and with love, then read Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by Adrienne Maree Brown.

• If you are interested in a light and funny but comprehensive general history of Taiwan, then read 臺灣史上最有梗的臺灣史 by 黃震南.

• If you are interested in a history of tea or in how global capitalism develops and operates, then read Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India by Andrew B. Liu.

• If you like video games and will enjoy beautiful introspective pieces on the transformative power of video games. then read Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games by J. Robert Lennon.

• If you are interested in a powerfully and painfully thrilling coming of age novel about truth and courage, or if you liked The Door, also by Szabó, then read Abigail by Magda Szabó.

• If you like Tokyo as a city or if you are interested in city planning, then read Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City by Jorge Almazán.

• If you are interested in learning more about semiconductors and why they are so important, then read Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller. A friend thought I was writing a book review about potato chips 😭.

• If you are interested in learning the heart sutra or learning more about Buddhism. then read 图说心经 by 玄奘法师.

• If you are interested in a super fun trilogy about magic with great characters, even better plot, and even better world building, then read The Scholomance Trilogy by Naomi Novik.

• If you are interested in heroes and hometowns (or if you really like Cleveland), then read There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension by Hanif Abdurraqib.

• If you like looking at the food in Ghibli movies, then read Dungeon Meshi by Ryoko Kui.

• If you have any nostalgia at all for music from the 2000s or if you like reading music / cultural criticism, then read They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib.

• If you liked the movie Mad Max: Fury Road or if you are interested in the insane story behind an insane movie, then read Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan.

• If you are interested in a great collection of short stories where Munro again finds the universal in the specific, then read Friend of My Youth: Stories by Alice Munro.

• If you are interested in obscenity and believe that bodies are never obscene, or if you would appreciate a story about and by a funny, brave, and very cool artist, then read What Is Obscenity?: The Story of a Good for Nothing Artist and Her Pussy by Rokudenashiko.

• If you are interested in Taiwanese food, Taiwanese history, or the way that conceptions of a “national cuisine” are deeply influenced by the concept of a “nation,” then read 台灣菜的文化史：食物消費中的國家體現 by 陳玉箴.

• If you are skeptical about the capability of technology to save humanity, then read Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

• If you are looking for a real page turner, or if you enjoy westerns, then read In the Distance by Hernan Diaz.

• If you enjoy short stories, like Russian literature, want to learn to read and write better, or are interested in general in how to improve at something, then read A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders.

• If you are interested in a good fighting shonen, then read Legend of the Northern Blade by Hae-Min.

• If something bad has happened or is happening to you, and you are wondering how you can possibly find a way out and through, or if you are interested in the redemptive power of community, then read Moshi Moshi by Banana Yoshimoto.

• If you are interested in ballet, or if you would just enjoy a very knowledgable and passionate person talking about their area of expertise, then read Celestial Bodies: How to Look at Ballet by Laura Jacobs.

• If you are in the mood for a super fun and light read showing how fun it is to be a girl, then read Shopaholic Ties the Knot by Sophie Kinsella.

• If you have ever felt the fear of wasting your best years on something or someone unworthy of that attention and effort, then read The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.

• If you are interested in the different colors of Chinese porcelain, or a history of Chinese porcelain organized by color, then read 瓷之色 by 马未都. Or just look at the pictures!

• If you are interested in the role and responsibility of art and artists, the possibility of a solid and substantial world, the weight of art in such a world, the ease in which we deceive or misremember or misconstrue our selves and our past, or in the difficulty of seeing beyond your time, then read An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Books of 2023

I had another very fun year of reading (I always do). I think this might be the highest fiction : non fiction ratio of books I’ve read since starting to keep track in 2017! Numerically I read a lot of books, but I actually didn’t spend as much time reading this year, because I was busy with work / personal things and had less time / energy / focus to read. I also got a library card, so I’ve been hitting up the LAPL for children’s books and YA a lot (shoutout Libby and the LAPL Silver Lake branch). I ended up reading a lot of comforting and easy books, especially series I read when I was younger, because I felt like the distraction / consistent enjoyment was something I needed.

I still read a lot of fantastic new stuff though! A testament to that is I have 32 favorites this year to recommend. I got through some excellent non fiction (the fashion books were especially good, and I was able to get through my whole list), and a lot of really really stellar fiction. I find I need a few years to enjoy rereading books, so this year I also got to enjoy rereading some of my old favorites, like The Woman Destroyed, The Master of Go, and Convenience Store Woman. I also bought a bunch of physical books, which I haven’t done since 2019, so I was able to update my bookshelf and reflect my new favorites :-)

In my last two annual book reviews I talked about wanting to read more great fiction. Partially because I’m regularly visiting a bookstore again, and partially because I have more friends to get recommendations from, I’ve been reading a lot of great fiction. Next year I would like to keep it up, and also return to more intellectually demanding and expanding non fiction, so I can continue to educate myself and grow my political and societal consciousness. This means I think rather than reading for comfort, or maybe in addition to reading for comfort, I want to devote more focused time and energy to reading. Anyways, either way I’m sure in December 2024 I will be talking about how I had another fun year of reading, so I look forward to whatever comes my way!

Next year I will also be starting some form of a book social media account, where I can more regularly and casually share book reviews, and I will hopefully be sharing that sometime in January. As always, if you recommended me any books, read anything I recommended, or talked with me about books, I am grateful for your time and attention and respect, and I am excited to continue to bond over books!

2023 in books:

Before I get into the rest of my list:

• My favorite nonfiction book was Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam by Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, runner ups were Fashioning Identity: Status Ambivalence in Contemporary Fashion by Maria Mackinney-Valentin and 飲食文化：中國八大菜系漫談 by 周鳳翠.

• My favorite fiction book was The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt, runner ups were 生死疲勞 by 莫言, Trick by Domenico Starnone, Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro, and The Door by Magda Szabo.

• My favorite stretch of reading was when I got into Helen Dewitt’s books in February. As an aside, my recommended reading order (which I was lucky to stumble upon) is: The English Understand Wool -> The Last Samurai -> The Last Samurai Reread -> Lightning Rods -> The English Understand Wool, and finally I think The Last Samurai again but I haven’t done it yet (will do in 2024) and can’t vouch for it personally.

Favorites:

Here are my 32 favorite books from this year:

• If you like this quote from the book “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” then read Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut. Very different stylistically from his other books though!

• If you enjoy finding deep meaning in seemingly mundane topics by exploring them as seriously and rigorously as possible, and believe that there is always something to be found, then read Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace. 

• If you will enjoy a well written, fun, snappy story with a clever protagonist, if you are a devout Helen Dewitt truther, or if you are following my Helen DeWitt reading order recommendation, then read The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt.

• If you believe that great, challenging art is for everyone and everyone’s potential as readers and thinkers and artists are underdeveloped and undersupported (or if you’re intrigued by the idea), and if you want to feel an author deploy those exacting but loving demands on you as a Reader, then read The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt. My favorite fiction this year.

• If you are a Helen DeWitt / The Last Samurai truther, or if you just really enjoy literary analysis, then read The Last Samurai Reread by Lee Konstantinou. I am thirsty for more of this type of book, please send any recommendations my way.

• I hate to repeat myself, but if you are a Helen DeWitt truther or if you are following my Helen DeWitt reading order recommendation, then read Lightning Rods by Helen DeWitt.

• If you are interested in how skin can be a site through which we can understand war, disease, race, and beauty, or if you are interested in how different treatments, attitudes, and philosophies towards skin can reflect the differences between science & knowledge & domination vs protection & acceptance & collective care, then read Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam by Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. My favorite non fiction this year.

• If you are interested in fashion history, enjoy fashion journalism, or just want to look at a bunch of cool looks then read Fashion Evolution: The 250 Looks That Shaped Modern Fashion by Paula Reed.

• If you are curious about what fashion is, why fashion changes, and how fashion “fashions” social identity, then read Fashioning Identity: Status Ambivalence in Contemporary Fashion by Maria Mackinney-Valentin.

• If you are interested in a Chinese epic, or if you are interested in that period of Chinese history (latter half of 20th century China), or if you are intrigued by the concept (a landowner is killed and reincarnates as various animals and witnesses how China changes), then read 生死疲勞 by 莫言 (Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out). Can’t say if the English translation is any good.

• If you liked Convenience Store Woman, or if you enjoy a good weird Japanese short story collection that makes you reflect on the weirdness of normalcy, then read Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata. My favorite stories were: “A First Rate Material,” “Life Ceremony,” “Body Magic,” “Eating the City,” and “Hatchling.”

• If you are interested in how the mind and the body are one and how stress can manifest physical symptoms, or if you have back pain, or if you are interested in how Amazon reviews of a book can heal back pain, then read Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection by John E. Sarno.

• If you are interested in Chinese food and learning more about the depth and variety of Chinese cuisine, or if you enjoy reading about culinary philosophy and history, then read 飲食文化：中國八大菜系漫談 by 周鳳翠. Sorry no translation.

• If you are interested in a masterful example of how good short stories build tension, then read Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 

• If you are interested in learning more about how gentrification kills cities and how gentrification is an intentional outcome of public and economic policy, then read How to Kill a City: Gentrification, Inequality, and the Fight for the Neighborhood by Peter Moskowitz

• If you are interested in morality, purpose, health, and success, or if you are just interested in a Tolstoy masterpiece, then read The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy. To be honest I think your interest in these topics isn’t even important, because regardless of your interest they will be interested in you.

• If you are interested in a very practical set of suggestions on how to tackle climate change from the socialist perspective (and why that is the only realistic way), then read Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet by Matthew T. Huber.

• If you are interested in the joys and sorrows of girlhood then read Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki.

• If you are interested in a fun and well written short story collection about the games and rituals we play and engage in with each other, and how those small practices are emblematic of our larger lives, then read Games and Rituals: Stories by Katherine Heiny. 

• If you are in the mood for something dark and clever, or if you are interested in art, ambition, and inheritance, or if you enjoy a good translator’s note, then read Trick by Domenico Starnone, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri. 

• If you are interested in improving your ability to deliver critical feedback or if you’d like a better framework to understand feedback either in your personal or your professional life then read Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott.

• If you are interested in a very stylish and fun take on a very basic sci-fi story, then read Flux by Jinwoo Chong.

• If you are in the mood for something funny (in the British way) or if you enjoy modern day mythology then read Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett

• If you are interested in learning more about trees and how we can connect with them in cities, then read Thirteen Ways to Smell a Tree: Getting to Know Trees Through the Language of Scent by David George Haskell

• If you are interested in one of the greatest collection of short stories I have ever read, then read Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro. I have more to say about this collection, hopefully after I reread it again, but her sensitivity to ordinary life and her ability to help us see the universal in the specific is extraordinary.

• If you are interested in Go (sort of unlikely I think if you are reading this review, don’t know how many friends I have that play Go), or if you are interested in a clash between classic and modern values told through a Go match (much likelier), then read The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata, translated by Edward G. Seidensticker

• If you enjoy seeing separate plotlines and characters converge in very wholesome stories, then read The Miracles of the Namiya General Store by Keigo Hoshino. 

• If you are in the mood for a wholesome story about friendship, bravery, and bullying then read Lonely Castle in the Mirror by Mizuki Tsujimura. Very nice twist also.

• If you are interested in an atmospheric and tense murder story, or if you would enjoy a better understanding of Tanizaki’s beliefs about fiction and cinema, then read Devils in Daylight by Junichiro Tanizaki. Translator’s note is very good here as well!

• If you are interested in the ways society crushes women so that madness is the only option, then read The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir. Three very good short stories, the titular short story is especially devastating.

• If you are in the mood for a fun & funny fantasy series about magic with very endearing characters, creative & engaging stories, and very complete worldbuilding then read the Septimus Heap series by Angie Sage. 7 books, all pretty good!

• If you are interested in devotion, authenticity in art and relationships, superb characterization (Emerence is a titan, one of the best characters I’ve ever read), an unbelievably tense story about a Hungarian cleaning woman, or writing that goes incredibly hard, then read The Door by Magda Szabo. One of my favorite novels this year, narrowly beat out by The Last Samurai.

Books of 2022

This year I had more time and energy so I read a bunch of books, more than I have since 2018. It was still a pretty difficult year for me; in the first half of the year I was dealing with my disability and all throughout the year my partner and I were on different sides of the planet, so I still sought out a lot of comfortable reads. I did still read a lot of good, new fiction and some expansive non fiction, which is good because last year in my annual book review I said I wanted to read more theory and work through some more difficult fiction. I also recently read 600 unique books (according to my goodreads), and I often talk about my 2:1 fiction nonfiction ratio, so I am happy to say that does seem like the most natural split for me, because I am at about 400 & 200 respectively. 

I am not super sure what reading goals or aspirations I have this year, or to be more accurate, what vibe I am looking for, but I think I would enjoy having a more challenging year of reading, and making sure to not let comfortable and enjoyable reading completely replace more challenging, fresher, and more rewarding books. That dynamic between comfort and challenge is something I have been working on for many years, mirrored in my larger personal life, but I hope to strike a better balance this year. I was extremely moved by Dead End Memories by Banana Yoshimoto, and while I know it is unrealistic to expect that of every book, I still hope to find and read more books like that next year.

Something new for this year’s list is I typically have just listed the books on my “cream” shelf, but as I’ve gotten older and also as I’ve read more books it’s been rarer for me to come across books like that. I also found that this year I enjoyed a lot of books that I would like to recommend that didn’t quite make the cut for my “cream” shelf, which is why this year’s list is called Favorites instead.

2022 in books:

the 121st book ruined the rectangle :-(

Favorites:

Here are my 29 favorite books from this year:

• If you are interested in desire, identity, seeing / being seen, and how that personal struggle is mirrored in a larger political context, or if you are just in the mood for something atmospheric (the foggy kind), then read Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin.

• If you enjoyed GEB, or if you are interested in what makes you you, or if you are interested in how consciousness arises, then read I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter (top 3 non fiction of the year for me).

• If you are interested in a funny and charming story about magic set in an alternate history of London’s magical oligarchy, or if you just like footnotes, then read the Bartimaeus trilogy by Jonathan Stroud.

• If you enjoy reviews then read The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet by John Green. Personally I love a good review

• If you are interested in the sharp indelicacies of being a woman then read Indelicacy by Amina Cain. Mostly though I just agree with this 5 star goodreads review: “Obsessssssssed with this bitch”

• If you are interested in Murakami as a writer or as a person, or the writing process in general, then read What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami.

• If you are interested in what orientalism is, or if you are interested in how a body of theory and practice can be created, produced, and transmitted, then read Orientalism by Edward Said. 

• If you are interested in how games are made from a technological perspective or if you just enjoy a well written programming book then read Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom. 

• If you are interested in how trauma is encoded in the body or if you just want another reason why Descartes has a lot to answer for for mind body dualism then read The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk.

• If you are interested in examining your relationship with things then read The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki.

• If you are interested in what makes games a unique art form, or how games crystallize agency, then read Games: Agency as Art by C. Thi Nguyen. 

• If you are interested in oranges, some of the best narrative nonfiction I have ever read, or how capitalism is ruining fruit, then read Oranges by John McPhee.

• If you are interested in memories, and how they can be painful, sad, surprising, but also warm and radiant, then read Dead End Memories by Banana Yoshimoto. Two of my favorite short story endings ever, and my favorite fiction this year by far.

• If you are interested in a cute, sweet love story then read Stardust by Neil Gaiman. 

• If you are interested in men’s fashion or Japanese menswear or how culture changes and adapts as it crosses borders then read Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style by Marx, W. David.

• If you are interested in words or if you are just in the mood for a nice cute children’s story then read Frindle by Andrew Clements. The perfect accompaniment to DFW’s dictionary review, Authority and American Usage. 

• If you are interested in fashion theory and what fashion is and how fashion is a social construct then read When Clothes Become Fashion: Design and Innovation Systems by Ingrid Loschek.

• If you are interested in feeling trapped by an unbreakable, invisible wall, in feeling bleak and depressed, or in a feminist story of survival and isolation, then read The Wall by Marlen Haushofer.

• If you are interested in tomatoes or in once again how capitalism is ruining fruit then read Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit by Barry Estabrook.

• If you are interested in Roald Dahl’s darker shorts then read Skin and Other Stories by Roald Dahl. I read this first in middle school, and I think it is a large reason why I like short story collections so much.

• If you are interested in how art is influenced by and influences culture, society, and politics and how art cannot be consumed or created properly without understanding its context, or if you just want to read a good essay on nudes, then read Ways of Seeing by John Berger. 

• If you are interested in a delightful short story about good taste or if you appreciate precise and polished prose then read The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt.

• If you are interested in transportation and traffic or American transportation history then read Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town by Charles L. Marohn Jr. Together with The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Better Buses, Better Cities, the three are a great set of books on city planning and understanding cities.

• If you are interested in women’s fashion, skirts, or good concrete examples for how fashion changes with the social context, then read Skirts: Fashioning Modern Femininity in the Twentieth Century by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell.

• If you are interested in how to debug then read The Pocket Guide to Debugging by Julia Evans.

• If you are interested in a good book about engineering management that is not written by a borderline psychopath then read Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner.

• I typically don’t include rereads, but I wanted to be healed in December so I reread some of my favorite Vonnegut books and they are even better now, so if you are also in the mood for that, read God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Timequake, or Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut.

Books of 2021

This year, like everyone, I had a long and exhausting year with a lot of changes and adjustments, and even though I always find peace, inspiration, energy, and delight from books and my reading, this year I took an uncharacteristically long break from reading (I barely read from July to September). In last year’s book summary post, I talked about how, in a year sensible to look to books as a sanctuary, I instead read a lot of radical theory, but really it turns out that the escapism just came a little late. This year, instead of my typical 1:2 or 1:3 non fiction / fiction ratio, less than a quarter of my reading this year was nonfiction, most of it gentler reading. Unconsciously, I guess, because I only found out after reviewing my year of books, I sought out books that were shorter or more comfortable. Which is fine, books are great because they have so much variety in purpose and benefit, but my favorite books are still the ones that expand your vista and your views, so I am hoping for some more of that next year. I have no specific reading goal, but I’d like to get back into some theory, and work through some more difficult fiction.

2021 in books:

Cream:

Anyways, here are my 22 favorite books this year, each with a short description / pitch:

• If you are interested in a good historical and theoretical background on the anti-black roots of fatphobia, then read Fearing the Black Body by Sabrina Strings.

• If you are interested in a short and sweet modern day fat manifesto then read You Have the Right to Remain Fat by Virgie Tovar (also a good accompaniment to Fearing the Black Body).

• If you are interested in a thought provoking collection of speculative sci-fi then read Exhalation by Ted Chiang. Some of my favorite shorts ever, not just in the sci-fi category (The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate is fire).

• If you are interested in a brilliant, funny, charming tetralogy with a complete cast of strong, well thought out characters (and some amazing and distinctive women protagonists) then read Dealing with Dragons by Patricia Wrede. Also an enjoyable and instructive example of how in good fiction, often characters and worlds take on life of their own, and writing is as much about listening as it is about consciously creating.

• If you are interested in an incisive and insightful collection of essays about American black women’s relationships with beauty, desirability, and value, among a bunch of other interesting topics, then read Thick: And Other Essays by Tressie Mcmillan Cottom. Her twitter is also very good and funny.

• If you are interested in either a bunch of specific studies of modern technology in rural China (less interesting to me) or in an illuminating investigation of global capitalism and hierarchies of labor through these examples (much more interesting to me) then read Blockchain Chicken Farm by Xiaowei Wang.

• If you are interested in finding and understanding your own version of Hamlet, or some of Shakespeare’s best lines (imo), or some fancy wordplay and puns, or just in a good Shakespeare play, then read Hamlet by William Shakespeare.

• If you have ever been to a grocery store and marveled at its ubiquity, scale, and horrifying abundance and if you are interested in the absolute massive interlocking systems that support it, then read The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr. Or if you like Trader Joe’s; the TJs chapter is good.

• If you have ever felt despair over the way things are and have been, and are interested in an organized, disciplined vision and strategy for the future, then read We Do This ‘til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba. By far my favorite non fiction book this year.

• If you are interested in a delightfully weird and absurd collection of short stories about alienation, specifically the alienation of modern women in patriarchal societies and relationships, then read The Lonesome Bodybuilder by Yukiko Motoya. Much better the second time, if only because I was unprepared the first time.

• If you are interested in the soulless aspect of tech and the wholesome aspect of bread, or in the redemptive act of doing things with your hands then read Sourdough by Robin Sloan.

• If you are interested in a good trans story told through the vessel of modern day witches in East LA, or if you just want to read some good, heartwarming YA, then read Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas

• If you are interested in the ways love can be violent, cruel, pathetic, untrustworthy, and funny, then read Laughable Loves by Milan Kundera.

• If you are interested in a dreamy novel that blurs the boundaries between night and day, self, people, dreams and reality in its effort to seek and to define seeking, or just in a very unique reading experience, then read Untold Night and Day by Bae Suah.

• If you are interested in the role and responsibility of art and artists, the possibility of a solid and substantial world, the weight of art in such a world, the ease in which we deceive or misremember or misconstrue our selves and our past, or in the difficulty of seeing beyond your time, then read An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro. Lots of stuff going on in this one.

• If you are interested in a short and sweet LGBT manga then read My Brother’s Husband by Gengoroh Tagame

• If you are interested in learning about nature and a different way for people to relate to and understand nature through the combination of science and indigenous wisdom then read Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

• If you are interested in the delicious possibilities of freedom in sex and sexuality, or if you just want to read some gender bending smut, then read Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl by Andrea Lawlor

• If you are interested in the horrors of meat, the horrors of men, or the horrors of capitalism, or if you might want to become an involuntary vegetarian for a bit, then read My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki

• If you are interested in desire, or if you want to feel the zeitgeist of being queer in Taiwan in the late 20th century, then read 鱷魚手記 by 邱妙津

• If you are interested in some good, character centric sci fi, or if you just want to read a well-written, touching, heartwarming story, then read A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers.

• If you are interested in delight or in a book that is a delight, then read The Book of Delights by Ross Gay.

Books of 2021 (Apr - Dec)

Cemetery Boys - Aiden Thomas

My favorite YA novel this year, maybe one of my favorites ever??? Cemetery Boys is about a Mexican trans boy in East LA, living in a community of brujos and brujas. Assigned female at birth, Yadriel’s family wants him to be a bruja, but he knows he is a brujo, but is denied the chance to prove it and demonstrate himself thru the coming of age brujo ceremony. When mysterious deaths happen in the community, he has to work together with his cousin (who rejects bruja tradition of healing and opts to make traditional weaponry instead) and a young delinquent ghost to both unravel the mystery and prove his place as a brujo to his community. The plot and characters and writing are simple and straightforward (like all good YA, I think), but it is soooo well written and the story concept is so good!!! I love the way Thomas wrote and explored a trans story through this very intimately cultural lens of gender and a representation of the gender binary through gendered powers. Also once again I benefit from being an idiot, the twist was actually pretty surprising to me LOL.

Untold Night and Day - Bae Suah

One of those books that I am soooo sure is good but I am just not good enough at reading to fully understand it. A very dreamy novel, w/o a lot of plot or characters, just one insubstantial day and night in a hot Seoul summer. The book is easy to fly through, but in every phrase and corner I could feel a great depth of meaning and significance, just slightly out of grasp but perceivable. It is really an impressive novel, but in an atypical way. Not because of plot or characters or writing, something larger like the construction of the novel as a whole that felt masterful. Slippery the whole way through, but I could clearly feel there was something special and worth thinking really deeply about in there. I also enjoyed the translation, and enjoyed the translator notes at the end. I am sure the second read will be better, and am looking forward to that.

An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro

I really really really love Ishiguro, he is one of my favorite writers. I love the way he writes, the way that the main context and background of the story unfolds in such a casual offhanded way. In his books, the narrators always bring you in with some commonplace everyday scenes, and only later, with context, do you look back and notice that something has always been very very wrong. I delight in that, in the same way I enjoy a good magic trick, and this book is no different. I also found the themes in this book particularly interesting to me. In An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro captures a sense of change, a time of complete tectonic shift in culture and beliefs. What better example of that than a society pre and post war? Everything changes from these catastrophic events. In these times:

• What is the role and responsibility of artists? What is the purpose of capturing beauty, and what is beauty in a “pure” context? I am currently reading Orientalism, and this book reminds me what Said says about orientalism not as a collection of texts but as various forms and exchanges of power, political, cultural, etc.

• Ono wants to make art that has real purpose, move beyond the floating world, but even that world turned out to be floating and unreal and unsubstantial. What is solid and truthful? Ishiguro writes to convey this deep sense of being left behind, a fear that comes from seeing an entire reality unmade and untruthed.

• What is the role of memory in building our understanding of ourselves and the past? Can we understand the past as a recreation of yourself? In this last theme is my favorite part of the story- the first twist that this mild mannered narrator was actually a war artist, and an important contributing war artist which is why he is shunned. Second twist (and therefore much more unexpected, the first one is typical Ishiguro stuff)- was he even that important or remembered? Was his art important and capital P Politically significant, and is art important and politically powerful? Ono thought he was making art for a pure purpose, but the world that purpose served turned out to be a floating world, and later even his importance became insubstantial. From an Ishiguro interview on the book:

I could put down a scene from two days ago right beside one from 20 years earlier, and ask the reader to ponder the relationship between the two. Often the narrator himself would not need to know fully the deeper reasons for a particular juxtaposition. I could see a way of writing that could properly suggest the many layers of self-deception and denial that shrouded any person’s view of their own self and past.

And for me personally: the nagging sense of how difficult it is to see clearly above the dogmatic fervours of one’s day; and the fear that time and history would show that for all one’s good intentions, one had backed a wrong, shameful, even evil cause, and wasted one’s best years and talents to it.

My Brother’s Husband - Gengoroh Tagame

A short and cute manga about a Canadian guy (Mike) who comes to Japan to visit his husband’s brother after his husband passes away, and to meet his family. At each turn I was expecting something unbearably sad and difficult, but at each turn it proved itself to be a beautiful and heartwarming story, the pacing and characters just so crazy on point. Months later I still remember this story very fondly, a very heartwarming few hours of reading. ^_^

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants - Robin Wall Kimmerer

Braiding Sweetgrass combines biological and ecological science with indigenous wisdom to explore and share the lessons that plants and animals have to teach us. This was a very transformative book for me, one that began to help me understand a different way of relating to nature. It took me forever to read (a lot of mini sections) but it was very pleasant to read each section slowly, and I appreciated the time anyways to let the different lessons from each of the plants / vegetables / ecosystems that she teaches in every chapter sink in. I was especially moved by the chapter on trees (esp the ones about burning, regrowth trees, and salmon) and the chapters on the three sisters (how corn, bean, and squash are grown together because they support each other). The most important lesson I learned from this book is the way that nature supports each other. Things are out of balance now, but people are also a part of nature, and an important part of the balance. We have just taken ourselves out of old ways of being and existing with each other and with the earth. Many of us live without any genuine gratitude or attachment to the land. For me there are many days that go by where I don’t physically touch the earth. It’s sad. I have always understood the balance of nature like the cursed spirit Hanami in Jujutsu Kaisen- the earth and sea need time to heal, time without humans. But Kimmerer showed me that people are part of the cycle, and we have to be an active part of not just the restoration but also play our part in the system. We have to understand things not as rights, but come to see our privilege and gifts as responsibilities and come to see the responsibility itself as a gift. It is a simple concept, but in a world so focused on rights, what we deserve, and defending ourselves from life and each other, it is hard to imagine a world focused on our responsibility to life and the earth around us. 

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl - Andrea Lawlor

My favorite fiction this year, one of my absolute favorite books ever. Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl is about Paul, a shapeshifter that can freely change his biological markers and present himself and perform as different genders. It is a gender bending, transformative, academic smut that helped me understand sex and sexuality as something not inherently traumatic (like James Baldwin says) but as traumatic because of society and the way we all collectively understand and relate to sex and sexuality, both personally and politically. Paul is free in a way that I didn’t understand or want or want to understand until I read this book. For me, the best books are the ones that make me think, that sit with me, that change me, and I can look back on the book and see a clear demarcation between the me before I read it and the me after I read it, and I really feel that this book changed my life. It reminded me how playful and fun reading can be, but also how academic and serious and rigorous reading can be. I am always remembering Jia Tolentino’s review of The Memory Police about metaphors made real, and Paul’s shapeshifting abilities remind me of that, because they take something intangible (gender, sex, sexuality) and make it physical. It is a wonderful and smart way to get people to really think about and examine gender as a concept, because when all the biological markers are easily moved and changed, we have to understand gender as a performance and as a creation rather than as a biological law. And the writing!!! What a triumph. The pacing is the sentences is so good, so full of energy and variation and tension. 

Just look back; that was the whole trick. Everything Paul knew boiled down to this one gimmick: try for what you want. He couldn’t always maintain, of course, but if you try one hundred times and you score five times, that’s five more times than if you didn’t try. And Paul tried for something every day, pretty much. Paul tried for a smile, a look back, an eyeful, a number, some illicit hallway kiss, a blowjob, a romance, a massage, a handjob, a finger up an ass, a free show, a licked lip, a passed note, a present, a surprise, something good, something better than the nothing he had.

I cannot speak more highly about this book and I recommend it to everyone. Also one of my favorite cover reviews ever- it really is Tight, Deep, and Hot.

Native Speaker - Chang Rae Lee

Native Speaker is about a Korean American spy that goes undercover to provide info on a Korean American politician in NY. The setup is so clever. I think it is a very smart idea to explore Asian American dynamics and issues by making the main character a spy. Just a good way to explore the ways in which Asian Americans are hidden in the US and put on disguises to fit into mainstream American society, and dig into some of the (sometimes true) Asian stereotypes of being emotionally closed off. I liked the book and found its ideas engaging, but I didn't enjoy reading it very much, and after reading it i felt sad that a book written in 1995 talks about and explores Asian American issues better than most mainstream Asian American media today, and our popular consciousness and understanding of Asian Americanness has not moved much (and has maybe even regressed). 

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life - Anne Lamott

A lot of great advice on writing, and obviously the writing itself is good lol. The stories she tells are funny, and I think she does a good job of explaining what it is like to be a writer and the writing process from her perspective and her experience. The book also made me very curious about how writers from different cultures write too, because in my reading experience a lot of East Asian literature is pretty different. In my opinion the creative process is super intimately tied to your understanding of the self, of which the western conception is unique and not universal, so I am not sure about it being the definitive guide to Writing (specifically some of the guidance around how to write stories and how to write characters and some of the descriptions of the pain and anguish around writing), but I read it and it made me want to write, so I enjoyed it and I would recommend it to anyone. Some of this advice I found also actually helpful in writing code.

My Year of Meats - Ruth Ozeki

I read My Year of Meats with one of my book clubs. An extremely powerful book… after I read it I literally had trouble eating meat for two weeks and would get stomach aches. I have never had a book have this strong of a physical impact on me. It is two parallel stories: one about a Japanese American documentarian making documentaries to sell American beef to Japanese housewives, the other about a Japanese housewife married to the sexist Japanese producer of that show. I looooove narrative setups like that because 1) parallel but different storylines and characters often create a dialectic that very sharply defines the central theme of the book 2) when those stories converge it is always so hype!!!!! I also found it a very illuminating way to explain the ways capitalism moves globally, and the wild central plot is not just imaginable but actually happening everywhere. Recent example: a dog instagram I follow talked about how their Squid Game Halloween costume from Shenzhen was late. So a show in Korea produced by an American company watched by an American audience resulted in an American buying a costume made in Shenzhen which then got delayed by global supply chain issues. How crazy is that?! No man is an island, especially today, and like it or not we are all tied together through capitalism (I hate it) and through shared human experiences (I love it). There is so so much depth and richness to unpack in every Ruth Ozeki book. I can’t believe this was a debut novel! A real powerhouse.

鱷魚手記 - 邱妙津

I don’t have much to say about this book, except that it is one of the best books I’ve ever read, and within its pages captures feelings and thoughts that I did not know or know to be capturable. Pages full of difficult things, that, like Murakami puts it, are meant to be engaged with, understood, and digested, becoming the cream of your life. I can only imagine what it feels like to have something like this written for you, and it is clear why this is a seminal queer Taiwanese lit and a cult classic. Don’t read the english translation though, it is criminally bad (and makes me wonder if some other translated novels I read and didn’t like just suffered from a shit translation).

Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir
- Kai Cheng Thom

The coming of age story / anti-memoir of a young Asian trans girl that runs away from home and goes on an adventure. I liked this book a lot. There were a lot of parts that were “cliche,” but because it is a trans story, those familiar elements felt very new and exciting and enjoyable, and I loved seeing not just a fairy tale / feel good story with a trans protagonist but a trans version of that type of story (not representation but re-creation). I also really liked the poetry and the writing. The magical realism was a little convenient at the climax, and the other non main characters were a little flat, but it was very enjoyable throughout and I liked the subversion, although predictable, of a typical fairy tale happy ending. 

A Closed and Common Orbit - Becky Chambers

This is the sequel to A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. Because I liked the crew and the writing I thought a sequel would be more of the same enjoyable stuff, but what a pleasant surprise to read a very different story! This one is much more character focused, much less plot, focused on just developing two characters rather than an entire crew w a very specific quest. Also my absolute fav sci fi book this year! One of my fav sci fi books ever!!! There is so so so so so much to like about this story. First the structure: I love a good dual protag, love a good dual story, love when they cross, both narratively and thematically. I’m always so so so pumped when it happens and I think it provides such a lovely alternate pacing for the book and builds up such a satisfying tension (see: My Year of Meats). Second: her take on a common quandary. The question of the humanness of AI is so explored and so much writing, both fiction and non fiction on it. I don’t think Chambers brings anything new, but A Closed and Common Orbit is still a very touching and wonderful story and an in depth and varied exploration of the subject via the parallels and contrasts in the two stories. Like I said before I am most invested and interested in sci fi as a way to explore and understand people and each other. The characters in this book are so strong, and the ending is really very touching and heartwarming. It makes me enjoy being an idiot, because the ending was very surprising to me, which definitely added to my pleasure.

Hip-Hop (And Other Things) - Shea Serrano

This is the third and final book in Shea’s (And Other Things) trilogy. I really like Shea’s writing and this is his 5th book I’ve read, so I was very excited about it also because out of the trilogy hip-hop is the subject I am most familiar & interested in. This book fell a bit short of my expectations though. I think there were too many goofy chapters, which is OK, but overall I felt like there was not a ton of very in depth writing and thinking about rap which I enjoyed very much in the rap year book. To me, his strengths in his previous books were his knowledge / research and his very conversational writing style, which was consistently funny and interesting and would occasionally give way to some very poignant insights. I just didn't get as much of that in this book, which was doubly disappointing because I really really enjoyed the Missy Elliot chapter (it was funny and educational and poignant and I listened to Missy Elliot for at least 10 hours after that) and it was an early chapter, so I kept waiting for more in the book. His typical style also often starts with a funny anecdote, and then later he reveals its significance and relevance in a very funny and natural and conversational way, but then in this book many chapters felt a little bit more deliberate and sometimes even forced :-(

The Book of Delights - Ross Gay

The Book of Delights is my 500th book since 2017, when I started tracking books on goodreads and reading again! It is a wonderful book, and reaffirms for me that one of life's greatest delights is reading the right book at the right time. The book is a collection of daily delights that poet Ross Gay wrote over the course of one year. Some of these delights are short, some of them are a few pages longer, some are brief and funny, some are inspiring and poignant; together they all paint a beautiful understanding of delight that I did not have before. Delighting in not bringing the groceries in in one trip. Delighting in tenderness and touch. Hunger as a form of delight. Delight as kin to loneliness. Delight as the joining of sorrows from our great individual wildernesses. It is clear that Gay sees and feels and brings forth so much delight from himself and into the world, and he helped me not only understand delight better but also find and look for delight in my own everyday life, in ways and forms both minor and major. I also love his writing style. This book is honestly pretty similar to Goodbye Again but I enjoyed this one much more. Gay is much more gentle and subtle with his stories, and gives them space to sit and breathe on their own without a lot of explanation, and many of his delights have poignant phrases and paragraphs that have sat with me since (especially delight 14, Joy is Such a Human Madness). Gay is also very very funny, and writes in a very personal and intimate style that made me feel, after reading this book, that he was my friend. This book is a real gift— I am delighted that I read this for my 500th book, and I am inspired to think about and write about my own delights. Some Gay quotes I enjoyed:

• On touch, shared intimacy, and the universal pleasure of union
  holding each other, the way we do

• On the possibilities inherent in every walk
  Among the purple things I didn’t gather today, and easily could have,

• On the unreliability of emotion, and why my memory is so especially untrustworthy
  I have a strong memory, I wonder if it’s true,

• On the delight of going on for and with yourself

  No one needs me to go on about the virtues of analog technologies, so I will

• On the pleasurable imprecisions of grammar
  This morning I was peeing into an empty rice wine vinegar bottle, which makes, with some olive oil, the vinegar, my very favorite salad dressing

 Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind - Hirohiko Araki

The 6th Jojo series I’ve read, and so far my favorite one. Story follows a young Italian Giorno Giovanno (giogio?) who joins an Italian gang Passione to find and defeat the boss and become a “gang star.” At this point of the Jojo series Araki really has the formula down: Take a very principled hero, some variation of a Jojo -> Give them a mission -> Give them a team -> Make them all sort of anti heroes but with sympathetic backstories -> Give them a final boss, some variation of a Dio -> And then give them a bunch of enemies along their journey -> And finally, give them all a bunch of cool costumes, good designs, and interesting stands => and then you have a sick Jojo series.

This one is my favorite mostly because I like the character and stand design the most here, and Giorno is my favorite Jojo. I like his design, I like his stand power, I like how he’s clearly a leader and wins a lot of his battles with his patience and wit, and like all other Jojos, a principled and passionate hero. I also like the supporting cast a lot in this series. Bruno is especially good and I think a zipper stand is so interesting and creative. I also liked this version of Dio a lot, and all of the minor protagonists along the way have good stands and fights that do a good job of highlighting each of the different characters in Giorno’s crew. I lke how you always know what you’re getting with Jojo, even if what you’re getting is always so wacky.

Mini Reviews:

A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles

A very pleasant reread. I love how Towles brings glamor and honor to small settings and small moments, and manages to make even imprisonment (albeit in a fancy hotel) still feel grand and poignant. I found the ending abrupt the first time, and thought it hurt the book overall, but this time I felt satisfied, perhaps because I already knew what was coming and could appreciate the slightly meandering meat of the book more.

Gold Diggers - Sathian Sanjena

I have a theory that the thing that people find the most deeply annoying are the things that are close to them, especially the things that are so close that they are clearly branches of you, and with a few changes, could easily be you today. I say that because I found the overachieving overpressured overly competitive protagonist to be extremely annoying, and had to really suffer through his perspective for the first half of the book. He remains annoying in the second half, but I liked what Sanjena does with the gold, and the ending was good and satisfying. The symbolism and all the characters were a little too on the nose, but I can forgive almost anything for a good ending.

Attack on Titan - Hajime Isayama

I read this many times over the years and dropped it many times because I either got bored or found it difficult to follow monthly. I really didn’t like this manga very much. I think the world building is attention grabbing and the character designs and the initial mystery is very exciting (titans!!! In the walls!!! Titans are the walls!!!) but everything else was either mediocre or bad to me, especially the ending. As a side note, this time I read it because I like 2 gossip and I saw people saying on twitter that the manga had fascist subtexts. 

Laughable Loves - Milan Kundera

A masterful, but very sad collection of short stories by Milan Kundera on love. In his stories, love is violent, painful, and pathetic, yet seemingly inescapable at every turn. I read it as a more impressionable person in 2017, and again in 2021, and while I enjoyed it a lot both times, I do not recommend it if you have malleable impressions and thoughts about love

Gambling Apocalypse: Kaiji - Nobuyuki Fukumoto

One of the OG gambling mangas. I do not know the history well but I definitely feel like there’s a very straight clear line that can be drawn from this work to Squid Game, which is funny and interesting to think about. Anyways for these types of stories I always like the characters, and I find the game construction / figuring out the “trick” to the game to always be fun, but eventually I always get sort of bored and then I get actively disinterested when the story (inevitably) devolves into a discussion on human nature and greed and morality. After reading at least 10 different versions of this I feel the same about all of them.

Toriko - Mitsutoshi Shimabukuro

A wacky shounen about food. The scaling is ridiculous, but the world building is good and the characters are cool and the food genuinely looks good (esp at the beginning, but it becomes kind of too crazy at the end). 

American Gods - Neil Gaiman

Just as good the… 5th time? Shadow is sooo boring but the rest of the characters are good and fun and I will literally always like modern and / or reimagined mythology.

First Person Singular - Haruki Murakami

I was baited because the first story was so good, but then the rest got progressively worse until the end where the stories were offensively bad both in content and theme. The first story really is so good though!!!! I love that kind of short story, nice, short, sweet, and a good satisfying ending to think about.

Your brain is made to think about difficult things. To help you get to a point where you understand something that you didn’t understand at first. And that becomes the cream of your life. The rest is boring and worthless. That was what the gray-haired old man told me. On a cloudy Sunday afternoon in late autumn, on top of a mountain in Kobe, as I clutched a small bouquet of red flowers. And even now, whenever something disturbing happens to me, I ponder again that special circle, and the boring and the worthless. And the unique cream that must be there, deep inside me.

Another good reason why my favorites bookshelf is called “cream”

The Secret Hour - Scott Westerfield

A YA book that I read when I was younger, about a group of kids born on the stroke of midnight that have access to a secret 25th hour, when monsters run free. The writing is honestly pretty bad, but I didn’t notice or mind when I was younger. The concept remains cool though, and I can see why I enjoyed it so much. The idea of a secret midnight hour is just appealing when you’re a kid at night having trouble sleeping, each of the secret midnighters with their own power, the number 13 having some special significance, Jessica’s big power reveal, all very enjoyable.

Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements
- Adrienne Maree Brown, Walidah Imarisha

I read this for book club. A collection of sci fi short stories focused on social justice movements. I enjoy and respect speculative sci fi greatly, and a lot of the stories were interesting and interesting illuminations of problems in our current society. A lot of them felt too “on the nose” though, and too closely tied to today, and I was hoping to also see more hopeful scifi w imaginations of the future. A lot of these writers are also not professional writers, and while they had great ideas I think some of the execution was a little rougher around the edges.

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet - Becky Chambers

I loved this book!!! A very light fun sci fi read about a tunneling crew on a spaceship (they punch holes through space time to make tunnels that people can travel faster through). Just like in heist movies, my favorite part about these types of stories is the crew. Each member has their role, their own backstory, and the way the crew interacts with each other is so much fun. All the characters and their culture / customs / differences are well thought out, and I enjoyed the story and learning more about each character a lot. Even when the plot slowed down a bit in the middle I felt like the strength of the characters and writing kept the book enjoyable.

Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations - Jonny Sun

After reading the book I liked Jonny a lot but the book less. I enjoyed a lot of what he was writing about and related to some of it, but it felt like a lot of his writing was very plain and I think lost a lot of its charm when stated instead of written, and oftentimes that extra explanatory sentence would spoil the vibe for me. 

Territory of Light - Yuko Tsushima

A short meditation on finding and building yourself, centered on being a single mother in japan and accompanied with lots of different kinds of light. A lot of fear, confusion, and anxiety in the book, but also brief moments of beauty and intense affection and care. Not a lot of sentimentality or self pity, which I appreciate and admired and found more relatable and realistic. I have come to appreciate light and its many different qualities and forms over the years. Recently I was working late at the pottery studio late by myself, and when I left and locked up I walked out to an empty street with lots of fog and very bright, thick beams of light. It felt very surreal, seeing almost solid chunks of light with the fog. This happened very soon after I finished the book, so light was on my mind, and after that I think I appreciated Tsushimas descriptions of light more.

James Baldwin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations - James Baldwin

• I haven’t read a lot of James Baldwin before, and thought this would be a nice gentle place to start. These interviews were good, and I now really want to read more Baldwin, but mostly I read it because I was so drawn to this quote in one of the interviews (I saw it on twitter):

“But the so-called straight person is no safer than I am really. Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility. Loving of children, raising of children. The terrors homosexuals go through in this society would not be so great if the society itself did not go through so many terrors which it doesn’t want to admit. The discovery of one’s sexual preference doesn’t have to be a trauma. It’s a trauma because it’s such a traumatized society.”

“I think americans are terrified of feeling anything. and homophobia is simply an extreme example of the american terror that’s concerned with growing up. I never met a people more infantile in my life.”

Effective C++: 55 Specific Ways to Improve Your Programs and Designs - Scott Meyers

I read this book for book club at work… and it was a very good book… sadly I am at a part in my career where I not only benefit from but also appreciate these types of books. I really learned a lot from this book, and I really like having very specific examples to study and learn from. Some of the items (especially ch7, templates, and ch8, memory management) were difficult to fully wrap my head around, but all programming / tech books are really reference books and make more sense each time you have to go back and look at them. This book in particular I think will be good as I dig deeper into the engine and C++ next year, and I think regardless of background or interest, every programmer benefits from a strong understanding of C++.

Beelzebub - Ryuhei Tamura

I liked this manga years ago when I was reading it, but on my second reread it was actually better than I remembered. It is pretty silly, but it knows what it is and does it well, never taking itself too seriously. It remains a funny battle manga throughout and the arcs are nice and short and actually with some pretty cool fights. 

The Stranger - Albert Camus

I read this because everytime I drive, when the sun is shining right into my eyes, or when I’m on a walk, and the sun is bright overhead and I have to squint, I think of Meursault on the beach and how a very bright, strong sun bleaches and insubstantiates reality. No comment on the book itself. 

Crying in H Mart - Michelle Zauner

I am a big fan of Michelle Zauner; I had a big Fader poster of her in my living room for something like 3 years. I liked her New Yorker piece a lot, I like her music, and I like her, so I was excited for this book. I heard some people say how it wasn’t that well written so I had low expectations going in, but the book was no asterisk good. It was well structured, and she was funny and interesting and wrote clearly and thoughtfully about something obviously very personal and painful. I liked how it was not very much about her music, but rather about her family and herself and her relationship to her mom and her culture and how they connected through food. 

笑傲江湖 - 金庸

Another 金庸 武俠小說. It was good, like all of his books are, but this one was definitely not one of my favorites. His stories are always long and exciting, but in this one the ending felt very abrupt, especially the bits around 任我行 and 日月神教 felt rushed. I also didn’t like the main character very much. I really dislike in 金庸 books when the main character falls for someone that clearly doesn’t feel the same way, and he gets wrapped in a painful love triangle that is super drawn out and primarily motivated by the protagonist being an idiot. It’s just a cringe storyline and was also my least favorite thing in 倚天屠龍記 and in 天龍八部. I also always really enjoy the martial arts, and I like reading about the different characters and sects and the slow buildup to the main character getting strong, but it just didn’t feel quite as satisfying in this one, compared to say 倚天屠龍記 or 射雕英雄傳. It was especially disappointing because a lot of people say this is their favorite (I read a thread on ptt). I also found book 4 to be super transphobic, especially the twist & the description of one of the central martial arts manuals. I know it is a product of a different time and culture, but I still found it off putting and for me, with the bad ending, really soured the series overall for me.

Books of 2021 Q1

Chuka Ichiban - Etsushi Ogawa

Chuka Ichiban is a manga from the 90s about a young Chinese chef trying to find and claim the seven legendary cooking utensils (lol) and fight the dark cooking society (lol) in order to protect China (lol). It is not the most serious of manga, but I watched the anime when I was really young in Taiwan and I was really into it then. I’ve forgotten a lot of the story since then, maybe because I watched it when I was young or because I just never finished it (I only watched it on TV at dinner), but specific scenes and characters still really stand out to me. It was interesting to reread those moments and remember them from over a decade ago. The characters in the manga are great, but I think the best part about the manga is that for me it was the first example of the two important components to a good genre manga: detailed and in depth research & absolutely wacky plotlines, e.g. the combination of an accurate and comprehensive understanding of the different types and regions of Chinese cuisine with a chef capable of cooking fried rice by literally rolling a giant ball of rice down the Great Wall, absorbing solar energy in the process to cure a nobleman’s illness. This same winning combination exists in a bunch of other manga I like: Shokugeki no Soma, Yakitate Japan, Eyeshield 21, etc., the list goes on. It is easy to dismiss this type of work as silly, but they are genuinely pretty educational and well researched, and more importantly they are undeniably earnest and fun to read. Some moments that I remember particularly vividly: the super stern instructor with falcon eyes, the originally evil dude with a lot of knives, the evil woman who spikes her food so the next opponents food sucks (exact same plotline in SnS btw), everytime the guy reveals his sick dragon embroidery…

Bestiary - K-Ming Chang

Bestiary is about three generations of Taiwanese Americans and the generational trauma and generational myth that follow them from their homeland. I have similar feelings about Bestiary as I do On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: both really well written & both a mix of prose and poetry, but I’m not really sure that I understood the book and while I feel pretty sure that it was good I’m not exactly sure how. I enjoyed Bestiary more though, maybe mostly because I related more to the source material? I especially loved and felt all the references to Taiwanese history and memory and mythology. I grew up in Taiwan and my grandparents lived through 228, and some of the stories she shares reminded me of ones I’ve heard from my family. Despite being Taiwanese and growing up in Taiwan though, I felt like a lot of the references still went over my head, although this review helped a lot.

On the note of goodreads reviews, I typically dislike and try to not read goodreads reviews, but Bestiary has one of the best _reviews_ i’ve ever read, and all reviews pale in comparison, so instead of badly writing more about Bestiary i am instead going to share this review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3342201087?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1

Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia - Sabrina Strings

One of the topics I was interested in reading about this year was fat politics; I was initially introduced to the topic by Da’Shaun on twitter & I was very drawn to it. This book was the first in my series. I enjoyed this book very much. I felt like it really shaped and changed my perspective on not just fat politics but radical politics in general, because a lot of radical theory I read is not very relatable to my personal experience (for example I have not interacted very much with police or prisons). But everyone thinks, knows, and interacts with fatness. Similar to Flavors of Empire, Fearing the Black Body helped me understand that the twin pillars of capitalism and racism are everywhere. It is important to understand the history of fatness because the history of many contemporary / modern things is rooted in racism and capitalism. Even tho today when we hate fat people we don’t think we hate black people, it is crucial to understand the racial origins of anti fatness and understand fatness as more than just a health imperative but a form of social exclusion and social control. 

Strings’ rough argument as I understand it is this: anti fatness first developed as a sign of moral and mental weakness, but along with the social construction of race and eugenics, fatness became another way to indicate race and provide a biological marker for moral inferiority, elevating fatness as a sign of personal failing to a sign of racial failing. At the same time, thinness was being developed as a form of American exceptionalism and a demonstration of the Protestant ideals, and was a reflection of the desire for northern western Europeans (and Americans) to separate themselves from the southern eastern Europeans and black people, showing once again how socio political trends spur racial sciences. All of this happened before fatness was tied to unhealthiness, and even after that the science is all bullshit. The reality is fatness has always been about control, about eugenics, about defining increasing extending and continuing the white race, and this is important to understand because people suffer and die over this. This was particularly crazy to me because we live in a society and I have internalized these outcomes but their racial origins were completely masked from me. 

One more side reason why I liked this book: after reading it I got interested in anti fatness in modern East Asian culture, so I talked to my friend Keva about it and apparently fat politics is a pretty new research field so there isn't a lot of literature yet connecting the East Asian form of anti fatness to anti black fat politics. I found that pretty cool because a lot of the stuff I read is older research. This is the first time there is something I’m interested in that isn’t very well researched yet, so I’m very much looking forward to future work!

Some quotes I enjoyed:

• On anti fatness as racism and misogyny:

  The image of fat black women as “savage” and “barbarous” in art, philosophy, and science, and as “diseased” in medicine has been used to both degrade black women and discipline white women.

• On the relationship between colonialism and race-making and physicality:
  Later race theorists would routinely use race as a justification for the colonial condition, and as a way to determine the attractiveness of women around the world. In the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the context of the Enlightenment and the peak of the slave trade, the science of race-making took flight. Then, as at its inception, philosophers underscored the purported racial distinctions in facial features, body type, and attractiveness between black women and white women.

• On fatness as a racial marker:
  After skin color, according to Buffon, the size and shape of the body were the next most important markers of physical distinction between the races.

• On race as a political tool:
  The development of racial theories had always been spurred by sociopolitical events. Thus it is hardly surprising that the massive upheaval of southern and eastern Europeans prompted a new generation of race scientists to rethink the world order.

You Have the Right to Remain Fat - Virgie Tovar

You Have the Right to Remain Fat is a short manifesto about being a fat black woman today. IMO it is the perfect book to read after Fearing the Black Body- the latter goes deep into history and the origins, and the former helps contextualize it. It is a wonderful, powerful, and personal realization of the ideas that Strings discusses in her book, and gave a lot of life to understanding fatness as a form of prison, and anti fatness as a part of a constellation of ways in which people are oppressed. 

Some quotes I liked:

• On the toxic relationship anti fatness creates with your body:
  Through a series of violent, culturally sanctioned events—so commonplace that women simply call them “life”—my innate relationship to my body was taken from me and replaced with something foreign and alien and harmful. My relationship to my body was replaced with one toxic idea: your body is wrong. This idea would threaten my happiness and my health for nearly two decades.

• On the pervasive harm of anti fatness:
  Fatphobia targets and scapegoats fat people, but it ends up harming all people. Everyone ends up in one of two camps: they are either living the pointed reality of fatphobic bigotry or they are living in fear of becoming subject to it. So, fatphobia uses the treatment of fat people as a means of controlling the body size of all people. Fatphobia creates an environment of hostility toward large-bodied people, promotes a pathological relationship to food and movement (which, when dieting, transforms into diet and exercise), and places the burden of anti-fat bias on “noncompliant” individuals—that is, fat people.

• On the close relationship between anti fatness, misogyny, and white supremacy:
  Misogyny works in tandem with white supremacy to build a population of women that is pliant and easily manipulated in order to carry out the oppressive needs of the culture and the state as they currently exist. It’s important to recognize that the desire to be thin is actually part of a drive to be compliant with current Western expectations of feminine submission and second-class citizenship.

• On the real goal and the true dream:

  • I want to be loved. I want to be happy. I want to be seen. I want to be free.

  • In the dreams I have of my future, I am fat.

Exhalation: Stories - Ted Chiang

Exhalation is a collection of science fiction short stories. I like and have read a lot of short story collections over the last few years, and Exhalation is one of my favorites. I haven’t been a big fan of scifi in the past but it’s been growing on me recently too. Specifically I think what good scifi aims to do (build & imagine a new world by extending existing technology and imagining its implications) is very interesting and amazing. Most science fiction is futuristic, but imo like examples in math scifi is most interesting as a mirror for the present. Exhalation does a fantastic job at that- it imagines technologies we don’t have in the present and extends it as a way to understand ourselves better. Some of my favorite stories:

• The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate. 

  • A lovely creative take on time travel, and the perfect setting for a poignant story. 

  • My favorite quote from the book: Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough. Gorgeous

• Exhalation

• What’s Expected of Us

• The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling

  • The perfect scifi accompaniment to The Medium is Not the Massage as well as Another Pioneer by David Foster Wallace

• Omphalos

• Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom

I also really enjoyed the bit at the end where he explains the inspiration and meaning behind each story. It is always cool to get a glimpse into the creative process of different writers

Fat Politics: The Real Story Behind America’s Obesity Epidemic - J. Eric Oliver

This is my third fat politics book. I didn’t like this one as much; this felt much more like a stereotypical non fiction book to me and I think it was missing some critical analysis. It focuses on America’s obesity epidemic, investigating its roots and concludes that it has very little grounding in science or health and is actually actively harmful. I enjoyed and learned from the science & the health history, but I felt like compared to Strings’ analysis it was really severely lacking. Oliver never discusses the racial aspect of anti fatness, and at one point actually posits that white women suffered more from anti fatness without understanding the intersectionality of the issue as both a way of social control of women and of black people. 

The Factory - Hiroko Yamada

I feel like I’ve written dozens of these reviews at this point but this is another weird Japanese story. Sometimes the themes or the vibes speak specifically to me, and I enjoy them more. This one was interesting but I felt like I got a little lost by the end. It is about three people who work at a huge factory, but they have meaningless jobs and lives. One studies moss, one shreds paper endlessly, and one proofreads incomprehensible documents. Eventually the factory expands and takes up all space in their lives, and their lives lose any semblance or relation to reality as factory specific life forms begin to evolve. My favorite part is the description of their jobs (I feel like everyone feels like their job is stupid sometimes), and my second favorite part was the ending. I felt like *spoilers* the time skip at the end was very well done and beautifully abrupt, but as most of these books typically are, the ending felt a little unresolved and I felt like I wanted a more developed ending (although I always feel like that and maybe that is the point?).

The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula K. Le Guin

The Lathe of Heaven is about someone whose dreams become reality, and everyone and everything is transformed without their knowledge, leaving the protagonist George Orr the only one who remembers the last worlds. I like the premise, and like all good scifi should I think it does a good job of investigating some critical human beliefs (e.g. Haber’s positivism and utilitarianism vs. George’s more Taoist views). I really like the ending; I think George’s character development & how it unfolds were very well written and satisfying to read. Even tho it was written in 1971, it still feels relevant today, because Haber’s egotistical and paternalistic desire to control and improve clearly still live on today in our society’s unbridled tech progressivism and optimism. Tell me a dangerously earnest SF tech bro is not just the modern, less powerful version of Haber. 

Enchanted Forest Chronicles - Patricia C. Wrede

The Enchanted Forest Chronicles are a series of four books about a dragon king, an atypical princess, the king of the Enchanted Forest, and their son. I didn’t read these stories when I was younger but I am sure if I did I would’ve loved them. They are so creative and so fun. The writing style is good and the stories are fun. I especially like how she plays with expectations and stereotypical fairy tale stories. It reminds me a lot of A. Lee Martinez’s works. The best part of the books though imo are the characters. Wrede wrote the fourth book first and then the next three prequels after, which was so super impressive to me because of how well the stories connected and how well thought out the characters are. This is only possible because she really centered the book on the characters, and because each of her characters have very distinctive personalities and depth. The characters are not super complicated, because it ultimately is still a children’s book, but they are still super well developed and likeable characters. I think that type of creative process requires incredible respect for the characters she creates, and like all good works they really take on a life of their own. I kind of wish I read the fourth book first, because I feel like it would be so magical to see backstories develop for each character. I can also definitely see why a lot of young girls like this book, because Cimorene is fantastic and so is Morwen and Kazul and Shiara. Lots of interesting heroines to relate to, each with their strengths and weaknesses and unique personalities. 

Thick: And Other Essays - Tressie McMillan Cottom

Thick: And Other Essays is a collection of essays about American black women’s relationships with beauty, desirability, and value. The essays are fantastic. I have a lot of respect for people who have such clear insight into modern culture. Some of my favorite collection of essays are Consider the Lobster and Trick Mirror; all of these writers just see so clearly and so much deeper than normal people. Thick is equally good and equally brilliant. So much depth on such a broad range of topics: beauty, infant mortality, LinkedIn, essays, black women in academia…

Some of my favorite quotes:

• On whiteness as a fundamental property of beauty:
  As long as the beautiful people are white, what is beautiful at any given time can be renegotiated without redistributing capital from white to nonwhite people.

• On beauty and ugliness as violence:
  When I say that I am unattractive or ugly, I am not internalizing the dominant culture’s assessment of me. I am naming what has been done to me. And signaling who did it.

• On productivity:
  Productivity tools promise you control where the political economy says you cannot have any.

• On the dangers of competence:
  What so many black women know is what I learned as I sat at the end of a hallway with a dead baby in my arms. The networks of capital, be they polities or organizations, work most efficiently when your lowest status characteristic is assumed. And once these gears are in motion, you can never be competent enough to save your own life. That is how black feminism knows the future.

• On Obama & whiteness:
  I have come to believe that it did not matter that Obama had faith in white people. They needed only to have faith in him: in his willingness to reflect their ideal selves back at them, to change the world without changing them, to change blackness for them without being black to them.

Also, Cottom is so funny:
“So, where are you from?” An easy question. I am from North Carolina. “No, I mean where are you from?” I am not confused, but perhaps he is, so I say it again. I am from North Carolina.

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside - Xiaowei Wang

I picked up this book initially because of the title. I thought it was going to be a cool read about tech in rural China, but in a sleight of hand that is a hallmark of most good non fiction, it actually turned out to be about something much larger and much more important. Each chapter explores a different use of technology: one chapter covers the titular blockchain chicken farm, another covers AI pig farms, another covers Taobao villages, etc. Each chapter is individually very interesting, but for me what really animated the book is understanding how these chapters braid into a theme about tech progressivism and global capitalism. 

Wang uses China as a way to think critically about capitalism and what these technologies reveal about inherent hierarchies of labor and the priorities of capitalism. Capitalism and imperialism move globally, and as capitalism expands, notions of rural continue to spread to the rest of the world. There always needs to be a rural in order to sustain the urban, but that is hidden from most people in the urban. China is helpful in building this understanding, because as they put it, China exists on the periphery- hidden from view from the cities but crucial to its continued existence. Rural China feels very distinct and far from the modern American city but the two are actually inextricably tied through technology and commerce and capitalism, and understanding the former is crucial to understanding not just the latter but these larger systems themselves. 

Another concept they examine really well is optimization. A primary goal of modern technology is to optimize and reduce inefficiency, but that is fundamentally a very egotistical aim, coming out from what Wang calls an inability to honor the unknown. This certainty in the present and the future is destructive- in the drive to optimize we oversimplify and underestimate, causing rippling effects that we cannot predict (an example they give in the book is pigs that die en masse in pig farms because of how similar all the conditions in these farms are). As a society, we optimize ceaselessly, but we never ask for what or why or how or at what cost. How do we build a different relationship with the earth and each other instead of maximally extract? That is also why I really love the last chapter, where they talk about building care and communities instead of tools to optimize. So good!!! What can we imagine that is new for our world and our communities, instead of continually trying to expand and refine the exploitation we already are intertwined with.

Hamlet - Shakespeare

Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays. Almost everyone’s read it at one point or was assigned to read it, I read it in high school, again in college, and again recently because I taught a Shakespeare course at a prison. Hamlet is also a very important play. My notes from my college class say “the history of Hamlet is the history of modern Western thought,” and over the centuries of Hamlet’s relevance there are references to Hamlet everywhere. But beyond just that, Hamlet is just a good play. It is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, and I think it highlights really well what I like about Shakespeare. Reading and watching Shakespeare is so fun because it is so rich. There are so many different interpretations and ways to understand the play, and there is plenty of evidence for everything. Productions of Shakespeare are always so interesting because the choices each director makes drastically change the play. As they say, for 1000 people there are 1000 Hamlets, and how you read Hamlet says more about you than about the play itself. This was particularly reinforced for me this time when I was giving feedback on my student’s assignments, because they each read the play in such different ways that it actually improved and changed my perspective on Hamlet. Two questions were particularly powerful for me: one asked them to write their own soliloquies, and the other asked them to think about what story they would want their friends and family to tell about them after their passing. It was touching for me to see people understand Hamlet and relate to Shakespeare in very powerful and personal ways, centuries after the plays were penned and performed. 

Ajin: Demi-Human - Gamon Sakurai

Ajin is a pretty dark manga about people who regenerate after they die. In modern society, they are prosecuted as monsters and are used in inhumane trials. The story focuses on a high schooler who discovers he is an ajin and a crazy mass murderer ajin named Sato. The manga just ended recently; I dropped it for a while but I decided to read it again from the start after it ended. It ended up being a pretty enjoyable read. Because it is short, the pacing was good throughout and the arcs flowed together pretty well. It stands out to me for two things: the panels & the art are very good (I initially picked it up because I saw a panel of Sato emerging from a crashed plane) and Sato is just a really fantastic, top tier villain. *mild spoilers* The scene where he infiltrates a building by delivering his fried hand disguised in a box of fried chicken, jumping into a wood chipper, and regenerating from the largest piece of flesh (his fucking deep fried hand) is so metal. Tokyo Ghoul levels of gore and fucked up-ness. 

The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket - Benjamin Lorr

The Secret Life of Groceries is about grocery stores in America and how they operate. We rarely think about it because grocery stores today are a common and normal part of our lives- everyone’s been to and goes regularly to grocery stores. They are deeply familiar to us; while there are regional variations grocery stores are recognizable anywhere in America and mostly the same. But when you really think about it, grocery stores are absolutely fucking insane. Where does this food come from? Who decides how it’s priced? Where do new snacks come from? How does Whole Foods always have so much fish? What unholy combination of capitalism and shipping logistics and international trade agreements led to me being able to eat grapes year round? We take for granted the incredible abundance that is offered in the grocery store today, but there is actually an incredible amount going on beneath the surface that we do not see or understand. We go to the grocery store and see food (albeit food in abundance as a product) and bring it home where it becomes food in our kitchens and our pantries. Before that though, food in the grocery store is purely a product, and that transformation from farmer -> product -> food is an incredible journey. 

The book starts with Trader Joes (I love that chapter. TJs is honestly so weird, and he explains why that is so well), and continues with shipping & trucking, snacks, grocery store employees, branding & auditing, and international sourcing. Each chapter is extremely interesting not just because it’s incredibly interesting on its own, but because of how mundane and common the final product we see is. In college, I wrote a paper in my sophomore year about chocolate for my paper on Marx, because I watched a video about cacao bean farmers that have never had or seen chocolate. Many things in our grocery stores are like that: it is absolutely bonkers how long and painful the supply chain is and how as a society we have chosen efficiency and massive scale and paid for it with immense human suffering. Even more than that though, like Blockchain Chicken Farm, the book tackles something even larger and even more important. More than grocery stores or food systems, the book is about how, as he puts it, we have the food system we deserve. While I disagree with the wording of “deserve,” I think he’s very right that the food system is a reflection of us, and grocery stores, combining their very normal natural place in our minds and hearts with the true insanity that is required to sustain it, make another clear example of how capitalism ceaselessly exploits and crushes people in exchange for comfort and efficiency. In my opinion the best nonfiction is always a bait and switch: it brings you in with a specific topic but switches it out under you to make a large and more general point.

One more mini side note: Lorr’s writing is so good, and his research so comprehensive. He actually rode with a trucker for many weeks to get a personal experience with trucking, and actually worked at the Whole Foods fish counter for a couple of months to better understand being an employee at a grocery store. I love this particular brand of passion- deep interest in something pretty common and seemingly mundane, but so electrifying and complete that afterwards you are just as enthused about it as they are. 

Some quotes I like:

• On the importance of grocery stores in understanding food:
  We’ve been happy to let more impersonal aspects of our food system—from industrialized slaughterhouses to farm bill subsidies—take up the lion’s share of investigation and critique. But to understand how and why our food gets to us in the form it does, the grocery store is a powerful entry point.

• On the inescapable maw of balance sheets:
  The economic factors can’t help but envelop everything else. Qualities like ethics and aesthetics get swallowed by the market, and reduced to price.

• On the vampiric nature of trucking:
  I come to see the trucking industry as structurally vampiric. I don’t say this to be dramatic. It is an industry that creeps along the margins of society and seduces the vulnerable, feeding itself on their aspirations, coaxing them to lend a little bit of their lives and credit in exchange for a promise that is almost never delivered: a stable job and control over their own destiny. Debt is the financial instrument that best expresses hope. Industrial trucking is brilliant at this precise exchange.

• On the costs of optimization and the devaluation of labor as a commodity:
  But somewhere in the last ten years, just-in-time manufacturing morphed into just-in-time scheduling. Whereupon the glorious terminology of efficiency squats square on the face of the retail worker.

• On the larger meaning of food:
  I want you to consider that any solution will come from outside our food system, so far outside it that thinking about food is only a distraction from the real work to be done. At best, food is an opening, like any maw, that might lead us inside. Somewhere darker, more unknowable, a place where the real work may finally begin.

We Do This ‘til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice
- Mariame Kaba

We Do This ‘til We Free Us is an incredible collection of speeches, essays, and interviews from Kaba on abolition, organized into 6 sections: an introduction to abolition, the concept of “perfect victims,” transformative justice, concrete demands of abolition, abolitionist practice and experiments, and accountability. Each chapter is so good and so powerful and so hopeful and I highlighted the shit out of everything. Really I would recommend this to anyone. It is one of the best books I have ever read. I just finished it recently but I am confident that this book is a life changer on the same scale for me as Blood in My Eye, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Assata, etc. (the other books in the Josh twitter name book list lol). I’ve been reading a lot of radical lit over the last few years, and in the last few months I’ve realized that to continue my praxis I need to combine theory with practice. Kaba’s book came for me at the perfect time, in her writing she answered a bunch of questions I had about transformative justice and abolition and provides such a clear and hopeful path forward to finding a community and organizing with that community. I am truly grateful for her wisdom and care and ceaseless dedication and I cannot recommend this book more!!!!

Some quotes I liked (too many to put down, I had 193 highlights):

• On why we center black women:
  Complex structures of violence become disturbingly clear when we center Black women and girls.

• On what PIC abolition is about:
  Prison-industrial complex abolition is a political vision, a structural analysis of oppression, and a practical organizing strategy. While some people might think of abolition as primarily a negative project—“Let’s tear everything down tomorrow and hope for the best”—PIC abolition is a vision of a restructured society in a world where we have everything we need: food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and more things that are foundational to our personal and community safety.

• On centering imagination:
  Let’s begin our abolitionist journey not with the question “What do we have now, and how can we make it better?” Instead, let’s ask, “What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?” If we do that, then boundless possibilities of a more just world await us.

• On transforming yourself as a necessary part of transforming society:
  When we set about trying to transform society, we must remember that we ourselves will also need to transform. Our imagination of what a different world can be is limited. We are deeply entangled in the very systems we are organizing to change. White supremacy, misogyny, ableism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia exist everywhere.

• On police abolition:
  Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.

• On transformative justice:
  Transformative justice is about trying to figure out how we respond to violence and harm in a way that doesn’t cause more violence and harm. It’s asking us to respond in ways that don’t rely on the state or social services necessarily if people don’t want it. It is focusing on the things that we have to cultivate so that we can prevent future harm. Transformative justice is militantly against the dichotomies between victims and perpetrators, because the world is more complex than that: in a particular situation we’re victimized, and in other situations we’re the people that perpetrate harm. We have to be able to hold all those things together.

Mini reviews:

The reviews below are mini reviews, something new I’m trying out. The razor for a mini review is:

1. did I like this book?

2. do I have something interesting to say about this book?

3. (very unfortunately but true) do I like the book cover of this book?

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again - J.R.R. Tolkien

I like The Hobbit a lot more than the LOTR series actually. I feel like The Hobbit is more charming and a lot of the LOTR series was kind of dry to me. I’m not sure if it’s because The Hobbit is shorter, but I felt like the story was more memorable and I had to trudge through fewer pages describing endless trees or rocks. I also really like Bilbo, and I think his character arc / his trip there and back again were both very satisfying.

Anxious People - Fredrik Backman

I am an avowed Fredrik Backman fanboy and have read many of his books, so I was also excited for this one especially because the premise seemed interesting, but I was so insanely disappointed. The things I feel like he does best are building strong emotional moments and creating thoughtful characters and in both of those things he fell so incredibly short in Anxious People. Characters were so one dimensional that they felt like caricatures, story felt way too forced (despite things fitting even more nicely in A Man Called Ove), writing was so cringe and overly prescriptive in its description. Just overall a very heavy handed work. I found it hard to believe it was written by the same author. I still finished it because it was a short read and the ending still turned out to be somewhat satisfying, but I definitely am deeply disappointed in this book. I remember writing the review for beartown and talking about how pleasantly surprised i was that he could do it again, and in such a wildly different dimension, but somehow after a couple more books he absolutely whiffs it in a book that is pretty much in the same genre as the first.

Severance - Ling Ma

A woman joins a group of stragglers and struggles to survive after the world is taken over by a pandemic, leaving those affected as zombies. It is a pretty interesting premise & is pretty well written (a lot of people picked it up during the pandemic for obvious reasons) but the ending was pretty uninspired and I felt like the themes of solitude and routine could’ve been explored better. They serve more as backdrops to the story than the backbone of the story itself. 

Alice in Borderland - Haro Aso

Alice in Borderland is about a group of four dudes who get transported to an alternate Tokyo and have to play in twisted games to survive. I watched the Netflix series, got bored halfway, then read the manga.The manga is unfortunately also not very good. I think it takes a very common (but popular) premise, doesn’t execute on it that creatively (imo Kakegurui and Liar Game both do it better), and doesn’t really explore or dissect themes on relationships and human nature well, which is fine but actually kind of important in psychological thrillers and the poor attempts to do so really hurt the ending for me. I don’t need my stuff to all be deep, but if it tries to be I want it to do a good job. 

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

The Da Vinci Code is further evidence that a book does not need to be remotely good to be entertaining lol. If you don’t take it too seriously it’s actually a pretty fun read, if you take it seriously (as Dan Brown himself unfortunately seems to) then the book is pretty goofy. Everyone digs a good conspiracy tho-- there’s a reason why the book is so popular.

Almond - Won-pyung Sohn

Almond is about a teenager who is incapable of feeling feelings and makes friends with a delinquent Gon, and thru that friendship both of them transform. I went into it w pretty high expectations but it was just a pretty typical feel good story. The premise was interesting to me initially and I guess I expected it to be darker but in retrospect it is the perfect premise for a feel good story lol.

Septimus Heap - Angie Sage

Septimus Heap is a series about a magical boy in a world of magic. I read this in middle school and I got really into the world. I especially liked the bold font and the alternative spelling of all the magic (magyk?) lol. I read it again a few years ago, that time actually finishing the series (I think Sage was still working on the series back then) and it was pretty entertaining. I tried reading it again recently and it definitely feels stale. The story & the world building are still impressive, but the characters & the writing are not that interesting. A lot of pretty cliche stuff. Some children’s books are stunning in their creativity and their simplicity is definitely an expression of the author’s imagination and skill, like The Phantom Tollbooth, The Enchanted Forest Chronicles etc. Others I think are just entertaining, which is fine but as a result ages worse (e.g. Septimus Heap, Artemis Fowl, Alex Rider, etc.). 

Books of 2020

This was a difficult and weird year for everyone, but as usual, for me, books have been a consistent and constant source of satisfaction and joy. Weirdly enough, in a year where escapism seems more appealing than ever, a lot of the books I enjoyed the most this year were nonfiction (mostly radical theory).

2020 in books:

Last year one of my goals was to read more casually, and read only when I really felt like it. I was able to do the same this year, and I found that although I read about the same (maybe a bit less overall), I read much more sporadically and would finish 2-3 books in a week then take a break for a bit. I find it suits me much better to read like that, and it feels much less stressful than reading on a “schedule.” 

I also started writing reviews again this year. I still really enjoy thinking and writing about books, but doing them quarterly instead of monthly and only writing about the books I was interested in writing about made doing the reviews a lot easier (although I’m still always late lol).

This year, I also noticed that my reading was split into roughly three chunks: 

• from Jan to March I read a ton of fiction (I read basically every Jia Tolentino rec I could find on twitter lol)

• From March to June I was adjusting to the quarantine and mostly read easy things that didn’t require any thinking, so I doomscrolled a lot of old manga

• From June onwards I started getting back into radical lit, and started reading a bunch of stuff from friends or reading lists online, interspersed with random fiction from browsing goodreads or twitter.

Next year, I’d like to continue my reading and writing habits. I’d also like to continue reading radical lit (my next topic is going to be fat politics), but I’m also interested in getting back into reading some more fiction. I typically visit a bookstore every two months or so to source a bunch of recs and get new books, but I haven’t been able to do that so I think my fiction was running a little low for a while :-(. I got a bunch of interesting recs from friends recently though, so hopefully like this year I can get into them in the next few months. I ALSO WANT TO READ MORE SHORT STORIES. I forgot how much I enjoyed short story collections until I read In Persuasion Nation. I’ve also been putting off The Pale King and I am going to read it next year :<.

Cream:

Anyways, here are my favorite books of 2020, each with a short description / selling point:

• If you are interested in learning about the ways in which creativity is co-opted and exploited under capitalism, then read Against Creativity by Oli Mould. I didn’t actually like the writing that much, but over the last few months I’ve found the book to be extremely relevant and I still think about some of the ideas he presents, which is my most important standard for non fiction.

• If you are interested in a depressing but poignant and thoughtful short story collection about boredom and inauthenticity then read Oblivion by David Foster Wallace. Better the second time.

• If you are interested in a cute, funny, and short manga combining ancient Roman culture and modern Japanese bathing culture, then read Thermae Romae by Mari Yamazaki.

• If you are interested in being submerged in a beautifully ethereal book about a community isolated from the world, then read Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips. Special shoutout to the narrative structure: so good + so effective!

• If you are interested in the idea that the fundamental message is in the medium, not the content of the message, then read The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Flore. 

• If you are interested in a satisfying epic about summer and baseball and magic, then read Summerland by Michael Chabon.

• If you are interested in some of the best writing I’ve ever read, and some of my favorite short stories, then read A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berin.

• If you are interested in “the subject of being alive when being alive feels terrible,” then read My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh.

  • https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/ottessa-moshfeghs-painful-funny-novel-of-a-young-womans-chemical-hibernation

• If you are interested in a beautiful book about loss and recovery and the comfort of feeling understood and understanding then read Moshi Moshi by Banana Yoshimoto. I liked Kitchen, but I think I like Moshi Moshi even more.

• If you are interested in learning what makes an effective bus system then read Better Buses, Better Cities: How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit by Steven Higashide. It sounds kind of troll but this book was actually very interesting. 

• If you are interested in a transformative collection of speeches, interviews, and essays about intersectional identity, then read Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde.

• If you are interested in the experience of being sad while knowing how small your sorrows are, but feeling how important they are to you, then read All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews. There’s also a sick monologue at the end, and I am a sucker for sick monologues.

• If you are interested in the comforting and redemptive nature of food then read Kitchen. Most enticing katsudon description ever.

• If you are interested in feeling unseen and grappling with an unbreakable solitude and loneliness, or if you’re interested in a writer’s perspective, read Outline by Rachel Cusk.

• If you are interested in the 2nd best sports shonen manga then read Eyeshield 21. It helps during the Super Bowl, I can kind of understand what’s going on.

• If you are interested in an introduction to prison abolition then read Are Prisons Obsolete by Angela Davis.

• If you are interested in a painful but painfully relevant book about the role of romanticism and society in sexual abuse, then read 房思琪的初戀樂園 by 林奕含.

• If you are interested in a book about failure and the importance of running away, trying again, and facing problems earnestly, then read Silver Spoon by Hiromu Arakawa. This is my favorite manga of all time, and I am sad but happy to see it finished.

• If you are interested in a direct and blunt book about the viciousness of America and the necessity & tools for revolution, then read Blood in My Eye by George Jackson. Literally one of the greatest thinkers I have ever read.

• If you are interested in the best sports manga of all time then read Haikyu. It seriously has it all and does it all. It also features one of the best and most satisfying final arcs I’ve ever read.

• If you are interested in Japanese pop culture (ranging from Karaoke, Hello Kitty, anime, and games) OR if you are interested in the ways in which pop culture and sociocultural trends exist in a co-constituent relationship, then read Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World by Matt Alt. 

• If you are interested in a fucked up Japanese thriller about four housewives that get involved in a nasty crime then read Out by Natsuo Kirino. The thriller part is pretty good; what made the book great for me was the ending.

• If you are interested in an amazing transformative text from a heroic black radical feminist + revolutionary about the process of becoming a revolutionary then read Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur.

• If you are interested in the role and necessity of policing in modern society then read The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale (hint: they are harmful and we don’t need them).

• If you are interested in an interesting and thoughtfully written book from the perspective of an autistic teenager then read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.

• If you are interested in the pernicious effects of colonialism on both the colonizer and the colonized, then read Discourse on Colonialism by Aime Cesaire.

• If you are interested in a beautiful lesbian love story then read Run Away with Me, Girl by Battan.

• If you are interested in a pedagogy for the oppressed then read Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Pablo Freire. Sometimes nonfiction books are just really aptly named
  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• If you are interested in modern Greek family saga and/or a coming-of-age novel with an intersex narrator, then read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. 

• If you are interested in how marginalized audiences engage with and enjoy video games in the era of casual video games, then read Gaming Sexism: Gender and Identity in the Era of Casual Video Games by Amanda C. Cote. The ideas explored in this book imo are also generally relevant to other cis male dominated communities. 

• If you are interested in learning more about one of the most powerful and effective systems of propaganda in the world, mass communication media in the US, then read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman.

• If you are interested in a beautifully satisfying and sappy book about a grumpy old man then read A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman. Save it for a happy day of reading.

• If you are interested in reading the OG science fiction epic then read Dune by Frank Herbert. I loved the world building; Arrakis and the Fremen are particularly cool.

• If you are interested in a thoughtful essay about the nature and purpose of poetry, and why everyone seems to both hate and love poetry, then read The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner.

• If you are interested in a collection of speeches and essays by Kwame Ture about liberalism, black power, and pan-Africanism then read Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism by Kwame Ture.

• If you are interested in African American culinary history or the ways in which food is deeply connected with society, history, culture, and identity, then read The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South by Michael W. Twitty

Books of 2020 Q3

房思琪的初戀樂園 - 林奕含

cw: sexual abuse, violence

房思琪的初戀樂園 is about a young girl who gets sexually abused by her teacher over many years, eventually culminating in her mental breakdown. It is Lolita from the perspective of Lolita. The book is painful to read, but it is an important read, one of those works of fiction that feel so real & urgent that it almost reads like non fiction. A couple things in the book feel particularly sharp & insightful to me, and the comparison to Lolita is apt for more than just plot reasons. The first is the use of literature & language to mask horrible things, disguising abuse as love through flowery language. Just like Lolita, the author uses lots of literary references, and all of the main characters (房思琪, her friend, their older neighbor, and her abusive Chinese literature teacher) are all well read and frequently quote or reference literature. The second is the way rape and sexual abuse are not just personal acts of violence, but also societal. 李國華’s repeated abuse is only possible because he understands the uses and the purpose of shame to coerce and control, and for me some of the most painful parts to read were the parts where the girls were let down by society: the woman at the tutoring agency who drives the girls to 李國華, the comments she receives after she posts about her situation online, her parents sharing a polite meal with 李國華.

One, No One and One Hundred Thousand - Luigi Pirandello

One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand is about a guy who “loses his reality” after his wife comments on how his nose tilts to the right and he realizes that everyone knows a different version of him (hence the title: he is one, no one, and one hundred thousand). The book has a very loose plot, mostly describing his grappling with this problem & him slowly going crazy. Most of the book follows a long internal monologue & argument, and especially in the earlier parts feels more like a thought experiment than an actual novel. The lack of plot makes it feel a little dry, but I think more importantly I just read it at the wrong time.

Books like these rely heavily on some level of 共鳴 with the concept, and I don’t think I’ve ever really experienced the same hell. I’ve definitely thought about it before, but I just don’t think it’s ever really bothered me that different people have different perceptions of each other. I also felt that Genge was too cynical and gave up too early. Just as others didn’t make an attempt to understand him, he also didn’t make a genuine attempt to understand the people around him. I understand feeling frustrated by the effort and the imperfect nature of communicating and seeing, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the right response is sliding into despair like Genge does. I think that frustration can coexist with being OK / excited about working on relationships where you never fully understand each other but you continually try and progress & also being currently sad about feeling lonely from not currently having that type of relationship.

Ms Ice Sandwich - Mieko Kawakami

Ms. Ice Sandwich is a nice short weird coming of age novel, about a boy who is interested in a woman who sells sandwiches in a market. He is too shy to talk to her, but is drawn by her demeanor and her bright blue eyelids, the latter the reason why he calls her Ms Ice Sandwich. The narrator is by far my favorite part of the book-- it seems like a lot of Japanese novels I read are just hard carried by a very charming and smart but unassuming narrator. In this one, the boy is clearly still young and innocent, but he sees and thinks about things with surprising sensitivity and clarity. His dad passed away before the book starts, and he currently lives with his mom (a fortune teller) and his grandma (who is slowly dying). He doesn’t have many friends, except for Tutti, who energetically recreates Al Capone gun fights when she watches movies. Tender and warm but unsentimental, like many Japanese books I’ve read Ms Ice Sandwich gently touches significant topics like love, loss, and relationships, but doesn’t attempt to give any overarching morals or lessons. After I finish these books, I always want to ask what the point is, but honestly it seems like the book is the point, and the slice itself is enough. 

Blood in My Eye - George Jackson

I tweeted about this book here: https://twitter.com/jstnchng3/status/1288905162308726785?s=20

Haikyuu - Haruichi Furudate

It is always bittersweet to have a great manga end. Sad because I’ve been consistently following for so many years, but happy because I love endings and it’s always wonderful to see a story end strongly. I’ve read a bunch of sports manga before, but in my opinion Haikyuu is the best one. Sports mangas are fairly formulaic (more than typical shonen, which is already pretty formulaic) because the overall story structure doesn’t allow for much flexibility. There are always the same arcs: the first tournament, spring tournament, & nationals, with training arcs sprinkled in between, and always the same general character archetypes: energetic newbie, talented but aloof young star, powerful and confident ace, etc. Not every manga has the same exact group (Haikyuu has no villains AND no people with red eyes, which I really like) but they draw from the same overall set. Because of this, typically in sports manga the story is not the differentiator of quality. What sets apart great from good and good from bad are in my opinion two things: character design & development and philosophy.

The first is kind of obvious. There are so many characters and teams that they have to be very distinctive in design and personality and backstory, otherwise they just kind of become unrecognizable and the story falls apart. Haikyu is so great at that, each of the characters on the main team get great development (literally all of them get a turn, but Hinata + Kageyama + Tsukishima have particularly outstanding ones). Other teams also get a lot of love. There are so many awesome and memorable and likeable characters, like the twins, Bokuto, Ushijima, Oikawa, etc. The teams themselves are also quite memorable. They all play with a very distinctive style and so even though every match is just good old volleyball each one feels very different and fresh. The only other manga I felt did as good of a job at that was Eyeshield 21. 

The second one sounds a bit stranger, but I think underpinning every sports / Shonen in general is a simple philosophy that drives the characters and the story. Haikyuu’s is being good means being free, and being free means being able to play. Think about Tsukishima’s monster block, or Hinata at training camp, or Kageyama’s middle school team. These themes are consistent throughout the manga, and give purpose and meaning to some of the larger personal conflicts and team competition. It also fits nicely with the fact that most sports manga all take place in HS, where inevitably people graduate and teams change and teams really only have one year to play together. Despite all the drama and hard work and heartbreak it’s ultimately really a short time.

Which brings me to the third reason why I think Haikyuu is so great: THE STORY. The basic elements Haikyuu is incredible at, especially the training arcs-- they are all so well thought out and interesting (the one where they play a bunch of Tokyo teams and the one where Hinata sneaks to camp especially stand out to me). The most impressive arc for me though is by far the last arc, where (spoilers) Hinata starts to play professional volleyball. I found it a nice way to wrap up some of the loose ends and revisit and polish old characters, but also to extend the philosophy in a way that just isn’t possible for high school volleyball. I love love love the final arc, imo it so crystallizes everything great about sports manga. First there’s a sick training arc (BRAZIL BEACH VOLLEYBALL) and then just a chain of chapters where we learn more about some of the most outstanding characters & revisit their philosophy (nicely & succinctly captured by their teams slogans), ending w our two stars Hinata and Kageyama. Just perfect. 

盜墓筆記之1: 七星魯王宮 - 南派三叔

盜墓筆記 is a series of fantasy novels about tomb robbers in China. In the series, they rob old Chinese tombs to find treasures to sell, and on their adventures encounter all sorts of traps and magic and dangerous creatures (lots of zombies, lots of flesh eating bugs). The books are pretty solid but they feel kind of like 爽文- not a ton of depth, just an interesting story and an enjoyable read. Part of it is just that the premise & the story is cool, but there are literally cliffhangers on every chapter. Cliffhangers are fine, it keeps the book interesting, but omg the book even ends on a random cliffhanger, like someone just chopped the book in half. I read the next two books too and they actually got worse with the egregious cliffhangers, and I kept on finishing stories with even more questions than when I started -_- 

How to be an Antiracist - Ibram X. Kendi

I read this book for book club. The basic argument is pretty simple & sound: there is racism, which is any policy that creates inequitable outcomes between people of different skin colors, and antiracism, which is any policy that creates equitable outcomes. I like how the book is structured; it feels kind of repetitive but that’s the point. These concepts are related to everything, and it is important to analyze multiple things through the same lens to understand how they fit together. My primary criticism of the book though is I feel like it is oversimplified to the point of being wrong. A discussion of racism is not complete without a discussion of capitalism and imperialism. Like Kwame Ture says, "Anytime you make an analysis of an oppressed people, in any aspect of their life, & you leave out the enemy, you will never come to a correct analysis… Our biggest problem is our enemy capitalism and it must be destroyed." It’s weird because at some points he does kind of touch on these ideas, but for a large part of the book I felt like he was focused on individual action rather than solutions for structural problems. The most egregious chapters imo were the reverse racism chapter and the capitalism chapter (describing how Warren shows a model for ethical capitalism). I also didn’t like the title, which isn’t really his fault, but I think it contributes to the oversimplification of these ideas and I’m sure people will read this and think that this is the final answer for how to be an anti racist. For me personally I’ve found engaging directly with some of the black feminists and black radical theorists he mentions were a lot more revelatory and transformative than reading this book.

Also check out this article by Josh: https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/on-the-anti-racist-economy

Pure Invention: How Japan's Pop Culture Conquered the World - Matt Alt

I love this book; it combines all the things I like in nonfiction: a subject I have some experience with, tons of great research, a fresh perspective, an unifying framework, fantastic structure,and lots of passion. Pure Invention discusses pop culture in Japan from the 1950s to present. The book is roughly split into two parts: the first part about how Japan created products that capture the hearts of people globally and the second about how social and cultural trends then went back to influence Japanese pop culture. Each chapter covers a specific item, like karaoke, tamagotchis, manga, anime, etc. I really like that structure because it allows him to go into a ton of detail about each thing, but they all fit really nicely in the overall point he was trying to make. In each of the chapters I learned a lot of new stuff, some I didn’t know a lot about like walkmans or karaoke, and some I had pretty good familiarity with before, like manga or video games. I particularly liked learning about the leftist origins of manga (pamphlet in one hand, manga in the other) and it made me think a lot too about how art is best and most creative when it is completely free to explore, which is why I think radical art has so much more vibrancy and creativity and life. 

The book reminded me a little of Zanker’s book on Augustan art and iconography. Roman art is so similar & constrained because it was so tightly controlled, and through that book (and in general my Roman art class) I learned that art doesn’t just reflect life but influences life. In the same way, pop culture isn’t just a reflection of socio cultural trends (as it is in the first part) but also shapes our lives. There is a really interesting and complex bidirectional relationship that I think is often misrepresented or missed in common conceptions of pop culture as shallow. 

Tokyo Ghoul - Sui Ishida

I read Tokyo Ghoul a few years ago, but I think Tokyo Ghoul:re left it on a bad note, so I wanted to revisit the original. I forgot how good the original is, especially because I binged the first and followed re week by week, so re was comparatively much longer for me. I really love the setting and the characters, the gritty concept of ghouls living and hiding in a modern city. It really feeds into this wonderful dark fantasy of the hidden dangers lurking behind seemingly safe modern cities, but within that dog eat dog world there’s an oasis where ghouls congregate and drink coffee. The setting also creates these wonderful opportunities for love and tenderness in the grisly carnage, like Hinami’s parents or Ken & Touka. It reminds me of Sheldon Pearce’s review of DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell is Hot: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22940-its-dark-and-hell-is-hot/, specifically the final paragraph where he describes DMX as not just “a rapper in the trenches; he was a messiah in the gutter, painting a portrait of a community laid desolate by corruption, and the sociopaths its conditions were breeding. He was the voice of the street corners and the graveyards, telling stories of the lost and the damned. From on high, he demanded empathy for man, who were cold to murder and unapologetic for their crimes because he knew it’s hard to be good in a world this broken.” Ken Kaneki is an obviously great character, and the duality of Ken as a suffering but brave and innocent teenager with Ken as the twisted but protective avenger is so excellent. The Yamori arc that bridges the two is brilliant, and has some of the most disturbing but impressive panels, not just in Tokyo Ghoul but all of manga. The art is not always the easiest to follow, but the manga is not really a battle manga (idk about re though lol) but the lines and the details are beautiful and it was cool to see his art evolve as well. I forgot because re gets messy, but Tokyo Ghoul really is a unique work 

Out - Natsuo Kirino

Out is a Japanese murder thriller about four women that work at a bento factory. One murders her physically abusive husband and the other three help her cover it up. Each of the four women have their own struggles, and they are led by Masako, a tough woman who is estranged from her husband and her teenage son. A lot of complicated stuff happens which I won’t spoil, but some absolutely crazy shit happens and it all builds up to a super satisfying climax (for example, early on in the book, they are butchering people in a bathtub and that is not even the craziest thing that happens). In my opinion good thrillers are dependent on context, and the greatest ones are the ones where you can understand the characters’ motivations and why they behave the way that they do, because that creates the best immersion. Kirino accomplishes this with some truly weird stuff, which makes Out feel both deeply uncomfortable but also unfortunately understandable at the same time. I can always appreciate the skill involved in that. 

Assata: An Autobiography - Assata Shakur

More twitter book reviews: https://twitter.com/jstnchng3/status/1300624129305968641 

The Plotters - Un Su Kim

I say I don’t read a lot of thrillers but I read two in short succession this month lol. I guess I do actually like thrillers sometimes; I just don’t read a lot of them? Plotters is a translated Korean thriller about a network of assassins. These assassins are directed by plotters, a hidden group of people who decide who needs to be killed, based on a complicated relationship between government and big businesses. The main character, an assassin, eventually has to make a choice that shakes up the whole industry. Pretty predictable stuff, but I still liked it a lot because I think the execution was great. The book reminds a little of John Wick, in the sense that there are a lot of complicated and archaic rules and settings that just make the whole story cool (for example he lives & works out of a library lol, and a bunch of assassins / contacts work in a meat market). It feels unnecessary but also so cool, like the flairs in John Wick with the hotel and the gold coins-- it’s the details of the world that are primarily enjoyable.

The End of Policing - Alex S. Vitale

More twitter book reviews: https://twitter.com/jstnchng3/status/1300849188708601856 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is about a teenager on the spectrum, Christopher, who lives with his father and loves math and hates the color yellow. After a dog in the neighborhood gets killed by a pitchfork, Christopher decides to investigate the dog’s death. I first read this book in high school, but decided to reread it after listening to a podcast about the play (the podcast was very good, would recommend), and found it just as enjoyable the second time. I have a goldfish brain so I don’t remember much about a lot of the stories that I read, but somehow years later I still remember almost everything about this book. That’s how much it stood out to me and how much I enjoyed it back then. One of the primary reasons why is because of Haddon’s unique perspective & tender touch of the subject & story. A lot of what drives the story forward or some of the details important to the plot are only mentioned briefly, and instead we really get to see things thru Christopher’s perspective. I loved those details; that’s what really made the book feel alive to me. It never feels like he is a caricature or his problems are taken lightly. Instead, Haddon shows a very nuanced picture of family and relationships completely thru the perspective of Christopher, building up a wonderfully touching ending with Christopher & his father. 

Discourse on Colonialism - Aime Cesaire

Discourse on Colonialism is another of Josh’s (https://twitter.com/queersocialism) recommendations and Josh does not miss. The book is really short, sub 100 pages, but really super good. I expected some pretty dense stuff, but it reads much more like poetry, which I really enjoyed (I actually found the foreword and intro way tougher lol). In Discourse, Cesaire explains how colonialism negatively impacts both the colonized and the colonizer. It is obvious how colonialism hurts the colonized, but the colonizer also suffers because thru their oppression, they lose their humanity and slide into brutality, where they are just as dehumanized as the ones they are dehumanizing. Colonization is thingification, and no one colonizes innocently. Another part of his argument I really enjoyed was the necessity of decolonizing your mind. Decolonizing is not a call to return to the past, but rather an attempt at creating a new future combining the productivity of the present with the warm fraternity of the past. The economic argument is important, but the imagination required to think beyond the present and create a future is crucially dependent on decolonizing your mind. That’s also where Cesaire talks a bit about Afro-Surrealism, which was very interesting and definitely something I am planning on reading more about in the future.

Hardboiled & Hard Luck - Banana Yoshimoto

I am a big fan of Banana Yoshimoto but explaining why is difficult because so much of my enjoyment is really just the vibe / the mood. I love her novels because of how wonderfully evocative they are, but I’m never quite sure exactly what is doing the evoking. For the same reason it’s not super clear to me why, but I didn’t feel like these two stories landed with me as powerfully. I still enjoyed them, but I just didn’t feel them as deeply as I did her other books. Maybe it has something to do with the length? Or the subject matter? Characters? Writing style? Maybe even just my mood / mental state while reading? I just bought two more Banana Yoshimoto books so hopefully I will enjoy those more.

Run Away With Me, Girl - Battan

Run Away With Me, Girl is a short romance manga about two girls who were lovers in high school and broke up after graduation because it was “time to grow up.” 10 years later, Maki, who has never really moved on, meets Midori again, who is now almost married to another man, and they rekindle their friendship / relationship. 

I absolutely loved this manga. It was so cute, so gorgeous T_T. I mostly read longer stories with super expansive world building, so it was nice to read something shorter that I could finish in one sitting, and goes to show how length is really not always necessary to develop good characters & tell a touching story. The two main characters are so sweet and cute together. I love how they are different, and how that’s reflected in the art style with the line work and the backgrounds. But they also complement each other, and that dynamic is so perfectly captured in the panels when they’re both together and the contrasting art styles merge & the background fades, leaving this wonderful glow that you can feel in a black and white manga. Endings are particularly important to shorter stories, and the ending for this one was also perfect. I love the callback to the previous scenes (no spoilers) and the story wraps in a very satisfying way for me. It is a well written & beautifully drawn manga, something I can always appreciate.

Books of 2020 Q2

Kitchen - Banana Yoshimoto

Kitchen is about dealing with loss and grief, and the redemptive nature of food. It is one of my favorite books for two fairly different reasons: Kitchen is short and cute and a delight to read, but at the same time in a short novella explores serious topics and expresses serious emotions. I particularly like how Banana Yoshimoto writes about grief. None of her characters pull their hair out or wail or beat their chest, opting instead for what I felt were more relatable, muted expressions of sorrow. My sister described it as “writing about an emotion without describing it, like a negative space in a drawing, always in such a delicate way where you fill in the blank and feel somewhat ethereal.”

What I like the most about her work though is that she takes something hyper specific & seemingly minor and treats it seriously, making it feel universal and important. Like the final scene (no spoilers)— I think most people have a very similar redemptive food experience. Mine is being depressed in 2018 with my friend eating oranges on our couch. Every night one of us would peel a sumo orange and we would share it and talk or watch youtube videos on our TV or just sit. It’s such a small thing, sharing a piece of fruit, but to me it is memorable and meaningful, and I will always fondly think of those sumo oranges and that couch. Banana Yoshimoto not only accurately captures that type of moment, but also feels and understands the importance of those moments enough to center a book on them. That is why I love her work.

Outline - Rachel Cusk

Outline is about a British writer who goes to Athens to teach a class. Each chapter is about a friend or stranger that she meets, and the stories they tell her. Something about the narrator inspires confession; each of these people share their histories and insecurities and fears, and the narrator reflects and manifests those fears and desires. Atypical to most novels of this form, there is no chapter devoted specifically to the narrator, so we never really directly hear her story, but through her commentary & discussion with each person we learn a little bit about her personality and her background. I like that she never features prominently in any of the stories, because I enjoy the emphasis on the original storyteller, but I also really like how she doesn’t listen passively & transcribe exactly, instead offering her own opinion or challenging their thoughts and assumptions. A very on-the-nose review I read described Outline as a book from a writer’s perspective.

The stories don’t really build into anything cohesive (they feel more like fragments), but I felt that there were some consistent underlying themes: themes of feeling unseen and grappling with an unbreakable solitude and loneliness. My favorite chapters were the first two, although I enjoyed them all and felt like I would enjoy them anew at different stages in my life.

Naruto - Masashi Kishimoto

Quarantine started around then so I lost a lot of my focus for reading novels. I decided to re-read a bunch of old manga instead because some series were ending + I wanted to revisit older stuff + manga is easy to pick up and put down. Naruto belongs to the older set of manga that I actually watched the anime on TV long ago in Taiwan before reading the manga. It ended when I was in college but I was so mad about the ending that it left a really sour taste in my mouth. When I re-read it this time around, I remembered why I initially liked it so much, because it really does a lot of things super well. The world building is deep but immediately immersive (all the references to Japanese mythology and religion are great and the concept of ninja villages are cool), the characters are uniquely designed (in looks, personality, abilities), the fight scenes are well executed and well drawn, and the underlying theme is fairly simple (a coming-of-age story) but engaging and inspiring. I also like how the story is structured, up until the end of the Pain arc each arc led nicely into the next & they were all different (the Zabuza arc is especially great). The ending is where it all went wrong though. The final war arc was around 200 chapters of ??? Final antagonists came out of nowhere, power scaling got all fucked up after 700 chapters (they throw knives at the beginning of the manga and chuck meteors at the end), and lots of cool characters just became irrelevant.

Familiar Things - Hwang Sok-yong

In Familiar Things, after his father goes to jail, Bugshot and his mom join a big community that lives in a garbage dump called Flower Island, where they survive by sorting and selling trash from more prosperous districts in the city. It is a story fundamentally about the dark side of capitalism & East Asia’s rapid economic development. People often praise the little tigers of Asia, but capitalism always depends on expansion and repression to exist and there are always victims. Like Jia talks about in her review of The Memory Police, Familiar Things works in the tradition of allegory, making the abstract concept of classes in capitalism a literal material thing: these kids, abandoned by society, live on the outskirts where they are invisible, subsiding on scraps.

The Sellout - Paul Beatty

The Sellout opens with protagonist (last name Me) at the Supreme Court, fighting the court case Me against the US for re-segregating his home town. His crime, as he describes it, is “whispering Racism in a post-racial world” (specifically owning slaves and segregating public transportation and schools). It is a bitingly funny, satirical novel about race, and how sad and funny and bizarre the conversation about race has become in America. I particularly enjoyed the last third of the book, partially because I think I got used to the style by then, and partially because the final payoff was pretty good. The two shortcomings of the book for me were 1) as a foreign born American, a lot of references went over my head and 2) at times the book felt a bit unfocused / rant-y, but that might be more on me, because the book feels very smart and I am sure it was a deliberate choice.

Kimetsu no Yaiba - Koyoharu Gotōge

Kimetsu no Yaiba is about a boy who becomes a demon slayer to get revenge and save his sister after his entire family gets killed by demons and his sister is turned into a demon. I picked up the series right before it got super popular, which was crazy because I saw how quickly people started to talk about it / read it / watch it, especially after its super good anime adaptation. I think for a period a volume even sold more copies than One Piece, which is nuts. Thinking back now it makes sense why the series was so popular, because in my opinion most really explosively popular manga have their success based on their characters, and Kimetsu has a great cast: lots of diverse characters (protagonists and antagonists alike) with cool designs and personalities and background. Think of all the fan art and discussion and cosplay; that really only happens when people really fw the characters. I also like that the story was fairly short, which seems like a consistent trend for most WSJ manga now. I like that much much more than stories that get unnecessarily dragged out, because it gives the author an opportunity to wrap the story when appropriate instead of forcibly creating more conflict or introducing new antagonists, which often feel surprising or forced (a horrible offender of this is Bleach). The ending was a little unsatisfying though, because the pacing at the end definitely felt surprisingly rushed, considering how popular it was. From arc to arc the 3 upper moon fights were pretty short, and the final Muzan fight was anti-climatic compared to how interesting and well thought out the previous fights were. Still preferable to a dragged out story, but I felt like there was more to see.  

The Art of the Novel - Milan Kundera

The Art of the Novel is a really interesting and educational series of essays / speeches / interviews about novels as an art form. In these essays, Kundera discusses the history of novels, the potential future of novels and the current danger they face, and how his work fits into that academic lineage. According to Kundera, underlying each novel is an ontological hypothesis, a theory about the world that anchors it. Based on that idea, each novel is centered around a few definitions that define the project of the novel. For example, some of the fundamental words for The Unbearable Lightness of Being are lightness, kitsch, and inexperience. All of his ideas come from a very specific context, because as a European academic, he is primarily focused on a very narrow academic canon, so novel for him is very narrowly defined. I didn’t really mind the definitive sweeping statements about all novels though, because ultimately what I liked most about this collection was that it helped me understand Kundera’s goals a lot better, which I think will make rereads of his books much more enjoyable.

Pluto - Naoki Urasawa

Pluto is the fourth Naoki Urasawa manga that I’ve read. The story is based on the Greatest Robot on Earth arc in Astro Boy, reinterpreted by Urasawa as a murder mystery with the main protagonist as Gesicht, a Europol robot detective who tries to solve a string of famous robot & human creator murders. I’ve never read Astro Boy (a little too before my time) but I don’t think it’s necessary and I still enjoyed the story a lot. Pluto has all of the classic great parts of Urasawa’s works: suspenseful story, fantastic characters w/ very compelling backstories, integration of larger social & cultural contexts / issues into personal stories, and philosophical explorations of good and evil. It also has the classic negative (which may be more of a personal failure) of being a little bit hard to follow. Pluto is also shorter, at 60-ish chapters, which I think helps make the story simpler but comes at the cost of a smaller mind fuck and a lesser emotional investment / pay off.

Minor Feelings - Cathy Park Hong

I read this book with Shicong, Greg, and Keva, and we discussed it in a zoom call. I took notes on our meeting here. Unfortunately I didn’t take notes while I was talking, so very few of my thoughts are there, but I enjoyed our discussion a lot and I thought they all had really interesting things to say.

Are Prisons Obsolete - Angela Davis

This is the third book I’ve read by Angela Davis, and she remains extremely accessible and amazingly knowledgeable. A lot of people are discussing abolition these days, and if this is a new topic to you, this is a fantastic introductory text. Just < 100 pages of straight facts, short and easy to understand. Angela discusses some pretty radical ideas, but she presents them so clearly and cogently that they seem incredibly obvious, a real testament to her skill & gift at educating.

My understanding of the general argument is this:

• In chapter 1, she discusses how and when America started to “relegate ever larger numbers of people from racially oppressed communities to an isolated existence marked by authoritarian regimes, violence, disease, and technologies of seclusion that produce severe mental instability.” The ubiquity of prisons today has not always been our reality; the prison industrial complex really began to grow and expand in the 1980s when larger and large prison populations, independent of crime rate, “began to attract vast amounts of capital—from the construction industry to food and health care provision—in a way that recalled the emergence of the military industrial complex.”

• In chapter 2, Davis explains the ties between prisons and slavery, both as institutions that have “posed complex challenges to the people who have lived with it and have become so inured to its presence that they could not conceive of society without it.” Prisons are the successor to slavery because a loophole in the 13th amendment allowed slavery to continue as penal servitude, which drove states to develop a criminal justice system that developed as “a most efficient and most rational deployment of racist strategies to swiftly achieve industrialization in the South.”

• In chapter 3, Davis highlights the historical context of how prisons came to be. Imprisonment was not always the dominant form of punishment, and developed out a puritanical belief in “imprisonment as an occasion for religious self-reflection and self-reform.” “We should therefore question whether a system that was intimately related to a particular set of historical circumstances that prevailed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can lay absolute claim on the twenty-first century.”

• Chapter 4 discusses how gender structures the prison system. The reformist roots of prison is male specific; because women in the 19th century had different dominant social expectations, “the deeply gendered character of punishment both reflects and further entrenches the gendered structure of the larger society… Like male convicts, who presumably could be “corrected” by rigorous prison regimes, female convicts, they suggested, could also be molded into moral beings by differently gendered imprisonment regimes.” It is important to consider this gendered punishment because “the call to abolish the prison as the dominant form of punishment cannot ignore the extent to which the institution of the prison has stockpiled ideas and practices that are hopefully approaching obsolescence in the larger society, but that retain all their ghastly vitality behind prison walls.” I remember reading similar ideas in Freedom is a Constant Struggle when I was first introduced to what Angela Davis calls a “feminist approach.” Because these issues and challenges are so interconnected, without untangling and holistically addressing them, there can be no true progress. 

• Chapter 5 goes in detail into the prison industrial complex. Prison labor is a gold mine for private corporations looking to exploit essentially cheap labor, but more than that, the prison industrial complex now also includes the consumption of commodities that are sold in prisons for prisoners, such as health care, food, communication, etc. This “array of relationships linking corporations, government, correctional communities, and media constitute what we now call a prison industrial complex.” Because prisons are inseparable from “economic and political structures and ideologies,” it is impossible to truly advocate for abolition of prisons without also advocating for abolition of the global persistence of racism and exploitative capitalism. “Activists must pose hard questions about the relationship between global capitalism and the spread of U.S.-style prisons throughout the world.”

• In chapter 6, the last chapter, Angela discusses some abolitionist alternatives. There is no single, simple, structurally similar replacement for prisons. Instead, she advocates for a complicated framework or solutions, each of which tackle, contest, and separate the set of relationships that comprise the prison industrial complex. Examples include schools, health care systems, and drug treatment programs, all alternatives that transform a society woven through by prisons.

The Gun Seller - Hugh Laurie

I read The Gun Seller many years ago in high school (I think I bought it in Page One (rip) in Taipei 101). I picked it up again recently mostly because I was looking for a light read. Written by Hugh Laurie (House in House) in 1997, The Gun Seller is about a former military man who gets involved in a conspiracy centered on the military industrial complex. Most of it is typical spy adventure novel stuff, but overall pretty well written and funny in the typically dry British fashion - lots of deadpan satire and self deprecating jokes. The ending and the title are especially clever, which I think helped make the book much more memorable because I have always been a sucker for good endings. All of these things I enjoyed as a high schooler, but something I newly enjoyed on this recent reread was the subject matter. I will always respect fiction exposing the military industrial complex and the unfair sham of democracy

Silver Spoon - Hiromu Arakawa

Silver Spoon is about a city boy who goes to a farming high school in the country because he feels lost in his current life and wants to run away to a new start. It is one of my favorite manga in the world, and one of the most impactful manga on my life. The manga itself is very good: it’s a really well researched slice of life; all of the agricultural tools / processes are really detailed & all of the food looks so good. It’s very funny in the same way that Full Metal Alchemist is funny, with lots of slapstick and situational humor and funny faces (Arakawa is so good at expressions & caricatures). All the characters work really well together and even though there are a lot that mostly fade in the background the core set of classmates and teachers are really endearing and well developed. The story is also very tight. Arcs connect w/ one another and there’s always clear continuity and progression. The stories seem unimportant but end up feeling really meaningful. I love that my two favorite arcs are the pork bowl arc and the first pizza arc. It was hard to be an active reader though, because in the middle she had to take care of family and there were many long hiatuses. I’m not sure how that affected the story, because the ending, while satisfying, also felt a bit incomplete, and I felt like there was more story to explore. It was good, but I think it missed the perfect satisfying total completeness that FMA had.

Independent of all that Silver Spoon is really important to me because I read it at a time when its themes & central message really touched me. I read it when I was very depressed in my sophomore year of college. It was one of the few things I was able to enjoy and actually also was eventually part of the reason why I started to feel better. Hachiken has an overbearing, overly strict father, and in the prep school in Tokyo he was attending he was in an extremely competitive environment and felt afraid of failing. His grades were not as good as his peers, so fearing failure and hating his studies, he decided to run away and go to agricultural school. There, he learns that it is OK to feel lost and wander and run away, because even if you leave unfinished business behind, the new experiences and new people you meet can still be positive and meaningful. Plus, people are not like livestock: we can run, we have multiple chances to reinvent ourselves, and the process of meeting the unknown, opening your mind, and finding yourself anew is always important and valuable. At the time in my sophomore year I was mostly sad because I was working incredibly hard at school and in my personal life but felt like nothing I did made me feel fulfilled or happy, and I felt trapped in what I had to do / what I had to become rather than thinking about what I wanted to do or who I wanted to be. It was deeply encouraging for me to watch Hachiken try and fail and learn and grow, and although it seems trite, through his story I felt supported to do the same.

Notes from a Discussion on Minor Feelings

I had a one book book club back in June with Shicong, Keva, and Greg for the book Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong. I was the one who took notes, so most of my thoughts are not transcribed, but I mostly got what everyone else shared. Besides some minor cleanups on my end, these notes are unaltered.

Q: What did everyone like?

Greg:

• Liked the different perspective that it provided, specifically about her exploration of what “we” meant as Asian Americans

Keva: 

• Some history about the collective we. How did the term “Asian American” come into being in the 1960s?

• Asian Americans as a whole are a very different group. There is a lot of complexity to Asian American identity, although it is often discussed as a singular monolithic identity

• Was also interested in the ways in which she was talking about the different forms of narrating racial identity: lyricism, prose, stand up, etc

• Different artistic form conjure up feeling for being Asian American, a way for Asian American identity to become legible

• Liked the ways in which her essays probe different areas of Asian identity, specifically the juxtaposition / tension of those histories

• This sense of privilege she alludes to, how do Asians fit in the US white / black relationship? 

• Not about belonging but about racial complexities

• Took some time to warm up to it

Shicong:

• Similar sentiment, but not exactly because I don’t identify as Asian American 

• First publication discussing Asian Americans that I have read

• Reading this was accepting identity as immigrant in US

• Before that I was just a tourist. Been here for 8 years, but didn’t have a childhood growing up in this environment

• Outstanding that she is able to consolidate all these “minor feelings” from growing up and being part of this cultural system and attack these nuances w a lot of precision

• More obvious to me because as an outsider when I arrived in america I experienced all of these up front (it was culture shock to me)

• Re the Cha chapter & her personal chapter on art, have very similar experiences of being an Asian women in fine arts, grappling w/ mental illnesses

• Enjoyed those essays very much

Q: How important do you feel like is your racial identity?

Justin:

• I liked this quote a lot: “I began this book as a dare to myself. I still clung to a prejudice that writing about my racial identity was minor and non-urgent, a defense that I had to pry open to see what throbbed beneath it.”

• While reading this book I continually struggled with feeling that my racial identity was not important, and there were other more pressing and urgent issues to engage with. What do you all think?

Greg:

• What she calls minor feelings does feel less urgent

• But at the same time to be a better ally it is important to have space to define Asian American identity outside of white supremacy

• Liked the poem with a lot of periods about bad english. Felt like an Asian American way of engaging with this subject

• A lot of Asian American mainstream art feels very superficial / flawed in that way. For 88 rising it’s very much a performance of black culture done by Asian Americans rather than things that are authentically Asian American. Crazy Rich Asians is another example.l 

• I like that she seems to be fighting that urge that it is not important and not urgent

Shicong:

• Why does it have to be a competition

• Doesn’t have to be a binary, be a ladder

• We are allies but the experience is different

Greg:

• Racial triangulation: there is a common enemy, people fighting for scraps are caught in the crossfire

Keva:

• Agree with a lot of what you all are saying

• Something that I’ve been grappling with in particular in the last few months: BLM protests, uprising, moment of racial reckoning the US

• What does it mean to be a researcher / teacher of Asian American studies? What does it mean to teach race right now?

• Thinking about transnational solidarity, not just national

• Interconnected thru a particular moment in the cold war: US intervention in Asia to secure global capitalism. Goes back to this question of how race and capitalistic accumulation of white supremacy intersect. Race is a product of that

• What it means to think about interconnectedness of struggles is to visit 1960s and think about solidarity then, and think of moments not just as romanticizing moments and how we can understand race today

• Revisit Asian American politics that looks towards transnational connections

• For example: usage of tear gas against protestors, a substance that gained popularity for US armed forces in the Vietnam War as a tool of quelling communist insurrections

• Ways in which the material tech of war / tech trafficked thru different sites in the war

• We need to attend to specificity but also need to understand / build forms of solidarity and connectedness

Q: What did everyone think about Dictee and the Cha chapter?

Shicong:

• What did everyone think about Dictee? Specifically Keva?

• How she went about investigating Dictee?

• What they left out about Dictee and Cha?

• Found it a very haunting chapter, probing the history that no one talks about it

Keva:

• Cha and Dictee are both very important in Asian American literary scholarship

• But no one really discusses the details

• A lot of concern about the legitimacy of Asian American as a site of worthy study, so early scholars wanted to prioritize the aesthetic part of Dictee

• The explicit violence “overshadows the work” lingers over the analysis of the work

• Appreciate the care of how she went about it, to reckon w this history

• Asian American art always about trauma

• Explicit move to separate art from artist’s experience

Greg:

• Found it very disturbing as well

• The ongoing fight to legitimize Asian American studies must be difficult

• Feels weird to ignore it considering how crazy it is & that it is relevant

• Just as a feeling, it’s very frustrating bc a lot of different things don’t have to justify their legitimacy

• I can empathize w the people who made those decisions but kind of sad that it was felt necessary

Keva:

• Different aesthetic forms

• Two mediums she didn’t talk about are film & games

• Games are an interesting medium for thinking about racial identity. You get to play the character & how it mediates different racial experiences

• What are different ways of expressing racial identity?

• Often times can be rendered a little shallow/ simplistic

Greg:

• The basic common examples are: “Where are you really from”, “Having to help parents with English” 

Keva:

• Those can be a reductive way to render Asian American experience, but can be helpful for people who are just entering that space

• Ambivalent feelings about that. It is helpful but a very played out trope, can be reductive

• Changed my mind when I saw students use it as a gateway to enter more complex discussions about Asian American history and identity

Q: Who is this book for?

Justin: 

• Who is this book for?

Shicong: 

• herself

Justin: 

• yes but I think there’s more because she talks often about thinking about her audience

Keva: 

• Also for mainstream Asian Americans

• There are moments where she narrates it in a similar way as people do for white people

• But also some complexities she explores. Basically an intro Asian American studies to help Asian Americans explore their identity deeper

• Not for an academic audience but academics fit into it really well. For a more mainstream Asian American audience

Greg: 

• I felt like that too. I would feel OK recommending this to someone who hasn’t thought about Asian identity that much

Books of 2020 Q1

Here are some of my favorite books I read from January to March in 2020, organized chronologically, each with a short review:

Against Creativity - Oli Mould

Against Creativity is about the ways in which creativity is exploited under capitalism. The basic argument is: because value is always tied to money in capitalism, the concept of “creativity” has been weaponized to always feed the notion that everything can be monetized. Under this belief, we are all creative, and we are all capable of unleashing that creativity, and so if you aren’t able to (i.e. you are poor) then you just need to work harder or think smarter or be more “creative.” It sounds good with the buzzwords (Be agile! Be entrepreneurial! Be competitive!) but in practice all it means is that boundaries are blurred between work / rest / play, and to survive you are forced to be creative. This definition of creativity is not true creativity though because nothing is re-imagined, the products feed right back into the same system. Creativity is unavoidably political; true creativity imagines ways of living and social organization previously unknown.

I read this book pre-covid but it feels especially relevant now. It definitely helped me understand why people hate rise & grind twitter, and why everyone gives rich people so much flak for saying things like the quarantine is a great time for people to be entrepreneurs at home & to write books. Let people be stressed during a global pandemic ok?

Oblivion - David Foster Wallace

Oblivion as a whole is a pretty decent short story collection, but for me two stand above the rest: The Soul is Not a Smithy and Good Old Neon (they are also among my favorite short stories).

It feels weird to me to try to summarize DFW stories because they seem very intentionally written, and it feels like I’m doing you & him & the story a disservice by trying to compress them to anything else. I read Oblivion a few years ago and never actually wrote a review for it for the same reason. Instead, really briefly, I’m going to talk about what I think those two stories are fundamentally about. The Soul is Not a Smithy is about the true horror of soul crushing boredom, feeling like life is passing you by, and Good Old Neon is about the inescapable paradox of feeling fake. If either of those seem interesting to you both of these stories are phenomenal and deeply thought provoking.

Disappearing Earth - Julia Phillips

Disappearing Earth is about two little girls who get kidnapped in the remote Siberian peninsula of Kamchatka. It is beautiful, frigid, and dreamy; it really feels like a different world which makes it wonderful book to submerge yourself in. I also thought the structure of the book was pretty creative & very effective. The book spans one year after the kidnapping, and each chapter is centered on a different character in a different month, all related in different ways. Each delineated chapter is very well written, and could easily stand alone as a short story, but they also all weave together and converge (albeit slowly) into a complete picture. It’s a fantastic way to slowly unfold the setting from 12 different perspectives.

Thermae Romae - Mari Yamazaki

Thermae Romae is a manga about a bathhouse engineer in ancient Rome who gets teleported to modern day Japan through taking baths (mostly he “drowns” in a Roman bath, and reemerges in a modern Japanese one). Chapters are mostly stand-alone, but the story culminates in a longer arc that is tremendously satisfying. Each chapter goes roughly like this: he encounters a bathhouse problem in Rome, goes back to modern day Japan, learns from modern bathing innovations, and brings it back. It is such a creative way to unite the author’s love of Japanese bathing culture and ancient Roman history, and her passion and knowledge shine so clearly through the pages. The manga is so clever, so funny, and so well researched. I read it in two very light and pleasant sittings.

The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects - Marshall McLuhan & Quentin Flore

It is crazy to me that this was written in 1967, because it really feels incredibly ahead of its time. The basic argument is this: the medium of the message is the message, because the medium shapes / massages our senses. Media is an extension of our senses, and when changes between society & technology are incongruent then the medium causes us anxiety. Technology extends our abilities: phones for talking, cars for walking. We are fundamentally different people because of these changes, and methods of communication change our perception of self. Oral traditions are fundamentally different from written are fundamentally different from oral (think phone, videochat) are fundamentally different from the internet. With his conception of the “global village” it feels like he predicted the power of the connectedness of the internet before it was a thing, and also predicted the anxieties and the dangers of it as well. Social media is a fundamentally different way of connecting with people, and it is not just a conduit for communication, it itself shapes communication. 1967… wtf. 

Devils in Daylight - Junichiro Tanizaki

I read Tanizaki’s short collection of essays about the aesthetics of shadows a while ago and since then I think a lot about lighting, modern plumbing, and miso soup. A lot of these ideas are also prominently featured in his fiction, but it’s especially tight in Devils in Daylight, maybe because it’s a really short book. Dreamy, tense, and weirdly sensual, it’s a good one session afternoon read.

Spaceman of Bohemia - Jaroslav Kalfař

This book has been sitting in my shelf for a while, but a goodreads review promising a slow-ish start but a very satisfying ending finally pushed me to read it, which I felt was mostly true, especially if (like me) you don’t mind occasional ramblings and musings in books. A nice little read about purpose, choice, and how the two shape your life.

Summerland - Michael Chabon

I adore Summerland. I borrowed my copy from my 7th grade middle school English teachers classroom, forgot to give it back, and it’s still sitting on my shelf today (lol). Summerland is a modern day epic about Ethan Feld, a kid whose dad gets kidnapped, and his journey to rescue his dad and save the world. The book incorporates many mythologies, but essentially Coyote (from the Native American myths) is trying to poison the Murmury Well (Mimir Well) and destroy the World Tree (Yggdrasil), starting Ragnarok. It is so good: the setting is fantastic, the concept is cool (modern day myths are always super fun), the characters are all well thought out and well fleshed out and each of their stories are equal parts touching and satisfying. I enjoyed it as a 7th grader and since then I’ve enjoyed it many many more times. It is just a really magical book with a beautiful ending. I don’t care about baseball and I still enjoyed the book so much and through it understood the pleasure of a slow summer day baseball game. 

Life for Sale - Yukio Mishima

Interesting concept (young copywriter thinks life is meaningless, puts up an ad to sell his life, and goes through a bunch of wacky adventures). The idea is executed well and it was fun to read, so if the concept is a draw for you I would check it out, but it’s nothing especially spectacular or mind blowing. I hear it’s also very different from his typical work, but I haven’t read anything else by him yet.

A Manual for Cleaning Women - Lucia Berin

A Manual for Cleaning Women is a big collection of short stories. Each piece is super short (not many over 10 pages long, some even shorter), and none have clean, clear cut endings. Instead of individually complete stories loosely united by a theme like most collections, A Manual for Cleaning Women feels more like a tapestry, each vignette a very detailed but brief look under a microscope, ultimately connecting to form a whole picture.

What blew me away the most about the book is Berin’s ability to tell a story. Her writing is some of the best that I’ve ever read. One of the main things I enjoy about short stories is how quickly I can get into it, so I really value beginnings because the author doesn’t have a lot of space to take their time to develop the story. In the first two or three sentences, without mincing any words or wasting any space, she creates these mini worlds that I am immediately engrossed and involved in. This wonderful terseness & efficiency continues in the rest of the stories, with metaphors & phrases & descriptions that are simultaneously delightful, surprising, and illuminating, like

• Maybe I’m morbid. I am fascinated by two fingers in a baggie, a glittering switchblade all the way out of a lean pimp’s back. I like the fact that, in Emergency, everything is reparable, or not.

• It doesn’t bother me what they said. I read it over and over. Of course it bothers me.

• I miss the moon. I miss solitude.

• He rarely spoke, but caught humor immediately.

• Bad smells can be nice. A faint odor of skunk in the woods. Horse manure at the races. One of the best parts about the tigers in zoos is the feral stench. At bullfights I always liked to sit high up, in order to see it all, like at the opera, but if you sit next to the barrera you can smell the bull.

• Actually one sound you hear a lot in jail is laughter.

Crucial to this kind of writing is the ability to look, and more than almost any other author I’ve read, Lucia Berin looks, and through her writing, encourages you to look.

How the Irish Became White - Noel Ignativ

The title is a pretty good description of the book (I always like when nonfiction books have very no nonsense descriptive titles). How the Irish became White is about how Irish people in America came to be considered white, when initially black people in America were called smoked Irish and Irish people were called white negroes. It is a really interesting look into white supremacy and how race is really a sociopolitical concept, not biological. It is socioeconomic forces and structures of power that lead certain groups of people to be considered white, and whiteness is more an indication of status and privilege rather than skin color.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh

Such a bleak book, but Moshfegh walks the line between gratuitous and descriptive really well. Usually I find these types of depressing books get hard to read, but it somehow never happened with this one, maybe because the protagonist is always so detached. At one point it felt like I was syncing with her wavelength, sinking in with her. My favorite part of the book by far is the ending (spoilers ahead). I think Jia Tolentino sums it up the best (as she does). The whole book she struggles with speaking the same language / operating the same way as other people, but after her “coma” she learns the code, and watching the video of her friend jump to her death out of the empire state building during 9/11 she learns how to say the “right” things. Initially it seems easy to think maybe that was nice? Maybe it worked? But its really much bleaker than that, because she was just in a coma for 6 months? With a random artist letting himself in to feed her? And her friend literally jumped to her death out of a burning building during 9/11? And she thought that was beautiful and human? So fucked. But so good.

Moshi Moshi - Banana Yoshimoto

Moshi Moshi is my 2nd Banana Yoshimoto book, after Kitchen, and I am really becoming a big fan of her work. Moshi moshi is about a girl, Yoshie, whose father passes away in a murder suicide with his lover, and how she and her mother come to terms with it. Really early on in the book, Yoshie says about a movie she likes: “What a comfort it was, I thought, to hear someone put into words something that you were on the verge of grasping.” This is also a really good capture of her work and why I liked both books so much. Banana Yoshimoto is wonderful at capturing specific feelings, ones that might seem small / insignificant but feel profound to yourself, and it is a very comforting feeling to know that someone else sees the world in the same way, someone else has those same thoughts and feelings. Some of my favorite quotes:

• I longed to have the same kind of effect, in my own way—to cast such a wonderful spell over people. When I thought about this, late at night, alone, it used to give me a space in which I could breathe deeply, without which I doubt I could have survived.

• “Wow, I can taste this—it tastes good. I’d almost forgotten what it feels like to taste. I guess the body lives, even if your heart’s died,” said Mom, in a small, hollow voice. We didn’t cry then and there in the bistro, but the feeling of the cells in our bodies welcoming the sudden influx of nutrients was as refreshing as crying in a speeding car with the windows rolled down, letting tears fly. Like finally sitting yourself down at your destination at the end of an exhausting journey.

• I was smitten by the process of acquiring this new understanding. The satisfaction of doing something over and over, by rote, until one day you saw something differently.

• Something in me lifted, and I felt myself almost dissolving into the joy in what he said. They were the words I’d been waiting for, and they soaked into me, easing both my body and my soul.

• If someone had asked me how I’d spent this period in my life, I’d have said I’d done nothing in particular. It had all felt like a dream. But I drew confidence and satisfaction from the fact that I had in fact achieved things, that there had been a through line. Even when I’d felt suffocated and short of breath with nowhere to go, I’d done what I could, and it had all linked up and moved forward, and before I knew it I was coming up for breath somewhere where I was no longer weighed down. That place just happened to be here, tonight.

Steel Ball Run - Hirohiko Araki

I read Steel Ball Run a while ago but gave up about 5-6 chapters in, but I think it’s because I read all the JoJos in one go and it was just way too much JoJo. I found it much better this time around. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure has always been a ridiculous series, hallmarked by colorful & unique designs (clothes & characters), bizarre powers, and big muscular men, and Steel Ball Run is definitely peak JoJo. Set in the US in the 1980s, the main story line is a giant nationwide horse race (lol) that is actually a secret ploy to gather relics of Jesus (lol) because the different body parts give super powers (lol, so good).

Better Buses, Better Cities:
How to Plan, Run, and Win the Fight for Effective Transit - Steven Higashide

Every now and then I read a non fiction book that totally changes my perspective and/or opinion on a specific thing, and those are my favorite non fiction books. Some past examples: water prices, drug economics, city planning, healthcare systems, etc., and this book was that for bus systems. Super cool book, super well written, super well researched, super passionate, imo the best combo in a nonfiction book. It really changed my perspective on why buses are so crucial and what makes a good bus system. Bus systems are important because they free people! Without reliable buses people can’t get places, and that means less opportunity for work, less opportunity for fun, less opportunity overall in life. A lot of people don’t like taking the bus (specifically in the US, people love the bus in Taipei), but the bus is not inherently lame!

More people choose buses when they are a useful option for them—when it’s reasonably fast, affordable, and convenient. Decades of research by academics and public agencies show that this is determined mostly by factors such as how often the bus runs, how fast it is compared with alternatives, how reliable it is, and how safe riders feel.

The book also provides lots of concrete suggestions for how bus services can be improved, looking at very specific cities and how they improved those systems. 

Better bus service ultimately demands changing how we design our streets, run our bureaucracies, prioritize our budgets, and plan our cities.

This book was also personally significant because it made me think more about my own career. A while ago I read a book about obamacare & how some software engineers supported the launch in states by building the website for people to register. In this book he discusses how data can help support better bus systems, e.g. bus route planning and where to build stations. How can I better leverage tech for public good?

Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches - Audre Lorde

I read this book for Noname’s book club. Lots of really good short essays and speeches from Audre Lorde, centered around her various identities: black, lesbian, feminist, poet, cancer survivor, mother, activist, etc. Together, they discuss how structures of power and oppression are all interrelated, and draw on her experiences to illuminate these points. I found all of these essays to be tremendously insightful and powerful. I learned a lot from reading this work.

Some of my favorite essays: Poetry is Not a Luxury, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House, and The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.

Some of my favorite quotes (there are a lot, so I left out a lot):

• On silence:
  What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.

• On perception versus analysis, knowing versus understanding:
  That’s the only thing I’ve had to fight with, my whole life, preserving my perceptions of how things are, and later, learning how to accept and correct at the same time. Doing this in the face of tremendous opposition and cruel judgment. And I spent a long time questioning my perceptions and my interior knowledge, not dealing with them, being tripped by them.

• On anger:
  Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change. To those women here who fear the anger of women of Color more than their own unscrutinized racist attitudes, I ask:  Is the anger of women of Color more threatening than the woman-hatred that tinges all aspects of our lives?

Magical Negro - Morgan Parker

I also read this book for noname’s book club, and wrote a brief thread about it here; I think it’s a pretty good summary of my thoughts: https://twitter.com/jstnchng3/status/1234900232627863553

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels:
The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made - Jason Schreier

Blood Sweat & Pixels is 10 chapters about 10 games and the story about how they were made. I’m pretty connected to the gaming industry (I work in games, I play games, lots of my friends play games), so most of the games he discusses I’ve either heard of or played before, and some of the stories I knew before, albeit in less detail. It was still a really fun read though, especially because I always enjoy the twin combination of passionate author and detailed research. So much stuff that is often unseen goes into a game, and from indie games to big budget studios every game is an intense labor of love.

Every Person in New York - Jason Polan

Every Person in New York is a big collection of doodles of people Jason Polan saw in NY from 2009 to 2014. I lived in NY from 2013 to 2017 (my college years), and I don’t think I would ever live there again, but I did like those years in NY though, and in his doodles I think Jason captures a really big part of why. In NY, there are always people around, always people doing things, always people interacting with everyone else, and while it can feel stifling sometimes, there is so much life in the city and just by being there you are automatically a part of so many people’s lives. Jason pays attention to the details, and in a city so full of things, reminded me to look and to remember NY as more than a mass of people. 

My favorite doodles were the taco bell ones (he spends a lot of time in taco bell) and the museum ones, especially the afternoon sketches where he overlays a bunch of doodles. The chaotic moving lines capture exactly what it feels like to be in a busy place in NY. 

All My Puny Sorrows - Miriam Toews

All My Puny Sorrows is about an ordinary, conventionally unsuccessful woman’s attempt to convince her brilliant, beautiful, professional pianist sister to keep living despite her depression and desire to die. I am a big sucker for good book titles, and I really like All My Puny Sorrows, so I am a little biased. AMPS to me is the experience of being sad while knowing how small your sorrows are, but feeling how important they are to you, and I like that concept in a bunch of stuff: A Little Life, Funeral by Phoebe Bridgers, Moshi Moshi, etc. The book starts a little bit slowly, but I didn’t really mind because Yolandi (the narrator & protagonist) is so likable, and the book culminates in a really beautiful & touching 20-30 pages. I love a good, cathartic book-long buildup.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold - Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Before the Coffee Gets Cold is a Japanese novel about a cafe where you can time travel, although with very specific restrictions. Four people choose to go back, each for a different reason: to confront a departed lover, to get a letter from their husband before he loses his memory, to speak with their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never had the chance to know. All four stories are soft and heartwarming, and although initially seemingly unrelated, tie together really nicely. It’s a nice quick read, because it is light in the same way that a lot of Japanese novels are, but also very enjoyable, because it is profound in the same way that a lot of Japanese novels are as well.

Top Tens of the Decade

Here are 5 of my top tens of the decade (music, games, manga, nonfiction, and fiction), with a brief explanation of what, why, and how. 

I like making lists because it’s a good opportunity for me to reflect on the things that I like, why I like them, and the impact they’ve had on me. Thinking about them again is in many ways enjoying them again, and thinking about them relative to each other and from a more distant perspective is enjoying them and understanding them in new ways.

A few quick notes: The list is sorted in rough chronological order, which ended up working out nicely because for a few of these, they are interconnected & each thing builds on the next. I didn’t really respect things like release date; I just picked stuff I personally enjoyed in this decade. My biggest criteria for why something makes it on the list is if it gave me better eyes, i.e. if after consuming it, I ended up with a greater or different appreciation of something.

Artists:

http://www.more-onions.com/books/top-ten-artists-of-the-decade
• Frank Ocean
• Kanye West
• Kendrick Lamar
• Migos
• Bolbbalgan4
• Drake
• Young Thug
• Twice
• Carly Rae Jepsen
• Mitski

Some honorable mentions: DaBaby, Polo G, Shura, Snail Mail, Japanese Breakfast, Higher Brothers, Bad Bunny

Games:

http://www.more-onions.com/books/top-ten-games-of-the-decade
• Bioshock
• Skyrim
• World of Warcraft
• One Night
• Fallout 4
• Vermintide 2
• Monster Hunter World
• Teamfight Tactics
• Stardew Valley
• League of Legends

Manga:

http://www.more-onions.com/books/top-ten-manga-of-the-decade
• One Piece - Eiichiro Oda
• Naruto - Masashi Kishimoto
• Full Metal Alchemist - Hiromu Arakawa
• Eyeshield 21 - Riichiro Inagaki & Yusuke Murata
• Kekkaishi - Yellow Tanabe
• Oyasumi Punpun - Inio Asano
• Monster - Naoki Urasawa
• Vinland Saga - Makoto Yukimura
• Jujutsu Kaisen - Gegu Akatami
• Silver Spoon - Hiromu Arakawa

HM: Space Brothers, Kingdom, Tower of God, Haikyuu, Kimetsu no Yaiba, Grand Blue, Hunter x Hunter, Mushishi, Zatch Bell, 20th Century Boys

Nonfiction:

http://www.more-onions.com/books/top-ten-nonfiction-of-the-decade
• Stumbling on Happiness - Daniel Gilbert
• Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter
• Consider the Lobster and Other Essays - David Foster Wallace
• The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song From Every Year Since 1979 Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed - Shea Serrano
• Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America - Mark Padoongpatt
• The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone - Olivia Laing
• Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement - Angela Davis
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs
• Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion - Jia Tolentino
• A People’s History of the United States - Howard Zinn

Fiction:

http://www.more-onions.com/books/top-ten-fiction-of-the-decade
• Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
• The Heroes of Olympus series - Rick Riordan
• Beartown - Fredrik Backman
• The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut
• Laughable Loves - Milan Kundera
• A Little Life - Hanya Yanigahara
• The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller
• The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
• The Devotion of Suspect X - Keigo Higashion
• Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

Top Ten Nonfiction of the Decade

Stumbling on Happiness - Daniel Gilbert

My sister Jessica gave me this book in my sophomore year of high school, and since then I have read the book on average probably once a year (my original copy’s spine is now very fucked up). 

There are a few things I think this book does extremely well:

• Depth. Daniel Gilbert presents a very interesting argument about the shortcomings of our imagination and why we have such a hard time figuring out what makes us happy in the past, present, and future. The book is clearly super well researched, and everything is backed up with cited & summarized studies.

• Organization: Stumbling on Happiness has one overarching “point.” Every chapter works on its own but they also all fit well together under the main point, and the progression from chapter to chapter is clear. 

• Style: Stumbling on Happiness is fun to read and easy to understand. Some arguments are a little complicated at times, but Gilbert combines funny and educational examples with a conversational style that makes even the most complicated points “flow.” He also opens each chapter with a Shakespeare quote, which I appreciate a lot. 

• Influence: this one is more personal. How much did this book change the way I think about things? How different do I “see” after reading this book? Stumbling on Happiness fundamentally changed the way that I viewed the concept of happiness and what it meant. Very few nonfiction books continue to be relevant and interesting for me across almost a decade, but I continue to think about the things I learned in that book today.

Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter

Godel Escher Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid is the most ambitious work of nonfiction that I’ve ever read. Out of all the nonfiction I’ve read, outside of straight up textbooks this book tackles the most complicated material, and even then I think it’s very different because textbooks usually don’t build towards a specific argument. In this book, Hofstadter presents his huge project tying together what seems like three non related things (math, art, music) to tackle the big question of consciousness. What does it mean to be conscious? What is the quality of consciousness? What are our mathematical and logical limits of expression and therefore limits of thought?

I picked this book mostly because I think the subject is very interesting and the book is cool, but also because I deeply admire Hofstadter. He is so smart. In GEB he presents complex ideas in relatively simple ways, and structures his arguments in chapters that build on each other nicely, none of which is possible without a deep understanding of the material and the underlying concepts. 

Consider the Lobster and Other Essays - David Foster Wallace

Consider the Lobster is a collection of short essays about a random assortment of topics. It is also my first exposure to David Foster Wallace and the beginning of my literary adoration. In books (and in general everything I like), I admire and appreciate things that make me see differently, especially if it happens in subjects that I previously thought were minor, obscure, uninteresting, or already understood. In almost every essay in Consider the Lobster, like a magician, David Foster Wallace accomplishes that, demonstrating his startling capacity for thinking deeply, making the mundane interesting by distilling keen insight from the obvious. This is the type of nonfiction essay writing that I really admire, and if I could write more nonfiction, the type of stuff that I really want to do. 

The Rap Year Book: The Most Important Rap Song From Every Year Since 1979 Discussed, Debated, and Deconstructed - Shea Serrano

In The Rap Year Book from 1979 to 2014, Serrano picks the most important rap song of every year (not the best, which is a slight but important distinction). In his explanations & justifications for his choices, he covers a lot of history of rap, various trends in rap, and the innovative rappers who changed the scene.

Three things make this book particularly outstanding.The first is that he is very knowledgeable and passionate about rap. It is clear that he has been deeply involved in the music scene and has loved rap and followed it ardently for many years, and nothing is more interesting to me than someone who knows a lot and cares a lot about a subject. I also love the concept of thinking deeply and seriously about some very not serious concepts. 

The second is his writing. I’ve written hundreds of book reviews at this point, and the two parts I consistently have the most trouble with are a compelling introduction to the book and a distillation of what is really important about the book. Shea does both of these things SO well. In every section, he clearly articulates why he thinks the song is important and how the song either epitomizes the apex of a movement or innovated an entirely new one. These are complicated ideas that he explains conversationally, a deceptively difficult thing to do. On every chapter his style and voice comes through so distinctively that he is clearly present on the pages. It is something that I continue to strive for in all my writing.

The third is the art. Every chapter has art of the rapper, and every chapter has some kind of infographic or a style map, where Shea tags some lines in the song with an icon indicating certain traits/trends. The art is cool and funny and the quality/ silliness of it complement the quality/ silliness of the writing.

Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America - Mark Padoongpatt

Flavors of Empire is about Thai food in America, specifically in Los Angeles. It examines why there are so many Thai restaurants in America, and explores how food is much more complicated than what most people imagine, using food as a way to demonstrate how socioeconomic and cultural structures of power extend to unexpected areas. In particular Padoongpatt presents food culture as a manifestation of how "the relationship between white culinary appropriators and the groups they extract from are deeply embedded in historically constituted relationships of power." More than any other book, it helped show me that everything is political, and nothing escapes structures of power, even commonplace things like food. 

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone - Olivia Laing

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone is about author Olivia Laing being lonely in New York and exploring her loneliness through the work of four different artists: Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, and Henry Darger. Over the last few years, especially with my art history minor, I’ve read a lot of writing on art, but The Lonely City is my favorite book on art I’ve read so far. She’s good at explaining the art and the artist, and I definitely understand these four artists’ work much better, but what she does great is that she humanizes the art and gives it a real, visceral purpose. She helped me understand what the artist was aiming for and helped me emotionally feel the art better. In this case the book was also particularly meaningful, because I also spend a lot of my time thinking about loneliness. One of her main points is that loneliness makes people shut off from one another, and the way to counter that is to be aggressively open and hopeful and communicative. In that way, through the work she presents and by sharing the artists’ loneliness (and hers), The Lonely City makes you feel less lonely. That is a lovely function of art, and also why I enjoy engaging with art by focusing on the art, because art makes you feel less lonely. It is not just that someone felt the same things you felt, someone felt the same things you felt and felt it so strongly that they had to make it real, make it art, and when you are feeling lonely, there is nothing more comforting than that.

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement - Angela Davis

Freedom is a Constant Struggle is a collection of interviews, speeches, and essays by Angela Davis. More than any other book, this book helped me really begin to understand the concept of intersectionality, the idea that struggles everywhere for freedom are one and the same. Minorities and the oppressed everywhere have things to learn and share from each other, but more than just that, all of these struggles are connected because the source that powers and builds the system that necessitates these struggles is the samem and mechanisms of control used in one plane are often applied to another. People in Ferguson are connected to people in Palestine not just because their experiences are similar, but also because these experiences stem from the same global system of racism and capitalism.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs

The Death and Life of Great American Cities is about city planning. It is a super good book; Jacobs is clearly an expert talking passionately and cogently about a subject she knows a lot about. She says in the beginning of the book that there will be no pictures because the reader should draw on their own experiences visiting and living in cities, and that is not only very bold but also very true. There are so many good descriptions of cities. Reading the book totally changed how I understand what a good city is and how to accomplish that, especially because most of her examples are based in NY. I now have a very different experience walking through a city, which is particularly enjoyable because reading the book gave me a richer and more structured understanding to something I already intuitively knew. More than that though, The Death and Life of Great American Cities shows again that any subject can be extremely interesting and there is the potential for any subject to be worth learning about, even something a typically dry and ignored topic like city planning. 

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion - Jia Tolentino

Trick Mirror is a collection of short essays by Jia Tolentino, writer for the New Yorker. Jia is my favorite essayist since DFW in Consider the Lobster. She writes with the same critical, sharp insight into herself and into society & pop culture. Jia is frighteningly smart; the essays in Trick Mirror have some of the most brilliant incisive thinking on social media, modern feminism, marriage, etc. that I have ever read. Jia doesn’t only think about something on a much deeper level; she also explores each level carefully and thoroughly. It is the same type of detail, completeness, and extensivity of argument that I admire in DFW’s work. She is also the only writer I know besides Shea Serrano that manages to mix in pop culture meme speak in her writing without sounding like a fellow kid. After Trick Mirror, I am a huge Jia stan and I will happily read anything that she writes. Jia also has good taste in books. I’ve read 3-4 books that she’s recommended on twitter and all of them have been bangers. 

A People’s History of the United States - Howard Zinn

A People’s History of the United States is a history of the US from Columbus to Clinton’s presidency, taking the perspective of the people, the marginalized on each side of history. It takes a lot of ideas that I was familiar with and applies them to American history. More than any other book I’ve read, A People’s History is a grueling takedown of America, revealing it to be the terrible and inhumane country it has always been and showing us that the current state of America that many of us lament and abhor is just more of what it’s always been. Trump is not an anomaly; he is the natural product of a system that has always favored the rich and the powerful. The terrible things his administration has done are not unique in America’s history; we have always committed atrocities both internationally and domestically. The one cheerful aspect of the book though is that it has required all the power and ingenuity of the system to crush our natural inclination of generosity and camaraderie, and the future of a united people has never been impossible.

Top Ten Fiction of the Decade

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

I read this book in my senior year of high school and it very strongly shaped how I approached problems and how I understood my purpose. What makes the book good are its technical aspects. The writing is eloquent and smooth, making for a pretty easy read, and the characters are diverse and really help expound Huxley's ideas. I especially like how he uses roughly 4 different types of characters to make his point about society and purpose very clear: there's Bernard, the different but cowardly psychologist, there's John, the "savage" who grew up away from civilization reading Shakespeare, there's Helmholtz, the tall, very popular man who feels a lack of strength in his writing, and everyone else, happily addicted to soma and their place in society.

What makes the book great is chapter 17, when John, speaking with the Controller Mustapha Mond, discusses the sacrifices society has made to be "civilized" and peaceful, and John makes the most brilliant and convincing argument for unhappiness and suffering I have ever read: (if you're going to read the book and you haven't before, I recommend skipping this part, because the build-up and that entire chapter is literary gold)

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan

I have read more books by Rick Riordan in the past decade than any other author. I love his stuff; everything he writes is so genuinely fun to read. Even in college when I was bogged down by work and assigned reading I still made time to read and reread his books. They are so great for 4 reasons:

• Plot. The books are long but because the plot is well paced, they are fun to read from start to finish. I often read his books on the plane because they take a lot of time, require low brain power, and remain engaging / interesting the whole way through. I also have always enjoyed ancient mythology, and I appreciate how he does extensive research to take old stories and modernize them in fresh ways.

• Writing. His writing is good. There are some “fellow kids” moments in his books, especially in the later ones, but the voices of each character shines through fairly distinctively, and the imagery he paints is clear.

• Characters. The characters are my favorite part of his books. He tackles a lot of complex ideas in his books, mostly through his cast of distinctive and well thought out characters. Each have unique motivations, behavior, and attitude, based off of their background and their experiences. This is most powerfully demonstrated in The Heroes of Olympus, where he successfully swaps perspective between 9 main characters across 5 books.

• Consistency. He churns these books out, consistently at an amazing quality bar, at least once a year, across different storylines and mythologies. That week in the year in September/October when he releases a new book has always been a great week for me in the last 8 years.

Beartown - Fredrik Backman

Before Beartown I read A Man Called Ove, also by the same author. I liked both for pretty similar reasons: in both, Backman does a great job building suspense, setting up situations, and writing great and varied characters. I think Beartown is the better book though for a few reasons:

1. In my opinion it is harder to write a tragic book. Balancing difficult, heavy themes with hopefulness and tenderness without being cheesy is walking a very fine line; building suspense without being overly dramatic has a very low margin of error.

2. I very much respect authors that are able to write in different styles and tones. Beartown is a huge departure from Backman's typical, feel-good works, and far from his whimsical style and gratifying novels, Beartown is dark, heavy, and deeply profound.

3. Beartown is the more emotionally powerful book. A Man Called Ove had hints of it but everything was resolved so nicely that the book largely felt warm. Beartown is much more brutal and the resolution much more glacial but as a result the book is also much more rewarding and nuanced. Mixed in with the sad are some beautiful moments of forgiveness and courage, appreciated even more in the backdrop of immense injustice and suffering, and I felt it all in this beautiful book: pain, respect, sympathy, passion, anger, sadness, pride, joy.

The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut

I read a bunch of Vonnegut in the last two years (both around the new year, both super fun) and Sirens of Titan was by far my favorite of the bunch. In Vonnegut’s books he consistently grapples with this question: how do we meaningfully live as humans when it’s very possible that we live pointlessly and powerlessly in an uncaring, predestined universe? His answer is mostly the same across all his books: you exist to love other people, and that’s all the purpose you can have and all the purpose you need. Sirens of Titan is my favorite book of his because I think it shares that core message better and more touchingly than any of his other books.

None of Vonnegut's other stuff has the same gut-punching strength of when (spoilers) Salo opens the sealed message he's been carrying for 200,000+ years (end spoilers). What you feel is the weight of the worthlessness and senselessness of everything we've built and everything we are. Everything grand, like monuments, history, government, and religion, but also personal, like friendships, love, family, everything we think gives us meaning- all of it is shit, and no one is free from it. No one can overcome or even comprehend it: the humans are controlled by Rumfoord, Rumfoord is controlled by Salo & the Tramalfadorians, and the Tramalfadorians are all unthinking, programmed machines. In the end of all of this, after a lifetime of exploitation and a race of exploitation, Malachi Constant still manages to say this:

It took us that long to realize that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

That is nice.

Laughable Loves - Milan Kundera

I got really into Kundera’s stuff for a few months in 2017 and read a bunch of his books. I like his writing style and I think he tackles interesting themes-- I particularly enjoy thinking about the horrors of romance, the weight of lightness, and the closeness of tragedy and comedy. I picked Laughable Loves though not just because it’s my favorite Kundera book, but because Laughable Loves is what crystallized my love of short stories. I primarily love two things about short stories, both made abundantly clear by Laughable Loves:

• Even more so than novels, the central theme and motivating vision of a good short story collection is extremely clear, and it is a pleasure to see how these various ideas get developed and fleshed out over the course of a short story. Seeing this happen several times over really helps you understand the author's project. 

• All of this also has to be accomplished in limited length, so short stories have to be very economical about setting up and resolving the story, which suits me because I admire brevity and tightness in writing. Short stories often just get right into it and end with a bang, and I love endings and beginnings. 

A Little Life - Hanya Yanigahara

A Little Life is a super touching book about the friendship between four men in New York from college to middle age. It’s also the saddest I’ve read in a long while, the first time I teared up reading a book in the last couple of years). I love this book because it’s extremely full of life. There are lots of very heart-wrenching moments, but sparsely sprinkled within those parts there are some very beautifully heartwarming moments. I read it at a time when I was anxious about something else, and I found the book a wonderful if very painful escape. It was very easy to sink myself into the book and feel like I was sharing their world. My only gripe is that the book is sometimes too sad, to the point of being kind of relentless, but for me it was a fairly minor complaint for a very long and very enjoyable book. Also in my opinion A Little Life is the best title + cover + content combo (except perhaps Infinite Jest). It is such a fantastic distillation of the themes of the book. A Little Life is about all the different ways that life can be little: with exasperation, with joy, with acceptance, with pain, with awe, with deep sadness, and it’s so perfectly captured both by the title and by the photo on the cover, Peter Hujar’s Orgasmic Man. 

The Song of Achilles - Madeline Miller

The Song of Achilles is a reimagining of Achilles’s story from Patroclus’s perspective. It is a really interesting and well written book, but it is on the list mainly because it helped me understand something I really really like in books. I know the legend of Achilles from (sort of) reading the Iliad in college, so this book took source material I was already familiar with and showed me depth in a whole new story from another angle I haven’t considered yet. I really really enjoy that. It is one of the things I most appreciate in books because every time I read a book like that, it helps me realize again that the potential for a great story exists everywhere, even in things I’ve already seen. Each experience helps me see the world a little differently and makes me more humbly open to my view or understanding of something being incomplete. 

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

I read The Remains of the Day earlier this year for book club and it was one of my favorite books of the year. After I read the book I watched an interview with Kazuo Ishiguro shortly after the movie adaption was released. In an early part of the interview, he talks about how “we are all butlers,” and it totally blew me away and completely fucked me up. I’ve honestly been thinking about ever since. That idea also pairs nicely with some themes in Infinite Jest, because in a world where we are all butlers in service of something larger, what do you choose to serve & give to, hoping but not knowing if your contributions will be valuable and valued?

Another part of the book I really like is the unity of style and theme. The Remains of the Day is really short but the prose is so flourished that it makes the book feel much longer than it actually is. It is a little annoying at first, especially when he’s talking about butler stuff, but eventually you figure out that the style is intentional and it complements the character and the message. It’s always extremely cool when an author pulls that off, because it gives the book a subtlety that makes the main points more palatable and realistic.

The Devotion of Suspect X - Keigo Higashino

The Devotion of Suspect X is by far the best detective novel I’ve ever read. There are so many things it absolutely knocks out of the park:

• The pacing and length are perfect: it really feels like nothing can be cut or moved, and it remains extremely entertaining all the way through.

• The characters are fleshed out and interesting. Their motivations make sense and I’m invested in how the story ends. I hate detective novels where the victims are basically caricatures, and halfway through I don’t really care who dies or who did it because I no longer care about any of them.

• What’s most impressive though is the story. It’s a whodunnit story except they reveal the murderer in the start of the book, and still manages to have one of the most incredible twists that is somehow extremely surprising and also feels very satisfying and “correct.” 

This is literally a perfect book, 10/10. There is no better version of this book possible. I didn’t get any great insight from this book, but it made it on the list anyways because I admire it so much.

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest is my favorite book of the decade. It is the most rewarding book that I’ve ever read. I’ve read it twice, the second time writing a blog post every 80 pages or so, and I still feel like there’s so much that I’m missing. Beyond the style, story, endnotes, individual passages, structure, characters, etc. all of which are phenomenal and very interesting, I think the primary reason why I am so drawn to Infinite Jest is because I also read it at the right time in my life. Infinite Jest is ultimately a book about how to choose and what to choose, and how that choice is the single most important choice in your life.

“Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen.

Since reading IJ I have thought a lot about the idea of temples and worship and how that shapes who we are and what we do. What are you a fanatic for? 

A truly enormous novel, not just in size.

Top Ten Manga of the Decade

One Piece - Eiichiro Oda

One Piece is one of the greatest manga of all time, and is number two on my top ten manga of the decade. Of all the manga I used to follow as a kid, One Piece is the only one I still keep up with. I started watching the anime in lower school in front of our small tv during dinner, started reading the manga around middle school, and I’ve been following it weekly ever since. That means it’s been about 15 years of One Piece for me, 15 years of waiting patiently and consistently week after week for a new chapter from Alabasta as a kid to Wano as an adult today, 15 years of being astonished and delighted and blown away by Oda. It has been one of the biggest pleasures of my life to be able to consistently enjoy One Piece through all these different periods/ stages; nothing else that has stayed with me for this long through this many different versions of me each with different interests. Even after over a decade, I’m still deeply fascinated and surprised by the world building in One Piece, and still feel deeply personally invested in the characters and story that Oda has created. There are so many well planned arcs, so many heart wrenching stories, so many hype panels, so much rich detail, that even after all this time I’m still just as excited and giddy about One Piece as I was as a kid. 

Naruto - Masashi Kishimoto

Even though the ending of Naruto is eternally painful for me, Naruto is an important one to mention. I started Naruto in middle school and continued a devotee (albeit a more and more disgruntled devotee) until it ended around my junior year. Before Naruto, I previously just watched anime on TV during dinner time, so Naruto was my first foray into manga, and it defined my experience. It was the first time I spent time outside of the standard dinner TV time to engage with and consume manga, and as a kid I think I even enjoyed Naruto more than I did One Piece. I love endings so I get extremely biased by bad endings, but disregarding the end, Naruto was truly one of the greats. It did so many things well, and I think during its run really set the tone / style of a lot of shounen. 

Full Metal Alchemist - Hiromu Arakawa

While I love One Piece dearly and consider it one of the greats, in my opinion Full Metal Alchemist is #1, the goat shounen. In every possible way shounen can reasonably be judged, FMA is perfect: the story telling, characters, art, pacing, ending, power system, power scaling, humor, length, theme, sequencing of arcs, everything is absolutely perfect. 10/10. This tweet sums up my opinions well: “you should never feel pressure to write the perfect story, not because it doesn't exist, but because it does exist, and hiromu arakawa finished fullmetal alchemist in 2010 so chill out guys the pressure is off all of us.” Everyone else sit down.

Eyeshield 21 - Riichiro Inagaki & Yusuke Murata

Eyeshield 21 is my favorite sports manga (and there are sooo many good ones). Some Important elements of a good sports manga are: good protagonists (typically 2 or 3 main characters in an underdog team), interesting and visually/ thematically distinguishable opponents, a training arc, and the big tournament arc (sometimes 2). Eyeshield 21 has all of those elements: 

• Sena and Raimon both have great story arcs and good contrasting personalities
• The main supporting characters, Hiruma and Kurita are obviously great and also have good contrasting personalities (bonus: they contrast in very different ways than Sena and Raimon)
• Deimon Devil Bats start out a terrible team (great name though) 
• The training arc in america is sick. The pebble scene and the truck pushing are very cool and fun. The coach backstory is short and suitably balanced between touching / cheesy. 
• The tournament arc and the subsequent final world arc were both very enjoyable. My one gripe is I think the final tournament arc was the better one and the manga would’ve been great if it ended there too. Something about the worlds arc made it feel more like a sequel than a necessary finale. 

Kekkaishi - Yellow Tanabe

Kekkaishi is another A+ shounen. I watched the anime as a kid but only appreciated the greatness of the manga when i got a bit older. It Hits the mark on everything I look for in a shounen: reasonable power curve, compelling story, villains that aren’t surprising / come out of nowhere, good characters that learn and grow and develop, interesting / reasonable power system, and manages to do it over hundreds of chapters (FMA, while perfect, is a tight 100 chapters, and one piece, while perfect, is a very lengthy 1000+).

Oyasumi Punpun - Inio Asano

Oyasumi Punpun is on the list for two things-- art and theme, both very intertwined. Artistically, out of all the manga I’ve read, Punpun is the one that best uses the medium of manga, made to be read from panel to panel, unfolding and transitioning from page to page. From hyper realistic close ups of eyes, hands or grotesque expressions, Asano quickly shifts the POV of the next panel to a wide panorama where the characters are almost hidden in their surroundings. It is a very jarring experience to move without transition from the intimacy of an emotional close-up to the homogeneity of a wide frame panel of a busy street, a type of art and expression only possible because of the way manga is created and consumed. Part of what makes the art so good is also how it supports the characters and the theme. Depicting Punpun and his family as birds is brilliant. The juxtaposition of Punpun and his family's normal visual simplicity as cartoony birds with the occasional hyper realistic panels of certain body parts makes those important moments hit extremely hard. It also helps make the story more vivid and visceral, because Punpun’s horrifying visual transformation from innocent little bird to monster mirrors his self destructive internal transformation. 

Monster - Naoki Urasawa

I love all of Urasawa’s work, but Monster is my favorite.The art is decent but not amazing; what Monster does better than almost any other manga that I’ve read is exposition & characterization. The twists are actually surprising and the story is seriously gripping, one of the best psychological thrillers I've ever read (novel or manga or otherwise). There are only two main protagonists, so most of the characters come and go, but all of them are important to the story and serve to further develop the plot. Despite their short appearances (so many people die...), in 1-2 chapters Urasawa can make you genuinely care about every characters, and he does a great job of showing not only the good and the bad of people but the nuances in between. Each character has a motivating back story, and very few characters are easily bucketed as good or bad. Every mini arc is so compelling on its own with only a short amount of time, but they also each fit very nicely into a whole picture too, building the overall story and suspense super well. 

Vinland Saga - Makoto Yukimura

Vinland Saga had a fantastic start (Thorfinn the viking arc) but it's on the list because the second arc is one of my favorite manga arcs. The first thing that I admire about that arc is how big of a tone shift it is. It’s so different from the previous one that it feels almost like a completely different manga, but the progression is smooth instead of jarring or unbelievable, and as a cohesive story, the transition from fighting to farming reinforces the primary purpose and message of the manga. The second is the art. The art in Vinland Saga is consistently very good in both the first and the second arc (in combat, impact is so palpable it’s almost tactile), but the second arc is especially memorable because of the raw emotional strength of some panels and dialogue. The panel of Thorfinn standing with the soldiers behind him, his face almost unrecognizably bruised, and the “I have no enemies” line is maybe one of the greatest panels in manga ever. Incredible stuff.

Jujutsu Kaisen - Gegu Akutami

A relatively new addition to Shounen Jump, Jujutsu Kaisen is my favorite of the more recent generation of jump series (p.s. anime adaption coming soon). Jujutsu Kaisen successfully subverts a lot of shounen tropes without being absolutely ridiculous (aka One Punch Man, which is also good), has a very interesting power system (the complexity reminds me of HxH, specifically the detail of and careful thought behind nen fights), is in general very smart and interesting (many panels and dialogue are very thought provoking), has excellent, distinctive characters, and phenomenal art.

A few points there merit more detail. 

• On tropes: the biggest subversion is Gojo. Really early on in the manga, he introduces Gojo Satoru, a character so unreasonably overpowered that any typical plot point around a straightforward power struggle loses its urgency. One Punch Man deals with that by being absurd and centering the plot around that. Jujutsu Kaisen deals with that by being very clever about the plot, creating compelling and different storylines where antagonists play around Gojo, only possible because JK has tremendously smart writing.

• On the power system & philosophy: characters don’t get stronger because of the exalted power of friendship. Two power ups are particularly memorable to me: one because “your hands can’t develop faster than your eyes, and if you lose eyes capable of discerning between good and bad your hands performing work won’t wish for improvement,” and the other because “with a firm base, skill, and imagination, a person can change thanks to the slightest of events.” Both of these are smart and true.

• On art: one of the key parts of shounen is action. The art is JK is not only beautiful (territorial expansions are very cool and very creative), but the action is easy to understand and follow, panels are clear and clean, important climaxes are punchy, and everything just generally flows very well.

Silver Spoon - Hiromu Arakawa

Silver Spoon is not just my number one manga of the decade but my favorite manga of all time. It is by the same author of FMA, but it is a pretty different manga & a totally different genre. The main story revolves around Hachiken, a disillusioned city kid who goes to a far away farming school for his high school education. I started reading Silver Spoon when I was profoundly and painfully depressed in my sophomore year of college and it was one of the few bright spots of my life. Reading about hachiken learning and growing on the farm was very healing for me at a time when I was feeling very stressed about accomplishments and school. No other manga has had the same emotional impact on me. 

HM: Space Brothers, Kingdom, Tower of God, Haikyuu, Kimetsu no Yaiba, Grand Blue, Hunter x Hunter, Mushishi, Zatch Bell, 20th Century Boys

Top Ten Games of the Decade

Bioshock

I played Bioshock back in 2011. Bioshock is the first story based game I’ve played that truly enraptured me (lol). As a younger gamer, Bioshock helped me understand and see the potential for deep, meaningful, and well crafted stories and experiences in games. It was the first time that I played a game and really felt invested in the story, and felt very rewarded after i finished the game, especially because of how the choices you make during the game influence the ending (albeit in pretty limited ways). For my playthrough, I tried to be the good guy and ended up getting the happy ending, which was actually genuinely touching, and I still remember watching the final cutscene and feeling very satisfied. It also definitely helps that the game looks very good and was most importantly very fun. The plasmid / weapon combo felt very fluid, especially the one two electric jockey, and I wish more games had a similar combat system. 

Skyrim

Skyrim is the one singer player first person RPG that I was the most invested into. I honestly don’t even know if the game was that good (sorry Isaac) but I enjoyed it a lot and I played the shit out of it in 2013. It was so fun (and so stupid) to make literally hundreds of iron daggers to level up my smithing (lol), backstab a bunch of grey monks for my sneak (also lol), and run around killing dragons and shouting at things. I also really liked the side quests!!! All of them were super fun and I actually think even more enjoyable than the main quest. I think that was the best of all the open world games that came out this decade, the release of which is thankfully slowing down. 

World of Warcraft

I started playing World of Warcraft on a private server (molten wow) in Taiwan around 2012 with some friends. Wow is my second favorite game of the decade. I was more deeply engaged with and engrossed into wow than I was with any other game, and to this date wow is one of the most community oriented gaming experiences I’ve ever had. I played and loved so many different parts of it. I got deep into raiding, and spent a lot of time raiding ICC with a bunch of Eastern Europeans in our guild super late into the night (I would sneak up and play until 3, 4 am). I played a bunch of pvp and especially arena, climbing the ladder as a frost mage + disc priest duo. I enjoyed every part of it, even the objectively unpleasant parts, like grinding levels, grinding reputation for titles, fishing / farming for unique mounts, wiping in raids after hours of progress / practice bc of someone’s small silly mistake, rolling for loot, farming mats. But out of it all I was for sure most into PVE raiding. The excitement of clearing a raid together was electrifying, the communal experience of everyone doing their role and working as a 25 person unit so satisfying. Raiding was so meaningful and enjoyable for me that I actually wrote the first draft of my common app college admission essay on wow, but it got vetoed by my college counselor, which I’m still mad about that today. That essay was better and way more sincere than the one I actually submitted. 

One Night 

I don’t play a lot of board games and never really did until the summer of 2016, although I always liked them. During my internship, I played a veritable fuck ton of One Night with my mason bros Andy, Brian, and Austin, and it was SO much fun. I also played a bunch of it in college in my senior year with my friends there, and I still play it occasionally here. The game is very well designed and balanced, and there is so much engaging depth in the game. It’s so fun when you manage to figure everything out and play the game perfectly and you feel mad rewarded when you pull off a narrow or unexpected win. Special shoutout to 3 person One Night, the purest and most difficult form of One Night. 

Fallout 4

Fallout 4 is honestly not that great of a game (the building is so boring) and the game is so buggy (one of the more boring building missions near the end bugged out for me, and I pissed so I never even finished it). It’s on my list though because this was when I first discovered my complete lack of brain when playing games. I don’t like puzzles and I (usually) don’t like having to learn hard mechanics, I just wanna hit stuff and watch cool things, and I discovered this during my Fallout 4 baseball bat only playthrough. Smacking things in vats is *chefs kiss*

Vermintide 2

Vermintide 2 is a really really simple hack and slash that I started playing in 2017. For some reason I got really into it and immediately sank about a hundred hours of it. I picked this game not just because I spent a ton of time playing it, but also because it helped me understand a dimension of gaming I enjoy deeply that I previously did not recognize. It’s an extension of Fallout 4, except even purer because Vermintide 2 has even more limited plot and map options to explore. Ultimately to be honest with myslef I just really like hitting stuff with melee weapons in games, and if there are satisfying visuals / feedback (aka a gory spurt, a loud thunk) then the game is going to be fun for me. Add on a solid progression system and there goes 50 hours of my life. I think it is very revealing that my favorite part of Pubg is punching people in the loading area, and my first kills in all 3 battle royales I’ve tried have all been melee kills. 

Monster Hunter World

MHW is my first foray into the Monster Hunter franchise (although I really wanted to get it on the PSP. My mom wouldn’t let me). My enjoyment of the game was definitely not tied to my master of the game because I was honestly pretty bad at the game. Diablos and Nergigante kept fucking me up which was super brutal cause I had to farm them a bunch for my big diablos hammer and my armor. All the dodging and all the carts were worth it though, because holy shit swinging my hammer and whacking monsters is so fun, and when you hit the end of the big bang combo that last swing is so satisfying to land. I’m really not into late game jewel grinding though, even though I heard apparently the grinding is worse in the previous MHs. 

Teamfight Tactics

Tft belongs to a genre of games that came out this year (autobattlers). I loved physical TCGs like Yu-Gi-Oh when I was younger, but since then I haven’t really played any games that hit that strategic niche until TFT. I find it very rewarding to plan around other people both in building a comp and positioning your comp, and it’s very exciting / a big hype moment when you either finish a comp or outposition someone in the late game. I think I also feel a lot of additional excitement because it’s sort of unofficially Riot’s 2nd game, and watching it grow / being a part of its success has been very cool. 

Stardew Valley

I started playing Stardew Valley this year with Shicong because we wanted to play some chill games together, and much to my delight but also chagrin SDV is horribly addictive. SDV is so so so so much fun, an incredibly wholesome and terribly engrossing game. It is a true labor of love. ConcernedApe is a top tier game developer and I can’t believe he made that game totally solo. There is so much rich detail in the game, and the mechanics / game systems are simple but repeatedly rewarding and engaging. It is endlessly entertaining to just run around the farm and do stuff, and so exciting when you catch that fish you haven’t caught before, when you collect the fat stacks after a full set of kegs are ready, when you get that first giant crop. I recommend it to anyone. 

League of Legends

League of Legends is the most important game that I have ever played, and likely will be the most important game that I will ever play. My league experience started in 2012 when TPA won the championship (Bebe’s cross map Ezreal ult snipe is forever seared into my memory). I’ve watched every worlds final since (some in person), and have spent many many hours grinding ranked solo and many many more playing casual league with friends. League is a transformative experience in games for me because the game wasn’t just limited to a one and done experience; league is something I’ve consistently returned to in the last 7 years. Outside of personal experiences, I also started my career at Riot and am still working there, so I feel a lot of personal investment in league. I find it difficult to imagine a game more personally transformative than that.  

Top Ten Artists of the Decade

Frank Ocean

Frank Ocean is the oldest (chronologically speaking) artist on my list; most of the other stuff on here I got into in 2017 or after. I spent a lot of time listening to Frank in 2016 and not much since then. That’s partially because there haven’t been any new Frank albums since 2016 (although I’m super excited to see him at Coachella next year), partially because my tastes in & depth of appreciation of music have changed a lot in the last 2-3 years, but I think mostly because Frank’s music is very emotionally powerful and I’ve formed deep associations between his music and 2016 that make it harder to listen to now the same way it’s hard to read old diary entries. Frank Ocean’s music is somehow simultaneously raw & emotional and well thought out & conceptually organized. Both Channel Orange and Blond were fantastic albums, but my favorite of the two is Blonde, and in general one of my favorite front-to-back albums is Blond.

I have two very fond Frank Ocean memories: the first in 2016, the first time I listened to music while high (thus tracing a very funny lineage from Frank to kpop). I was taking a shower, listening to Super Rich Kids, and I just heard the piano music, the snare, and the lilting drawl of the chorus into the falsetto of the first verse so differently and vibrantly. The second is also in 2016 at home, drinking the 18天生啤 while listening to Blond front-to-back alone in my room the day it came out. It was one of the first times in my life I’ve done that, and also one of the few (I have very little patience for sitting and listening to music. Very few albums interest me enough to listen to straight without doing anything else for hours). 

Kanye West

Unfortunately recent Kanye is not the best Kanye, but I think over the decade Kanye has been one of the best and most influential rappers. I’ve been listening to Kanye for years, since late middle school, but I never had a serious or complete appreciation for Kanye until I moved to LA and started living with Greg. We used to hang out and smoke a lot on the balcony at our first apartment, and I asked him once why he liked Kanye’s music so much. From that question we had 5-6 one hour long sessions about the progression in Kanye’s discography and Kanye’s influence on rap. Kanye is an undeniable giant of rap, and over the years his music has been incredibly innovative and influential. 

Some of my most enjoyable listening to Kanye moments: walking to work on a bright sunny day, listening to Kanye croon-rap on Heartless. Listening to Kanye tell the nation that George Bush doesn’t care about black people. Listening to Nicki Minaj and Rick Ross go off extremely hard on Monster / Devil in a new dress on repeat as a nerdy high school kid. Listening to Black Skinhead during my root canal (the rock drums fit teeth drilling sounds very well). Lots of really really great Kanye moments.

Kendrick Lamar

I started listening to Kendrick in my senior year of high school (starting with good kid, m.A.A.d city) and since then I have been blessed with two more phenomenal rap albums: To Pimp a Butterfly in my sophomore year and DAMN. in my senior year. These last few years of Kendrick have been tremendous and undeniably great, and Kendrick is aggressively, thoughtfully cool and smart. Two small side notes: 1) Humble is one of my favorite MVs of all time 2) I was totally bought into the NATION album theory and was so disappointed when another Kendrick album didn’t drop that next Sunday. This was my first foray into conspiracy theories :’(

Migos

I started listening to a lot of Migos late 2017, a bit before their new album came out. Before that I knew who they were, but I pretty much only listened to Bad and Boujee (I remember Frank stirring an imaginary pot yelling “cooking up dope in the crockpot pot” a lot my senior year). Migos is on the list because their music was the first introduction to a major component of what I really enjoy in rap: sounding and being cool. A lot of their music isn’t the most complicated/ complex thing possible, but none of the hate about adlibs or mumble rap matters to me because when they rap the Migos are so smooth and so effortlessly cool and so much fun to listen to. In October when I saw them in full red/ green/ yellow suits dancing and rapping, it really reaffirmed for me why I enjoy their music so much, the same reason why I now like listening to Gunna, Lil Baby, Roddy Ricch, Drake, some Vince Staple, and Bad Bunny. 

Bolbbalgan4

Most of the stuff on my list are not only just things I really enjoyed but also things that helped me see music differently, with the sole exception of Bolbbalgan4. I just really really like their music and I listened to a lot of them in 2018 (my most played artist on Spotify lol). I spent a ton of time at home or in an Uber or at work listening to Ahn Ji-Young’s beautifully soft voice, and Some still stands out to me as a perfect song even after probably hundreds of listens.

Drake

I’ve been listening to Drake for many years now, but in the last two years I have a new enjoyment and admiration of Drake. I went to his concert (Drake and the 3 amigos tour) early last year with Greg, and it was one of the most fun concerts I’ve ever been to. His music is so exciting and fun, and appreciating 3 hours of nonstop Drake bangers was absolutely incredible. Drake is a big goober and I will probably find Drake memes funny for another 10 years, but despite all that (or maybe because ?) Drake remains extremely cool in a way that’s somehow very unaggressive. Listening to Drake feels like celebrating a party where you’re just as hyped about him as he is about himself (very different from the way Kendrick is cool, or the Migos are cool, or DaBaby is cool). I also admire how versatile his music is. We are closing out a decade of Drakes dominance of rap, and in that time we’ve seen Drake fit on any song: Drake with BlocBoy JB on Look Alive, Drake with Bad Bunny on MIA, Drake with Migos on Versace, Drake with Rick Ross on Money in the Grave, Drake with Lil Baby and Gunna on Never Recover, etc. the list goes on.

Young Thug

In 2017 on one of our beanbag rap discussions Greg told me that he thought Young Thug was the best rapper ever, and I obviously blew him off thinking he was joking (he was not joking, actually, but I didn’t know / wasn’t enlightened enough at the time). A couple of months later, I definitely saw an argument for it, and a couple of years later now I’ve actually been kind of converted. Young Thug is just so gloriously weird in every way: his music, his voice, the way he dresses, the sounds he makes on his songs, his fashion sense, his attitude, his flows. So many things about him as an artist are absolutely unique. The more rap I listen to the more certain I feel about this opinion, because some of his music you just have literally never heard anywhere else before. I joke a lot about these bars on Best Friend:

Take them boys to school, swagonometry /
Bitch I'm bleedin' bad, like a bumble bee /
Hold up! Hold it, hold it, n—— proceed /
I'ma eat that booty just like groceries

but where else are you gonna hear this kind of stuff? 

Twice

Twice is kind of my cheat pick here because I’m going to lump this one in with a lot of other Kpop artists that I really like and mostly talk about Kpop in general. I started listening to Kpop in 2018 when I was still living in my first apartment with Greg. We were smoking a lot back then (and I was eating a lot of cereal), and one day when we were talking about headphones Greg told me to use his Sennheissers to listen to/ watch Blackpink’s Ddu-Du Ddu-Du music video and I was just absolutely blown away. Jennie coming out on a tank totally fucked me up; I still remember it today. There was so much stuff going on: incredible visuals, the colors, aesthetics, concepts, sounds, everything was so engrossing and so high quality. That was how I got into Kpop. In the next few months after I listened to a ton of Kpop and watched a ton of video, and I also I started listening to other artists like RV, Twice, Hyuna, Sunmi, & ITZY. I don’t listen to as much kpop now as I did before (weirdly I listened to a lot of kpop along with a lot of mitski in my late 2018 deep fog) but I still indulge every now and then and I still dig a good kpop MV and get excited about a solid comeback. I picked Twice specifically for the list because they’re my favorite of the kpop groups I listen to. My main enjoyment of kpop comes from how bubbly / energetic / catchy a lot of it is, and so far Twice has the stickiest songs for me. A typical cycle for me goes -> listen to a new twice song -> dislike it -> listen to it 5 more times -> listen to it on repeat for a week. 

Quick shoutout to ITZY. I liked Dalla Dalla so much / spent so much time watching youtube on the couch with Greg I think I literally watched every single live performance of that song. 

Carly Rae Jepsen

It is very funny and satisfying to me that Carly Rae Jepsen made the list. I have no doubt that middle school Justin would be mortified and shocked, because back then I loved to ironically like Call Me Maybe (like everyone else) when in secret I actually also really genuinely liked it (like everyone else). Like almost everything else on this list, my CRJ love affair started in Greg’s car early this year right before Dedicated came out. On the way to the gym he was playing songs from Emotion, and during my workout in the middle of my 5th loop of When I Needed You I knew Carly was something special (and I was totally right. Emotion and Dedicated are both incredible albums).

A month or two after my initial CRJ addiction, I read a review (or maybe a tweet?) that described her music as “cheerfully horny.” That concept / phrase still sticks with me today because I think that is exactly what I like so much about CRJ’s music. In all of her songs, across the happy, the angsty, and the horny ones, there is an unabashed embracement of all of her feelings and emotions that make her music so complete and so fun to listen to. In August this year, I went to her concert in LA with Greg and it was one of my favorite concerts ever (I have a lot of out of tune clips that I will never share but will always cherish).

In the beginning of this chunk I said that it was satisfying to me that CRJ is on the list. Part of that is because Carly is so good and her music is so fun to listen to, but I think a large of it as well is because I previously wasn’t the kind of person that would be down to enjoy CRJ’s music as wholeheartedly and unabashedly as I do now. In a very positive way, watching CRJ sing Cut to the Feeling while holding up an inflatable sword really felt like closing the loop from my moody Mitski period to my cheerfully horny Carly period. 

Mitski

And finally, to no surprise for anyone who knows me, Mitski is my number one artist of the decade. Her music spoke to me in a way and on a level that music hasn’t really before, and helped me understand how powerful and meaningful music could be when you listen to it in the right mood and at the right time. I spent hours and hours this year and last listening to Mitski alone in my room, sitting on my bean bag, lying on my couch or even on the floor. Mitski really shaped my last two years, especially late 2018 to early 2019 when I was sitting around a lot alone in my apartment, vaguely depressed.

I like almost all of her songs, but two parts of two songs are particularly memorable / significant to me, and together they both basically formed my 2019 personal goals. The first is the first verse of I Will (Everything you feel is good / if you would only let you) and the second is the last verse of Townie (I’m not gonna be what my daddy wants me to be / I’m gonna be what my body wants me to be). I spent much of my life before 2019 trying hard to be my ideal self, and very little time listening & caring about how I actually felt or what I really wanted, and it is partially thanks to Mitski that I felt more empowered to Be the Dumbass (Cowboy) I always have been.

My Mitski arc from first listening to Nobody in Greg’s car -> listening to a bunch of Be The Cowboy permanently on loop -> Mitski shaping and informing my 2019 goals -> flying to St. Louis with Greg to go see a Mitski concert has been so incredibly satisfying and nurturing, and I am eternally grateful to Mitski and her music for making me a better, happier person.

Books of 2019

I read much less this year mostly on purpose, but I still had a very enjoyable year of books. Thank you books!!! This year I tried to read more fiction; next year I think I might go back to a 2:1 balance of fiction / non fiction.

2019 in books:

Cream:

Here are my favorite books of 2019, each with a short description / selling point:

• If you are interested in what it means for us to all be butlers, and the difficulty and importance of picking what to contribute to, then read The Remains of the Day.

• If you are interested in a one tournament arc martial arts shounen with really great art and really fantastic characters then read Kengan Ashura.

• If you are interested in the enormity and the littleness of life or if you are in the mood to be tremendously sad then read A Little Life.

• If you are interested in the importance of shadows and obscurity in art and aesthetics and miso soup then read In Praise of Shadows.

• If you are interested in the legend of Achilles from the perspective of a lover and not the hero then read The Song of Achilles.

• If you are interested in a nuanced and varied set of perspectives on tragedy and horror from perspectives not often heard or a specific slice of the Japanese psyche then read Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.

• If you are interested in a very fun and funny set of essays about aging and life in general written in a very charming and dry way then read I Feel Bad About My Neck.

• If you are interested in nature and spirituality then read Mushishi. The anime is also very good.

• If you are interested in your place as a working person in society and individuality balanced against societal expectations then read Convenience Store Woman.

• If you are interested in the soulless aspect of tech and the wholesome aspect of bread then read Sourdough.  

• If you are interested in the best detective novel I’ve ever read then read The Devotion of Suspect X. Seriously this is my “recommend to anyone” book of the year. 

• If you are interested in what makes a great city and how to make a great city, then read The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Who knew city planning was so interesting?!

• If you are interested in feminism and socialism and women’s rights in more egalitarian societies then read Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence.

• If you are interested in the smartest collection of essays I’ve ever read about modern life (we live in a society) then read Trick Mirror. Jia I admire you so much and I want to be your friend.

• If you are interested in Marxist Leninist theory (more specifically the progression of communism and the withering of the state) then read State and Revolution.

• If you are interested in the comforting and redemptive nature of food then read Kitchen. Most enticing katsudon description ever.   

• If you are interested in the power of friendship and love, or a beautiful journey of the mind, body, and soul to the afterlife, then read 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World.

• If you are interested in a very real, interesting, and funny autobiographical account of the life and love of a Taiwanese woman in the Sahara desert then read 撒哈拉的故事.

• If you are interested in a history of America from the perspective of the people or one of the finest defenses of socialism or one of the most brutal takedowns of the idealized America then read A People’s History of the United States.

Books of 2018

Another great year of books!! Thank you books!!

2018 in books:

Cream:
I really ought to rename this shelf to be more descriptive because people always ask me what “the cream shelf” is, but by now the name is kind of stuck and I’ve already gotten used to it :-(. My rough criteria for putting a book in ‘cream’ is if the book either changes my opinion on something or changes my view of the world. Here are my 34 favorite books of the year that did that for me, along with a short description (link takes you to a fuller review, if you’re interested in more info):

• If you're interested in an insightful and thoughtful meditation on enlightenment then read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.

• If you are interested in a more worryingly realistic dystopia than 1984, and if you want to read the most impassioned defense of unhappiness I've ever read, then read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

• If you're interested in a very cute and funny manga about accepting yourself featuring a ridiculously overpowered but very nice kid, then read Mob Psycho 100 by ONE.

• If you're interested in an insane experience with a psychological horror visual novel that breaks the fourth wall in incredibly clever and innovative ways, then read (play?) Doki Doki Literature Club by Dan Salvato. 

• If you like magic and fantasy then read the entire Harry Potter series? But especially Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling. If you haven’t read them yet I’m not sure if my one liner is going to help convince you though…

• If you are interested in the cultural and social context of hip hop from its birth in the 1970s to the 1990s then read Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation by Jeff Chang. 

• If you like depressing short stories or if you’re interested in DFW’s project as an author or if you like his writing then read Oblivion by David Foster Wallace. It also has one of my favorite short stories in the world, Good Old Neon.

• If you're interested in the goat shounen then read Fullmetal Alchemist by Hiromu Arakawa.

• If you're interested in a masterpiece of characterization, a dark and depressing story, or the manga that I think best employs the medium of manga, then read Oyasumi Punpun by Inio Asano. 

• If you're interested in a lovely children's book about learning to be excited about life and some very fun wordplay then read The Phantom Tollbooth by Jules Norton. 

• If you're interested in Thai food in America and how seemingly innocuous areas like food reflect asymmetrical relations of power, then read Flavors of Empire: Food and the Making of Thai America by Mark Padoongpatt.

• If you're interested in modern Japanese architecture then read Maekawa Kunio and the Emergence of Japanese Modernist Architecture by Jonathan M. Reynolds.

• If you like Rick Riordan or if you like good characters and immersive modern day mythology then read The Burning Maze; it's so good and Rick Riordan is great.

• If you are interested in how China has changed in the last 60 years then read China in Ten Words by Hua Yu.

• If you are interested in cheap fashion and how it has affected the fashion industry (and the world) then read Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline.

• If you are interested in learning how to appreciate ballet then read Celestial Bodies: How to Look at Ballet by Laura Jacobs.

• If you are interested in short, funny, and occasionally thoughtful short stories then read One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak.

• If you are interested in a wonderfully dreamy read about a journey of self discovery then read Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami.

• If you are interested in capitalism and the incarceration system and the way the two of them intertwine and interact then read Carceral Capitalism by Jackie Wang, although to be honest I think everyone should read this book.

• If you are interested in learning about the intersection b/w women, race, and class in America then read Women Race & Class by Angela Davis, but honestly I think everyone should read it (especially if you're *not* interested).

• If you're interested in the process of self realization or the struggle between the world of illusion and the world of truth then read Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth by Hermann Hesse.

• If you’re interested in a fuking great sequel to Beartown then read Us Against You by Fredrik Backman. Alternatively, if you’re interested in a gripping story and great characters about community, then read Beartown and then read Us Against You.

• If you’re interested in art, loneliness, and art about loneliness then read The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing.

• Everyone should read this book, but if you’re interested in how all struggles for freedom are interconnected, then you would like Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Davis.

• If you like well written love stories with a lovely element of magic then read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern.

• If you are interested in Augustan era Roman art (unlikely) or if you are interested in the power of art to influence society (much more likely) then read The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus by Paul Zanker.

• If you are interested in why some things should not be for sale then read Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets by Debra Satz. Sometimes (and this is especially true with non fiction) the titles are pretty descriptive…

• If you are interested in wonderfully moody short essays about desire and commodification and identity then read Tonight I’m Someone Else by Chelsea Hodson.

• If you are interested in how racial identity is developed (mostly in America) then read “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” and Other Conversations About Race by Beverly Daniel Tatum.

• If you are interested in the feminist movement in China then read Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China by Leta Hong Fincher, but honestly if you’re interested in feminism or in China it’s also really worth a read!!!

• If you are interested in the loneliness and pain of a man divided between his human self and his wolf self then read Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse.

• If you like Vonnegut or are interested in the problem of hopeless determinism, read Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut.

• If you like Vonnegut or are interested in the possibility of art with meaning and soul then read Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut.

• If you are interested in Asian economics in the 1970s, and in general how countries develop successfully, then read How Asia Works by Joe Studwell.

Some general notes on the year:

• My nonfiction was a lot less focused this year in that they clustered less neatly into topics, but I did spend a lot of my year reading a variety of books on politics & economics & gender studies & ethnic studies that really changed my political views. Most of the non fiction books in cream fall under that category, and all of the books in that category are in this goodreads shelf.

• I read a bit of Vonnegut again in December and will continue in January. I thought it would be a nice way to round out this year and start the next, and so far it’s been pretty fun.

• I am hoping to read with less focus, so I don’t have any particular reading goals or specific genres/ authors I want to read for next year, although I’ll probably keep going through my current to-reads.

• As always I greatly appreciate your recommendations!

• My absolute standout favorites of the year are: Oblivion, Flavor of Empire, Celestial Bodies, The Lonely City, Freedom is a Constant Struggle, The Moral Limits of Markets, Tonight I’m Someone Else, and How Asia Works.

Books of December 2018

The Lonesome Bodybuilder: Stories - Yukiko Motoya

If you are into weird but weirdly normal short stories then read The Lonesome Bodybuilder.

The Lonesome Bodybuilder is a collection of short stories by Japanese author Yukiko Motoya, the first of her works translated into English. There’s weird, and then there’s “what the fuck did I just read,” and The Lonesome Bodybuilder falls squarely into the second category. In these eleven stories, a lonely neglected wife becomes a bodybuilder, a wife notices that she and her husband look more and more similar as time goes on, a saleswoman tries to find the perfect dress for a customer who won’t leave the fitting room… each of the stories surreal and sometimes disturbing.

What I think really sets the collection apart though is the weirdness never regresses to unintelligibility. What holds the collection together and makes it even more surreal is that they are all grounded in very normal, everyday domestic situations, like marriage or work. Motoya then carefully peels back the mundane to reveal a world that is bizarre and alien, imposing a weird normalcy on situations far from normal. Her style, unflinchingly calm and sober, is applied evenly to describing a newlywed couple and to describing a woman arguing with her husband, who is a literal scarecrow, while tiny musical instruments stream from his body. The writing is so cozy and domestic that while reading, I started to second guess myself. Am I the weird one here? Or is the story the weird one? From another lens, is my life just as weird as the people in these stories?

My favorite stories were The Lonesome Bodybuilder, Fitting Room, An Exotic Marriage, Q&A, and The Straw Husband. Some of my favorite quotes:

• On confidence and individuality in relationships:
  I knew the reason. Living with my perfectionist husband had made me think that I was a person with no redeeming qualities. It hadn’t been like that before we were married, but gradually, as I constantly tried to compensate for his lack of confidence by listing all my own faults, I’d acquired the habit of dismissing myself.

• On bodybuilding:
  “Of all athletes, I most respect bodybuilders, because there’s no one more solitary. They hide their deep loneliness, and give everyone a smile. Showing their teeth, all the time, as if they have no other feelings. It’s an expression of how hard life is, and their determination to keep going anyway.”

• On shopping:
  In terms of reasons a customer might not come out of the fitting room, one possibility is that they’ve actually finished changing but the clothes are hopelessly unsuitable. It’s happened to me too: there are some clothes in the world that, the moment you put them on, make you feel so miserable you just want to smash the mirror in front of you as your reflection looks on in surprise. The kind of clothes that make you think, You’ve got to be kidding, and wonder if perhaps you’ve always looked like a clown, whether your entire life up until that point has been an embarrassing mistake.

• On dependence:
  Men entered into me through my roots like nutrients dissolved in potting soil. Every time I got together with someone new, I got replanted, and the nutrients from the old soil disappeared without a trace. As if to prove it, I could hardly recall the men I’d been with before. Strangely, too, the men I’d been with had all wanted me to grow in them. Eventually, I’d start to feel in danger of root rot, and would hurriedly break the pot and uproot myself.

• On the varieties of relationship woes:
  Your concerns when it comes to love are much less unique and interesting than you imagine. The majority are variations on the following: How can I get the person I’m interested in to talk to me? He’s having an affair. He won’t have sex with me! My boyfriend is an asshole. And so on.

Children of Blood and Bone - Tomi Adeyemi

Children of Blood and Bone is set in prehistoric Africa and is about a girl’s journey to bring magic back to the lands. The premise is kind of cool but really unoriginal, but nothing really sets it apart except for the names of the people, places, and the African gods. This could’ve really easily been the same story with the African elements removed, and I don’t think the story would really lose very much. The characters are also very poorly written, and their motivations for doing things are either nonexistent or nonsensical. I wasn’t really able to empathize or relate to any of the characters, and she alternates between the four main characters and their perspectives but you can’t tell who the narrator is without the chapter headers because they’re all written the same -.-

The Incendiaries - R.O. Kwon

If you are interested in the relationship between faith, love, and obsession then read The Incendiaries.

The Incendiaries is centered on two main characters that meet at college: Will, who transfers from bible school after he loses his faith, and Phoebe, still wracked with guilt over her mother’s death but keeps it a secret. Their relationship becomes strained when Phoebe gets drawn into a religious extremist cult, and Will struggles to “save” her and their relationship. I’m not sure I really personally vibe with the themes, but they were interesting. I understood the book to be mostly centered on faith and love, and specifically the similarities between obsessive love and religious fanaticism. Both have elements of giving yourself up in dangerous ways, and devoting yourself to the wrong temple is one of the most dangerous things you can do.

One of the standout things about the book is R.O. Kwon’s writing. Her descriptions in the book are very lush and powerful, and some specific phrases like “disheveled with morning” and “still so God-haunted” were very enjoyable to read. She does go overboard sometimes with her language, the starkest example I can remember being the scene when Phoebe and Will meet John Leal and she is describing the food. “Pink meat bled when I cut it open, the charred bits crunching like minute bones. A torn roll steamed; butter liquefied. Oil dripped, gilding white porcelain.” I was also often confused by the Will and Phoebe chapters and who was narrating, but I think that’s more due to me being bad at reading rather than R.O. Kwon being bad at writing :-(. The setup of the story was also nice— the important parts of the book plot wise happen pretty late, and most of the book is character exposition & slow buildup of tension, which is always very fun to read when done by a good author like Kwon.

She also replied to our twitter DM suggesting some questions for our book club discussion, which is really cool. Here are some quotes that I like:

• On grieving:
  I noticed him crying, in the kitchen: I pretended I hadn’t. If he was grieving, I didn’t think he had the right.

• On a strong opener:
  I asked Julian questions. He tried to reciprocate, asking about life before Edwards. No, I said. First, I have to know everything about you. I want all your secrets, Julian. Let’s start at the beginning. Big or small, what’s the first lie you told? I watched him smile, each wide tooth showing. It was like a picket fence swinging open: his smile invited me inside.

• On losing faith:
  No loss occurs in isolation, and a side profit of the faith that I missed at times like this was how easily, while Christ shone in each face, I loved. If hatred cuts both ways, to forgive can be a balm, and I often missed, as I would a friend, the more tranquil person I now had no reason to be.

• An example of good writing, and showing rather than telling:
  I sat in the apartment through morning: I took a bus to Michelangelo’s. Though I didn’t have a shift, I helped at the front until I noticed a five-top littered with used plates. I carried them back to the kitchen, spilling pesto on my shirt. I dropped a knife. I took the table’s busboy out back, and I yelled at him. I asked what the fuck he’d been thinking. Looking down, he muttered that it wasn’t his table. It’s Gil’s, he said, his childish face bagged with fatigue. I excused him. I left, riding the bus home again.

Steppenwolf - Hermann Hesse

If you are interested in the loneliness and pain of a man divided between his human self and his wolf self then read Steppenwolf.

My friend Trisha has very similar thoughts on this book but was much more articulate than me on them so I’m going to cop out of a real review by quoting her in entirety (with minor edits):

ok so like a lot of the books i like steppenwolf captures specific instances of the human experience that are quite transformative or fundamental (to some). so in the preface when the nephew says that the events are "tangible representations of intangible events" i really like that because it means that the events of steppenwolf are representations of spiritual feelings through physical acts that aren't realistic but are representative

for example, harry haller and hermine are jungian opposites (anima and animus) and while i'm not too caught up on the psychological facet of that representation, i think it fundamentally comes down to one of the "splits" that the personality has - both of which are very real parts of him

i like that at first haller thinks he has to either be the man or the wolf, but through his interaction with hermine he realizes that each individual is made out of infinite parts (a discovery that culminates in the magic room) because i suppose i relate quite a bit to that - there's this fundamental self but at the same time by sticking to one identity you lose out on other, sometimes paradoxical, identities that are worth something as well and that are part of you as well. there's the independent, 'wolfish' part of harry that desires to be away from the rest of humanity. then there's the part of haller that wants to be loved as a whole and feels attracted to bourgeois society, even though he is still skeptical of it. and hermine teaches him that this isn't two contradictory selves, but different parts of one self

steppenwolf to me is about seeing identity as something multidimensional and something not to be too fixated by. it's also about the phrase "learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest.” haller's really serious at first but he learns to loosen up and appreciate things in the world through hermine, who is meant to be the lighter part of his personality. he learns to appreciate mozart through the gramophone, he learns to dance, he learns to see the heroic in the every day. and so when he finally kills hermine, it's symbolic of the unification of his personality where he learns to not be a dichotomy or a split in any number of ways but a unified self. in a way, accepting paradoxes within, and he's conflicted about the division because he feels both

The only thing I have to add is while I was reading Steppenwolf I found myself getting drawn into Harry’s monologues because I also often feel a sharp division in myself and struggle with what I perceive to be the “wolfish” parts of myself, but then he would follow these passages up by saying Harry was stupid and the division was artificial, and fuck… he’s right… Sometimes I do think the whole thing is pretty juvenile, akin to being a middle schooler and sulking because you feel misunderstood. Is the Steppenwolf just an angsty puppy? Hesse wrote Steppenwolf in his 50s but I am not surprised at all that it has been enduringly popular amongst teenagers for decades.

Some quotes I liked:

• On the division in the Steppenwolf:
  These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and the devil in them; the mother’s blood and the father’s; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man in Harry. Their life consists of a perpetual tide, unhappy and torn with pain, terrible and meaningless, unless one is ready to see its meaning in just those rare experiences, acts, thoughts and works that shine out above the chaos of such a life.

• On the artificial division:
  The division into wolf and man, flesh and spirit, by means of which Harry tries to make his destiny more comprehensible to himself is a very great simplification. It is a forcing of the truth to suit a plausible, but erroneous, explanation of that contradiction which this man discovers in himself and which appears to himself to be the source of his by no means negligible sufferings. Harry finds in himself a human being, that is to say, a world of thoughts and feelings, of culture and tamed or sublimated nature, and besides this he finds within himself also a wolf, that is to say, a dark world of instinct, of savagery and cruelty, of unsublimated or raw nature. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone’s does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands.

• On dancing:
  She danced wonderfully and I caught the infection. I forgot for the moment all the rules I had conscientiously learned and simply floated along.

• On lightness:
  I suspect you of taking love frightfully seriously. That is your own affair. You can love as much as you like in your ideal fashion, for all I care. All I have to worry about is that you should learn to know a little more of the little arts and lighter sides of life. In this sphere, I am your teacher, and I shall be a better one than your ideal love ever was, you may be sure of that! It’s high time you slept with a pretty girl again, Steppenwolf.

Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut

If you like Vonnegut or are interested in the problem of hopeless determinism, read Timequake.

Narrated by Vonnegut, Timequake's main character is Kilgore Trout, who also appears in many of Vonnegut’s other books. The eponymous timequake sends everyone from the year 2001 back to 1991, where they have to relive every decision they made and action they took in the last 10 years. As in all other Vonnegut books, style and how the story is told are just as important as the plot, and Vonnegut mixes past with present as the story moves through the timequake, jumping in between current day and timequake flashback freely. In typical Vonnegut fashion, he also goes off tangent very frequently, and adds small stories, weird tidbits, and stray thoughts, like plots of sci-fi books, the plot of the Scarlet Letter, and some psalms. Here, as in Slaughterhouse Five, the irregular time in the story allows Vonnegut to jump back and forth in past and present and in fact and fiction, slicing the story into irregular chunks where chapter breaks are just as significant as paragraph breaks. In most of these small stories, the characters are forced to remember and relive their bad choices, and when time finally jumps back to 2001, they are all rendered helpless by their apathy and their inability to exercise their will and change.

Some quotes that I liked (and man Vonnegut books always have so many):

• On good art:
  I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, “The Beatles did.”

• On the embarrassment of existence:
  It appears to me that the most highly evolved Earthling creatures find being alive embarrassing or much worse.

• On being alive:
  “being alive is a crock of shit.”

• On appreciation:
  He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to notice it. “He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery, or fishing and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door. “Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: ‘If this isn’t nice, what is?’ ”

• On helplessness:
  “Listen, if it isn’t a timequake dragging us through knothole after knothole, it’s something else just as mean and powerful.”

• On our purpose:

  • We are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.

  • For Christ’s sake, let’s help more of our frightened people get through this thing, whatever it is.

  • I go home. I have had one heck of a good time. Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different!

• On the purpose of books:
  Still and all, why bother? Here’s my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.”

Holidays on Ice - David Sedaris

If you like David Sedaris’s writing style and particular brand of humor then read Holidays on Ice. I read it on the plane because I thought it would be a nice read and it was quick but be warned, it’s definitely not a normal heartwarming Christmas read :p

Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut

If you like Vonnegut or are interested in the possibility of art with meaning and soul then read Bluebeard.

Bluebeard’s main character is Vonnegut’s other alter ego and recurring character Rabo Karabekian, a painter who is also a minor character in Breakfast of Champions. In Bluebeard, Karabekian is a wealthy old man, twice married, who lives in a big house with just his friend. Part of the abstract expressionist movement, Karabekian became friends with several of the famous painters of the movement, and built a large collection of their paintings. Like other Vonnegut books, Bluebeard mixes fact and fiction freely, so it’s hard to tell what’s true and what’s not, and he specifically notes in the introduction that Bluebeard is not supposed to factually recount Abstract Expressionism.

In the book, Karabekian meets a woman Circe Bergman, who forcefully enters his life and makes him change. He starts to write his autobiography (which ends up being this book), and we learn his background. Son to two Armenian parents who escaped the massacre and came to America, Karabekian apprenticed under another Armenian painter, meets the abstract expressionists, makes a lot of failed paintings, and then through a series of accidents, fortune, and misfortune ends up mostly alone in this big expensive house in the Hamptons with lots of expensive paintings, and a potato barn with his final work locked away from anyone else to see.

What sets Bluebeard apart from Vonnegut’s other stories, besides Karabekian as the main character, are two stylistic things. He doesn’t hop around quite as much in Bluebeard as he does in his other backs, and although moves from past to present, the past generally progresses chronologically, and the flashbacks are all sequentially interspersed between present day. This is typical for most books, so atypical for Vonnegut. Bluebeard also has a pretty happy ending, in the sense that the external situation is good, whereas while other Vonnegut books don’t necessarily end tragically, the satisfaction and happiness is more internally harmonious, and the plot always wraps up nicely but it’s not like anyone is having a particularly swell time.

I interpreted the book to be about the possibility of creating art with real meaning, i.e. art that has soul in it, which is something Rabo struggles with in the book. Karabekian is a very skilled painter and copier, and his original pieces that he created when he was painting with the abstract expressionists were big monocolor panels with strips of tape on it. They are supposed to mean nothing, but actually secretly symbolized souls, which is a really sad metaphor because the paint he uses is defective and eventually disappears, and the tapes (souls) just fall off. He is technically skilled, but his art lacks soul, which I think maybe is also an indictment of Vonnegut’s works, and something that he feared, since Rabo is one of his alter agos? That would be somewhat surprising though, because I think I like his work so much because of the amount of soul they have, and how solid and real they feel despite how weird most of them are.

Some of my favorite quotes:

• On the embarrassment of existence:
  Paul Slazinger says, incidentally, that the human condition can be summed up in just one word, and this is the word: Embarrassment.

• On loneliness:
  My mother was shrewd about the United States, as my father was not. She had figured out that the most pervasive American disease was loneliness, and that even people at the top often suffered from it, and that they could be surprisingly responsive to attractive strangers who were friendly.

• On making good art, and thinking of an audience:
  “That’s the secret of how to enjoy writing and how to make yourself meet high standards,” said Mrs. Berman. “You don’t write for the whole world, and you don’t write for ten people, or two. You write for just one person.”

• On being open:
  Circe Berman asked me about being one eyed after we had known each other less than an hour. She will ask anybody anything at any time.

• On women:
  And then she added: “Women are so useless and unimaginative, aren’t they? All they ever think of planting in the dirt is the seed of something beautiful or edible. The only missile they can ever think of throwing at anybody is a ball or a bridal bouquet.”

• On the postcoital mood (a big mood, for sure):
  When we reached this house, and although we had not and never would make love, our moods were postcoital.

How Asia Works - Joe Studwell

If you are interested in Asian economics in the 1970s, and in general how countries develop successfully, then read How Asia Works.

This is one of my favorite non fiction books of the year. How Asia Works examines the successes and failures of different Asian countries in the 20th century to develop, aiming to understand what set apart successful countries like Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and China from countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Taiwan. His primary thesis is that different stages of development for a country require different policies, and applying the IMF/ World Bank policy of financial deregulation & free market is terrible advice for developing countries. The recipe for success is very simple: household farming that maximizes the surplus of labor, export-oriented manufacturing that engages farmers in the modern economy and forces a country to technologically mature and develop, and closely controlled finance that supports these two areas of development. The book is split into four sections: the first three each devoted to a part of the recipe, and the last a specific chapter focused on China.

What I love about this book is even though the subject matter is a little niche and could easily be dry, Joe Studwell really really breaks down the subject very well, and writes in such a cogent way that the lessons he is trying to impart are so simple they sometimes seem obvious. I was initially very reserved about reading a book about Asia called How Asia Works written by someone who wasn’t Asian, but it's clear that Joe Studwell is a real expert on the subject, so much so that he is able to distill sharp insight into easily digestible and well organized chunks. If you have even a remote amount of interest in how different countries develop economically, this book is a very very interesting and informative read. In a nonfiction of this length, I typically have about 50 highlights, maybe 100 if the book is very interesting. In How Asia Works, I had 369.