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.