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.