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.