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:

did I like this book?
do I have something interesting to say about this book?
(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.).