reading
a list of books i've read (since june 2022)
- 03/02/25 america is not the heart - elaine castillo ✰ it's really good; one of my favorite contemporary novels. i can almost feel how much work went into writing (and rewriting) it, for how real the characters feel, how vividly their emotions in little moments and gestures are wrought. occasionally, the writing is a bit corny, but for the most part feels really fresh & lively, the psychological drama acutely observed. there's so much life in this book, so much love for people and a place.
- 02/02/25 landbridge - y-dang troeung ✰ afterlives of war and genocide, coming of age in a small canadian town, countless trips to the hospital, moments and feelings that make up a life, so beautifully and thoughtfully rendered. deeply moving and unforgettable; it has a permanent place in my heart.
- 01/22/25 territory of light - yuko tsushima ✰ living is hard.
- 01/16/25 please look after mom - kyung-sook shin liked this about as much as i thought i would, which is to say, :-/
- 01/08/25 the end of the affair - graham greene ✰ giving a star because i definitely liked it some of the time, like when maurice is soo in his feelings about his ex, and i like the evolution of his relationship with henry. good drama, all very #real. except for all the stuff about god. who cares.
- 12/29/24 greek lessons - han kang
- 12/24/24 mrs. caliban - rachel ingalls ✰ i didn't know much going in but i wish i'd known even less. i cannot describe the feelings i had reading those last couple pages. floored me. what a book!
- 12/11/24 the race card - tara fickle ✰ if you're interested in game studies, orientalism, and asian american lit slash history, have i got the book for you! academic nonfiction is almost always a bit of a slog, and this book is no exception, but there were some really interesting sections on pokemon go, the orientalism of "the magic circle," discourses on chinese immigrant labor and how the language of games is employed to further assumptions and narratives about "fairness" and "freedom" under capitalism.
- 11/12/24 korea's place in the sun - bruce cumings ✰ having not been trained as a historian or read many books on the subject, i found this a pretty well-written & readable history, both in its accounting of events/actors and in its willingness to editorialize. in addition to his wryness, cumings makes his feelings and sympathies extremely clear, and in doing so makes himself a more sympathetic storyteller. even if i don't savor all of his insights (at the end of the day, he is old white man in the korean dept with a younger korean wife [just found out they divorced a few years ago]), i still appreciate this approach to narration, and i hope the other history tomes i plan to read are as lively.
- 10/22/24 who ate up all the shinga? - park wan-suh ✰
- 10/06/24 a brief history of china - jonathan clements
- 09/27/24 beijing sprawl - xu zechen fine i guess.
- 09/17/24 so many olympic exertions - anelise chen ✰ belongs on the shelf sandwiched between search history and activities of daily living. though now that i'm comparing it to two of my favorite books, i admit this one was a bit less compelling. i expected to fall in love with it, which isn't rly fair. it's still a good book! pathos and grief mediated thru anecdotes / parables. the physical and psychic struggle of being an athlete in all its absurdity beauty and tragedy. the physical and psychic struggle of living.
- 09/05/24 mother night - kurt vonnegut ✰ not peak vonnegut but i liked it enough. there's not as much like, looking "outward"? already kind of feel like i need to reread it.
- 09/03/24 alien daughters walk into the sun - jackie wang long, but i liked the parts i liked. kunming. the biking.
- 08/25/24 concerning my daughter - kim hye-jin (tr. jamie chang) ✰ loved it... a little saving face a little activities of daily living. thank u for the rec chalay.
- 08/23/24 fang si-chi's first love paradise - lin yi-han (tr. jenna tang) ✰ among other things, a lucid and harrowing testimony of the emotional, social, psychic experience of child sexual abuse. trigger warnings include rape, grooming, domestic violence, and suicide. devastating, viscerally upsetting, gorgeously wrought and indelible. rest in peace, lin yi-han.
- 08/15/24 mort - terry pratchett ✰ comfort food, reminds me of adventure time (i imagine it was a big influence). fun, silly and touching. excited to read more discworld books, thx again for the rec sammi!
- 08/05/24 the naked tree - keum-suk gendry kim (tr. janet hong)
- 08/01/24 pedro páramo - juan rulfo ✰ really cool. found out after reading that they're actually releasing a new film adaptation later this year? almost 70 years later?? a coincidence almost as spooky as this book...
- 07/29/24 migrant futures: decolonizing speculation in financial times - aimee bahng ✰ i often have trouble articulating what i "get" from academic nonfiction.. i should probably start taking notes. but this was a really interesting book for thinking about how & where speculative fiction & other forms of speculation (from financial speculation and securitization to military simulations of "national security threats") intersect, and how science fiction can & has been used to, for example, advance u.s. military interests, and on the other hand, to imagine alternatives to capitalism's futures, the realization of which has always relied upon exploitation of the global south (exemplified variously by e.g. the establishment of fordlandia in brazil, the global commercial surrogacy industry, the exploited labor of migrant workers from latin america & southeast asia). i've also read most of the spec-fic texts discussed here which definitely added to my appreciation.
- 07/19/24 ping pong - taiyo matsumoto ✰ speaking of sports anime... i've watched this series 3 times and hadn't read the manga, but i saw the physical volumes in silver sprocket and decided i should (though i waited til i was home and read it on my phone). having thoroughly enjoyed both, i was surprised to find parts of the anime (namely some pieces of characterization / added backstory, a couple scenes) that weren't in the source material, but feel so core to my memory of the story & drama. it's so interesting to me when things are added to an adapted work; i appreciate that there's this 2nd, differently fleshed out version of the same narrative.
- 07/16/24 the queen's gambit - walter tevis i think if i'd read the book first i would've enjoyed it more & the show a bit less. i don't like doing it in the opposite order. as it was, in many important aspects, pretty faithfully adapted, reading the book mostly just felt like reliving my experience of the show, or it was hard for the images of the show to not delimit my imagination. (this also happened, albeit to a lesser degree, when i read do androids dream of electric sheep and couldn't stop picturing harrison ford's face). revisiting this story after 4 years of learning & spectating chess made me appreciate some details more but also caused it to lose some of its original luster.. it's a sports anime & i accept it must in part be a fairytale, and the more-or-less nonstop crushing everybody in her path is part of that, but i think it could've been a more satisfying narrative if it were less moored in fairytale logic?
- 07/16/24 cuckoo - joe sparrow nothing against the illustration but it feels like such a by-now extremely well-trodden sci-fi x coming-of-age narrative, the same series of emotional beats... just did not hit, in the same way that for example his earlier short work homunculus, while also not telling a super original or boundary-pushing story, still managed to hit.
- 07/12/24 the paper door and other stories - shiga naoya, tr. lane dunlop liked this overall, just not sure how much. if memory serves, i most liked the stories taken from the early to middle parts of his career. not forgettable, not indispensable, somewhere in between.
- 07/04/24 beijing comrades - bei tong (anonymous), tr. scott e myers
- 07/02/24 fish in exile - vi khi nao ✰ melancholic, oblique, startlingly pretty, relationally strange, stylistically not quite like any novel i've read.
- 06/27/24 the world is born from zero - cameron kunzelman
- 06/26/24 by night in chile - roberto bolaño ✰ wow. alt review: what if woodcutters was good?
- 06/23/24 the best short stories 2023: the o. henry prize winners - ed. lauren groff a decent anthology: a few i quite liked, most i liked ok / thought were interesting, very few i just didn't care for. my favorites: "temporary housing" by kathleen alcott, "the haunting of hajji hotak" by jamil jan kochai, "after hours at the acacia park pool" by kirstin valdez quade, "wisconsin" by lisa taddeo, and "me, rory and aurora" by jonas eika.
- 06/03/24 peach blossom paradise - ge fei (tr. canaan morse) ✰ never heard of this book/author but it called to me from the library shelf. on one level at least i thought this was really good. portraits of lives marked by suffering and failed ideals... the translation is so evocatively written. though by the end it left me feeling kind of empty. engages with revolution not on the level of ideology or ethics but just as the ego's striving, searching for gold at the rainbow, as bloody, tragic, ineffectual, ultimately irrelevant. a beautifully rendered story but also a tiny bit unsatisfying, like a dream so close to making sense.
- 05/28/24 border town - shen congwen meandering book with an unexpectedly affecting ending?
- 05/26/24 grass - keum-suk gendry kim (tr. janet hong) ✰ "what's your favorite thing?" "nothing." what is there to say.
- 05/15/24 kappa - ryunosuke akutagawa (tr. lisa hofmann-kuroda, allison powell)
- 05/07/24 tropic of orange - karen tei yamashita i find it harder to articulate my experience of this book than my experience of through the arc of the rain forest, which i wholeheartedly loved / resonated with. it's similarly ambitious and dense with interesting ideas/images/language, but i can't say i enjoyed it as much "as a novel." would be interested in revisiting one day.
- 04/11/24 kim ji-young, born 1982 - cho nam-joo (tr. jamie chang)
- 04/06/24 human acts - han kang (tr. deborah smith) ✰ among other things, an unflinching look at the brutality of state violence. the world turns but there are so many bodies to bury.
- 03/23/24 girl town - casey nowak (re-read) funny moment when i opened the table of contents and saw there were 5 stories cuz i only remembered there being 3. the one with the robot boyfriend is still the best (it's not close).
- 03/13/24 the absolute at large - karel capek fun premise and setup, but as it develops the satire becomes increasingly unfocused, incoherent, ineffective. by the end it's just farce.
- 03/11/24 familiar face - michael deforge ✰ who else is depicting alienation, desire, digitally mediated life etc in such a whimsical and soul-stirring way...
- 03/10/24 neotenica - joon oluchi lee file under queer lit about "straight" people—a fun, stylish novella that, as one goodreads reviewer puts it, "occasionally overreaches."
- 03/01/24 the storyteller: tales out of loneliness - walter benjamin mm dunno what i expected but didn't have the patience for this. eyes glazed over and i skimmed a lot. maybe for a hardcore benjamin enthusiast who wants to read everything he wrote / don't mind sifting through a lot of disjointed odds and ends.
- 02/27/24 at dusk - hwang sok-yong (tr. sora kim-russell) lukewarm, mostly. it's not badly written or anything, it just feels.. not particularly original, in its themes, emotional notes... the soap opera twist. park minwoo's present-day narration
- (didn't finish) the posthumous memoirs of bras cubas - joaquim maria machado de assis just couldn't get into it at this moment in time. maybe one day. not in a rush tho.
- 02/07/24 terminal boredom - izumi suzuki (tr. polly barton et al) similar and yet disappointing in comparison to hit parade of tears, which also had its share of clunkers but left a much better overall impression. i think i liked fewer than half the stories here, and while it's not entirely skippable, there just wasn't much to be excited over.
- 01/31/24 a scanner darkly - philip k dick ✰ about surveillance, drug addiction, psychosis, an atmosphere of paranoia and conspiracy that feels so endemic to american life, as much now as then. antihumanist and intensely personal, even sentimental. some rly beautiful, twisting writing, esp in the final third. my favorite of his so far and one of my favorite scifi novels in general. though the casual misogyny and racism of its characters make it not a universal recommendation, it leaves a deep impression.
- 01/23/24 the wrong end of the telescope - rabih alameddine ✰ beautiful, special book. i cried real tears. (the scene with the orangutan was maybe a little on the nose.) don't kill me but.. i was reminded of vonnegut. yes, maybe in general (the balance of humor, cruelty and tenderness; maybe the pacing reminded me of cat's cradle specifically), but definitely in specific moves: the way that the not-really-but-kind-of-authorial-self-insert character is written, and even how that character talks about different ideas he's had for books to write. anyway, yes, love this book—so capacious, and so timely. i borrowed it from the library but i'd like to get my own copy.
- 01/07/24 nineteen - ancco (tr. janet hong)
- 01/07/24 woodcutters - thomas bernhard look at these people! they think they're so fucking important, but get this: they're not! they think they're so good at art, but no, actually their art is dogshit! old crank excoriates his former art world acquaintances, reaches terminal levels of haterdom..! ok, there's definitely more to this book than that. i appreciated the richness of the narration, its twists and repetitions and repetitions and contradictions.. however, i think, barring some few nice musings here n there, the "analyses" of people and society and art etc were often just not very compelling or interesting to me. considering how much this book is lauded, i was expecting to get more from or feel more about it? if this book is any indication i don't think i'm cut out to be a bernhard stan, wade through the mire for the parts i find worthwhile.
- 12/28/23 nevada - imogen binnie ✰ last book of 2023! 90 pgs in: unfortunately pretty relatable, as in, the narrator's processing of thoughts/emotions feels very familiar, but it's also a bit obnoxiously white at times. i probably would have fixated on this a lot if i read it 10 years ago. still might. after finishing: the narrative voice gets kind of grating after a while. the whole 2nd half, i didn't really enjoy. in another universe it was excised and edited down to be a standalone short story. but i understand what she was going for..?
- 11/28/23 chorus of mushrooms - hiromi goto hard for it not to feel a bit dated and corny now, but still has some magic to it! fond of, if not in love with.
- 11/19/23 stone fruit - lee lai ✰ lovely graphic novel about rough feelings. would recommend in general!
- (didn't finish) - korea's place in the sun: a modern history - bruce cumings will finish one day
- 10/07/23 moms - ma yeong-shin meh.
- 09/24/23 becoming japanese - leo ching important academic book for understanding how taiwanese identity was formed under japanese colonial rule. sort of want to reread this cuz i've struggled to articulate its arguments to ppl, but also it's fairly niche.
- 09/16/23 roaming - jillian and mariko tamaki fresh out of their first yr in college, two old friends and one newer friend take a trip to da big apple. their relationships w one another go in all sorts of directions... cute, a little heart breaking, beautifully drawn.
- 09/07/23 hit parade of tears - suzuki izumi ✰ one of my favorites in recent memory. takes surreal / supernatural premises but gives them an extremely down-to-earth treatment, where it's like, just good stories about bizarre shit happening to "normal" people.
- 09/06/23 haunting the korean diaspora: shame, secrecy, and the forgotten war - grace m cho ✰ probably a must-read for engaging with the korean war & the korean diaspora in the us. i fucking hate america.
- 08/28/23 the membranes - chi ta-wei (tr. ari heinrich) a little let down after how hyped up this was. like as a cultural object, it's cool! and it had good elements to it, but actually reading it left me cold. i remember feeling put off by the constant references. idk.
- 08/19/23 a body beneath - michael deforge i'm so glad mdf kept at it, because i do not like his early stuff, and all his more recent stuff that i've read rules (starting w big kids from 2016). this book is his early stuff, and he even says in the intro that this stuff feels so bad in retrospect. part of that for me is it feels unrelentingly grotesque, meanspirited, maybe misanthropic in a way that i can't fully get with, and his later work contains so much more than that (and also just love the directions his style has gone in since then).
- 08/17/23 palimpsest: documents from a korean adoption - lisa wool-rim sjöblom ✰
- 08/13/23 intimate empire: collaboration and colonial modernity in korea and japan - nayoung aimee kwon
- 07/28/23 under the black umbrella: voices from colonial korea, 1910-1945 - hildi kang
- 07/20/23 the drowned world - jg ballard
- 07/09/23 speedboat - renata adler
- 07/03/23 harrow - joy williams ✰ about ecological collapse. no shortage of good joy williams sentences here, though it's not lightning in a bottle like the changeling either. it's angry, bleak, funny in a bone-dry way. liked it but can't say i'm hungry for a reread.
- 06/21/23 exhalation - ted chiang uneven. can't think of one i liked unreservedly, but first (time travel) and last (parallel realities) were probably the best? the one about digital pets had its moments, but otherwise felt so unnecessarily bloated, so much musing.. i can appreciate trying to explore a concept as fully as possible, but the returns, eventually, diminish. (not to mention the very uncompelling relationship drama threaded into it.)
- 06/01/23 skye papers - jamika ajalon
- 05/30/23 pizza girl - jean kyoung frazier
- 05/19/23 vampires in the lemon grove - karen russell
- 05/09/23 the word for world is forest - ursula k. le guin
- 05/04/23 the museum of unconditional surrender - dubravka ugresic (tr. celia hawkesworth) ✰ very good.
- 05/03/23 time shelter - georgy gospodinov (tr. angela rodel)
- 04/19/23 the children's bible - lydia millet
- 04/14/23 one! hundred! demons! - lynda barry ✰
- 04/08/23 krapp's last tape - samuel beckett
- 03/31/23 the wall - marlen haushofer ✰
- 03/23/23 a country of ghosts - margaret killjoy ✰ big shoes to fill for someone writing explicitly anarchist spec fic, sometimes the characters in this book are straight up just like "you've never heard of anarchism? well here's what it means." in general though i must've enjoyed it (enough to have given it a star after finishing it, it seems) and it probably would be a good thing for some kid who has never heard of anarchism to read it. (also appreciate how the author goes over some of the book's shortcomings in the paratext.)
- 03/15/23 sorry to disrupt the peace - patrick cottrell ✰
- 03/02/23 annihilation - jeff vandermeer ✰ i get why this took off!
- 02/19/23 dear cyborgs - eugene lim ✰
- 02/13/23 city of illusions - ursula k. le guin ✰
- 02/07/23 planet of exile - ursula k. le guin ✰
- 02/02/23 rocannon's world - ursula k. le guin ✰
- 01/27/23 office of historical corrections - danielle evans ✰
- 01/17/23 matigari - ngũgĩ wa thiong'o ✰
- 01/11/23 activities of daily living - lisa hsiao chen ✰
- 01/01/23 heaven - mieko kawakami
- 12/30/22 kakukaku shikajika - akiko higashimura ✰
- 12/25/22 attrib and other stories - eley williams
- 12/15/22 bliss montage - ling ma
- 11/25/22 buried child - sam shepard
- 11/23/22 long live the tribe of fatherless girls - t kira madden ✰
- 11/09/22 the changeling - joy williams ✰
- 10/30/22 the defense - vladimir nabokov
- 10/25/22 voyage to arcturus - david lindsay ✰
- 10/08/22 locos - felipe alfau
- 10/01/22 things that fall from the sky - kevin brockmeier
- 09/29/22 prison memoirs of a japanese woman - kaneko fumiko ✰
- 09/04/22 otaku: japan's database animals - hiroki azuma
- 08/30/22 through the arc of the rain forest - karen tei yamashita ✰
- 08/17/22 scattered all over the earth - yoko tawada
- 08/11/22 do androids dream of electric sheep - philip k dick
- 08/07/22 sing to it - amy hempel
- 08/05/22 flowers of mold* - ha seong-nan (didn't finish)
- 08/01/22 the hole - hiroko oyamada
- 07/29/22 the housekeeper and the professor - yoko ogawa
- 07/27/22 laura dean keeps breaking up with me - m tamaki & r valero-o'connell
- 07/26/22 galapagos - kurt vonnegut ✰
- 07/24/22 lesser known monsters of the 21st century - kim fu ✰
- 07/16/22 boundless - jillian tamaki
- 07/17/22 tokyo tarareba girls - akiko higashimura ✰
- 07/13/22 the lonesome bodybuilder - yukiko motoya
- 07/08/22 the sirens of titan - kurt vonnegut ✰
- 07/04/22 tokyo ueno station - yu miri
- 07/02/22 the lathe of heaven - ursula le guin
- 06/30/22 weather - jenny offill ✰
- 06/28/22 supermutant magic academy - jillian tamaki ✰
- 06/24/22 convenience store woman - sayaka murata
- 06/18/22 the maze of transparencies - karen an-hwei lee
- 06/14/22 the factory* - hiroko oyamada (didnt finish)
- 06/12/22 search history - eugene lim ✰
- 06/03/22 there's no such thing as an easy job - kikuko tsumura
2024
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