2019 international women's day.

march 8 is international women’s day, though, as far as i’m concerned, every day is women’s day. usually, i’d post a stupidly tall stack of books by writers who are women of color, but, this year, i thought i’d maybe try something different, try to be a little more intentional about this and talk about seven books by asian women i recommend — and why.

maybe the thing really is that i miss talking about books. hell, i miss reading.

(i know; this post is 12 days late.)

t kira madden, long live the tribe of fatherless girls

i’m currently reading this, and i. love. it. so. much. madden’s writing is so beautiful and thoughtful and haunting, and i’m not very far into this because i’ve been so busy, i haven’t had much time to read, and also because i want to savor this, don’t want to rush through it, but i already know it’ll be a favorite from this year.

these cookies, though … i am not a cookie baker. i do not bake cookies. i swore off baking cookies six years ago after i went through my spate of obsessively researching cookie-baking and trying so many stupid recipes in an attempt to get my perfect crispy-on-the-outside, chewy-on-the-inside chocolate chip cookie. all my cookies invariably turned out like cookie pucks, rising too much and resulting every time in a cookie that had slight taste variation but zero difference in texture, whether i had more butter or a higher brown sugar ratio or longer refrigeration time — whatever the recipe, i still always got the same puck-like cookies, and, so, i swore vehemently never to bake another goddamn chocolate chip cookie again.

until a few weeks ago, apparently, because i became curious again — and because i want to try to bake with alternative flours for some reason. (the reason is my health.) i will not, however, be baking cookies with alternative flours; i’m already annoyed that i can’t get that perfect chewy, crispy texture with regular flour (aka gluten); and i know it’s going to be impossible without gluten.

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t kira madden is not only a wonderful writer; she is also a delightful human being; and i want to be friends.

she and her partner are so cute together.

there is no period in her name.

angie kim, miracle creek

(FSG sent me this ARC months ago, before they changed the title to miracle creek, so my ARC title is not the publication title.)

i read miracle creek a month ago, and maybe this is lazy, but here’s what i wrote on instagram in my review:

the novel follows a trial after a tragic accident, and, ultimately, if i were to sum it up briefly, i’d say that miracle creek is a story of good people who make not-so-wise decisions that end up having some dire consequences. it’s a story about mothers who make difficult decisions for their children every day, about motherhood and the desire for it, about mothers with disabled or non-neurotypical children and the unique hardships and emotions that only they can truly know. it’s a story about the wisdom of withholding judgment; it is impossible to know a human’s story or motivations or fears or trauma or pain. it’s a story about human meanness, the necessity for human kindness, the lengths to which a little empathy (or lack thereof) can impact someone’s life. it’s about love, tough love, forgiving love. it’s about a whole lot of things, and the writing is smart and introspective and cinematic (this would make a fantastic mini-series), and i highly, highly recommend you add this heart-squeezing, thoughtful novel to your reading lists this spring.

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i wonder who gave FSG the memo that they really, really, really needed to start diversifying their list, but whoever did, i’m glad. FSG is the publisher i apparently have read the most from — i have enough books by FSG to fill almost two whole shelves, not counting the books that are published in paperback form by picador. that goes to say that i have always loved FSG’s taste in writing, though my interest had waned in recent years given the blinding whiteness of their list … until the last year rolled around, and, suddenly, there was eugene lim’s dear cyborgs and ling ma’s severance and now angie kim’s forthcoming miracle creek and chia-chia lin’s forthcoming the unpassing, and the really fun, cool thing about that is that i’m fairly sure there are a few titles i’m forgetting.

in the grand scheme of lists, it’s still a small percentage of asian american writing.

in the grand scheme of publishing, it’s not an insignificant change, and i absolutely love it.

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miracle creek is a smart, deftly written book. it jumps from character to character, while moving the story along in time, but it’s not a tiresomely ambitious book. in the hands of another writer with a more headstrong writerly ego, miracle creek could easily have gone the way of a tiresomely ambitious book, but, in angie kim’s hands, it is a novel that just wants to tell a nuanced story about the complexity of human love.

because human love is deeply complex. it is twisted up in contradictions, and, while it doesn’t have its limits, human love does get tired. it makes mistakes; it often makes those mistakes because it runs so deep, it can get reckless. human love also has the ability to trap us in a narrow place, creating a bubble around us and our love because that is the only way we can protect our love. it closes us off to greater possibilities, greater potential, greater hope.

and, yet, still, human love is a wonderful and powerful thing. it is the reason we are able to make sacrifices for the people we love. it is the thing that allows us to empathize with and understand other people. human love helps us keep each other accountable in the hopes that we will emerge as better people, and, even now, two months after i finished miracle creek, i’m still stunned at how incredibly and deeply angie kim depicts all this.

eugenia kim, the kinship of secrets

i have not read this yet, but i am sticking it in here because i have actually never seen this around since it was published in november and i am super excited to read it. the kinship of secrets is about two sisters who are raised in two different countries — their parents decide to immigrate to the US, but, at the time, they can only take one daughter with them, choosing to leave the other with her grandparents in seoul. as life goes, though, especially when there’s a major war (aka the korean war) involved, they’re unable to send for her in the timeframe they anticipate, so the two sisters grow up on opposite sides of the world.

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i’ve recently been craving some rich, vivid korean historical fiction set during the japanese occupation. i would be very surprised if there weren’t any such novels that have been published in korea, but, as far as i know, none has made it into english translation.

one day, i’ll get back to seoul and spend a week or so leisurely browsing bookstores, checking out the food scene, and trying all kinds of skincare. i’m so curious about what’s getting published and which products are being used in korea because everything we get stateside (or that we even hear about stateside) has gone through numerous gatekeepers who filter what’s actually being talked about on the ground in seoul.

i’d love to get past those gatekeepers and experience things for myself.

han kang, the white book

i also haven’t read this yet, but it’s my online book club’s pick for march, and i am excited to read it. i do wish i was reading it in its original korean instead, though, so i did go out and ordered 흰, which means i might dump this translation and just do the slow, laborious process that is me reading in korean.

i admit that i have a fair amount of reservations when it comes to deborah smith’s translations, to the point that i haven’t been able to read much of anything she’s translated recently. i’ve been trying to read bae suah’s recitation since it was published, but i keep wondering how accurate the translation is, how much we can even reasonably expect as far as “accuracy” goes in translation, and what that even means. is accuracy in translation simply getting all the words right? is it about taking liberties with words and structure to capture the quirks in a writer’s voice and tone? or does translation also entail taking more liberties in order to make things more “understandable” or “accessible” to a foreign reader who will likely not be familiar with the cultural and social context of the novel being translated?

i admit that i am also wary of a translator who is so new to a language and culture, and i’m also wary of the kind of inflated confidence that leads someone to think that she’s capable of adequately translating complex novels after six years of exposure to a language and culture. unlike others who may be impressed by the short amount of time deborah smith spent learning korean before diving into translating, i’m actually made wary by that fact. maybe it’s the korean in me being protective. maybe it’s the writer and reader and translator in me who knows how difficult it is even for me, a korean-american whose first language was korean, who is intimately familiar with korean culture, to translate something and minimize the amount of things that are inevitably lost in translation. i don’t know. whatever it is, i am wary and cautious.

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glossier’s milky jelly cleanser is still my number one go-to cleanser. i was honestly planning on bringing more skincare talk into this post, but, heh, that’s not happening.

nagata kabi, my lesbian experience with loneliness

i find this title to be louder and more sensational than it needs to be; this manga is a pretty damn universal story of loneliness, depression, insecurities, and fears — but, by this point, all i keep focusing on is how this blog post feels so choppy that it’s irritating me. i’ve fallen out of the habit of blogging (if you haven’t noticed yet), and, last year, it was because of a bad depressive episode then because of my puppy then because i was working on a memoir-of-sorts-in-essays, but, this year, it’s my day job. i’ve been blaming a lot on my day job, but it really has been a black hole of energy — and positivity. despite what the depression and anxiety might have you think, i am, in general, a positive person.

i hate whining and complaining, and i hate that kind of behavior all the more in myself. i’ve found myself doing a lot of it these last few months, and i’ve been trying to stop, to complain less, to focus on the positive side of things — i like my job itself, love that i’m back in new york, am super stupid grateful to be on my own with my own place.

and the thing about complaining about shit is that i’m always reminded that there are people who have worse jobs than i do — and maybe you’re thinking, well, tell me more about this manga, not about your stupid life! — except, i don’t know, that’s kind of it — this manga isn’t just for lesbians or for lesbians with depression — it’s for anyone who has ever felt lonely, scared, anxious, and depressed.

jang eun-jin, no one writes back

when people ask what they should read in korean literature-in-translation, jang eun-jin’s no one writes back is the one i recommend. someone asked me recently, why?, and i think i said something about how i think no one writes back reads as very korean without being too weird, too foreign, too distant. there’s nothing “exotic” about the novel — it’s about a young man who’s drifting around korea with his dog, befriending strangers and writing them letters. something has sent him away from home, but we’re not quite sure what, not until later.

there’s a quietness and somberness to no one writes back that i find very korean, but that’s honestly all i could tell you. there’s something in the tone, in the melancholy, that just feels very korean to me, and i know i keep saying — it’s “very korean” — but i’m not explaining it. i’m not trying to be mysterious or anything, though; i genuinely do not know how i should explain what i mean by that, just that that is my lasting impression of this novel, which i read a few years ago and still about time and time again.

no one writes back was kind of my gateway into korean literature-in-translation, which is true and isn’t because i’d definitely read other korean books (in translation) before. it is, however, the novel that kicked off a flurry of dedicated reading of korean literature, and it’s also the novel that introduced me to the tremendous work being done by the dalkey archive press that has this library of korean literature that has many, many books across a pretty wide range of authors. it is fantastic, and i am truly grateful for what the press has been doing.

susan choi, trust exercise

susan choi is one of my favorite writers; she’s so smart and insightful; and i finished trust exercise almost a month ago but have not yet reviewed it because i’m still processing — i’m still mulling it over.

i didn’t come out of trust exercise bouncing off the walls and wanting to shout about it from the rooftops. i came out of it thinking that it wasn’t necessarily a book for everyone, but i couldn’t explain what i meant by that. i don’t know that everyone will love trust exercise, though that kind of feels like a dumb thing to say because not everyone should love every book, anyway — books that are “universally” loved always seem suspect to me, like what i this conspiracy that has led people to band around any particular book and overlook its flaws and quirks and particularities? maybe that’s why i tend to be more open about my “negative” opinions; i want to put some kind of “balance” out there.

anyway, i didn’t come out of trust exercise wanting to run up to everyone and say, read this read this read this! i did, however, come out of the novel with a lot to chew on — susan choi raises a hell of a lot of interesting questions about narrative, memory, the ways we revise our narratives. she follows a group of theatre kids from a precious arts high school in southern america, and she takes us through three parts, though that’s all i honestly want to say about form. the less you know about this book going in, the better, i think. the more interesting it is when you can’t anticipate even the basic shape of what will happen.

so maybe that’s where i’ll leave this? because the book is not published yet, and i don’t want to go on and on about it because maybe i do think this is a book people should read. it makes you ask yourself about how you revise your narrative, how you revise who you are as the character in your life’s narrative, how you choose to remember things.

and maybe those are all things worth asking ourselves every so often.

international women's day!

it's international women's day, and i'm not that big on hashtags (despite sporadic participation), but i'm all about opportunities to share asian-american and [east] asian books-in-translation (i admit/acknowledge that my geographic focus is narrow).  here are ten books by international women i love.

1. banana yoshimoto, lizard (washington square press, 1995)
2. marilynne robinson, lila (FSG, 2014)
3. krys lee, drifting house (viking, 2012)
4. ruth ozeki, a tale for the time being (penguin, 2013)
5. mary shelly, frankenstein (penguin clothbound classics, 2013)
6. han kang, human acts (portobello, 2016)
7. helen macdonald, h is for hawk (grove press, 2015)
8. charlotte brontë, jane eyre (penguin clothbound classics, 2009)
9. jang eun-jin, no one writes back (dalkey archive press, 2013)
10. shin kyung-sook, i'll be right there (other press, 2014)

also, one of my favorite book quotes comes from yoshimoto's "helix," a story which can be found in her collection, lizard:

"even when i have crushes on other men, i always see you in the curve of their eyebrows."  (64)

happy international reading!

my year reading korean and korean-american literature.

i.

in 2015, i read 11 books (of 70) by a korean or korean-american author.  it was an interesting experience, surprising in some ways that i didn’t expect.  the most surprising was the shock of recognizability and the pleasantness of it, never having been the kind of reader (or viewer) who needed or wanted to relate to characters in books (or film or tv).  truth be told, it never occurred to me to be bothered by the whiteness of the world around me until i was in my twenties; i suppose there’s a privilege in that as well as a significant measure of unawareness and, probably, self-absorption.

a lot of it, though, came from the fact that, when i fell into pop culture and entertainment as a pre-adolescent, i fell into korean pop culture and korean entertainment.  my boy band was h.o.t., not ’n sync or backstreet boys.  my celebrity crushes were tony and junjin and jang geun-seok.  the women i considered beautiful were jeon ji-hyun and song hye-gyo and shin mina.  i grew up watching korean dramas, not american television, and, to this day, my nostalgic cultural references are all korean and i often sit silently, confused, when listening to friends talk about their adolescence because i can’t relate.

the strangeness of that also didn’t occur to me until i was in my twenties.  i was born and raised in the states and have never lived in korea, and it wasn’t like my parents forced me to partake only of things korean.  (they actually hated my k-pop obsessions; i often joke that, had i grown up in korea, my parents would have shaved my head because you know that drama answer me 1997?  i was sung shi-won, minus the cute romance.)  maybe it was that i had friends who were also into k-pop; maybe it was that, growing up, 80% of my friends were korean and the remaining 20% asian.  maybe part of it was that i am fluent (to a degree) in korean, so the language barrier never existed, and maybe it was also that this was all during the days of wimpy dial-up internet when on-line forums were starting to become a thing and making things more accessible.

and yet, though my sources of entertainment were korean, my reading life was solidly fixed in the west.  my parents didn’t encourage me to read outside the classics when i was young, so i grew up on the brits, the french, the russians.  when i started reading contemporary literature circa 2005, i still stuck with the familiars — the british, maybe a few americans, haruki murakami — and i have to confess i stayed away from “asian-american literature,” uninterested in what felt predominantly like “immigrant narratives,” stories i couldn’t relate to and wasn’t interested in, as horrible and snooty as that sounds.  (i’ve since come around and seen the errors of my prejudice, so don’t judge me too harshly.  i was young and very immature.)

the stupid part of that is that relatability (which is apparently not a word but i am running with anyway) is such a broad thing.  we can relate to so many things, so many different circumstances, because there’s something universal about human struggle, about human pain, about human love and desire and fear.  that’s why it’s so infuriating to me to see such a narrow focus in publishing, the dominance of white stories, the reluctance for publishers to take risks and throw their weight and support behind diverse writers of color from different places who have different stories to tell from the lives they’ve lived because there’s that fear that the american public “won’t relate.”

maybe that’s one reason i never put much stock in the idea of being to relate to what i was reading or watching.

there is a pleasure and comfort in it, though — i’ve learned that as i read more from korean and korean-american authors last year.  there’s something pleasurable about being able to immerse yourself in a world and find yourself there in the specifics, to see that there are other people out there who’ve had similar experiences, who’ve struggled with belonging, with balancing what oftentimes feels like a dichotomous existence.  it’s one of those things i didn’t really learn until i realized how nice it felt, these oddities of being korean-american, never really belonging in any group, whether it be white americans or korean-koreans or, even, kprean-americans.  being korean-american, in and of itself, isn’t a unifying force; there are so many of us growing up in different cities, in different neighborhoods, in different second-generation upbringings that the only common thread between us sometimes is that we are korean-american.

all that said, though, only two of the eleven books i read in 2015 really brought that sense of relatability to the surface in a dominant way:  patricia park’s re jane (pamela dorman books, 2015) and jung yun’s shelter (picador, forthcoming 2016).  both books follow a korean-american and beautifully capture that dichotomy of being korean-american without that identity being the focus of the story, and both park and yun weave it into the narrative rather, showing how our ethnic identities do influence us in ways that we might not intend or realize, how many of our decisions and actions are unconscious reactions to the way we grew up.

ii.

what’s not surprising is that my awareness of myself as an Other came through my experiences with book culture.  i grew up in southern california, specifically in the valley, and i never like a minority because there were just so many asians and i grew up in the korean community.

the first book event i ever attended was an ian mcewan reading at the LA public library.  it was for solar (jonathan cape, 2010), and i was excited for it because, one, i’d never seen an author “in real life” before and, two, i loved ian mcewan and had recently gone through his backlist in a frenzy.  it was weird to me, then, to queue before the doors opened, looking around at the white crowd around me — in an auditorium in little tokyo, no less — feeling like i must stick out like a sore thumb, this twenty-something asian girl among all these white people, most of whom were much older than i was.

part of me relished it.  another part of me wondered where all the other readers of color were because i knew i couldn’t be the only one, and that’s been the question that has remained with me over the years as i’ve attended many, many more readings but haven’t lost that sense of being the asian unicorn in the room.  i know we’re out there and, to take it further, that we’re out there reading from a range of authors, so it’s an honest wonderment of mine, and i love when i go to a reading of an author of color and find the room filled with a diverse range of readers, which goes to show that we are here and we want diverse books.

to bring this back to the topic at hand, though:  the concept of the Other obviously exists differently in korean literature.  i feel like all the korean books i read last year told stories of people who lived outside the norm, on the fringe, almost to the point that i wonder if that is the role literature plays in korea or if it is simply reflective of what editors here are compelled toward and want.  the filtration system of translated korean literature is of interest to me.

it’s true that society gravitates towards hierarchies and groups, and homogeneous societies will draw lines, too, making Others of people according to criteria other than skin color.  in many ways, to korean-koreans, the korean-american is the Other — the time i felt most acutely like the Other was in 2012 when i went to seoul for the first time in twelve years.  i spent ten days in seoul after spending three weeks in japan, which in itself was a crazy experience because i couldn’t communicate, so i’d anticipated some comfort going to korea where i could speak the language and was familiar with the culture.

i suppose that familiarity with the culture should have prepared me for how acutely aware i would be of myself as the Other.  i speak enough korean well enough for koreans to be impressed, but my limited vocabulary and weird accent set me apart and put me down.  more importantly, though, i don’t fit the korean (or the seoul) “type” or standard of beauty — i’m not thin; i’m too tan; and i don’t wear make-up.  i don’t wear the right clothes, and i don’t have aegyo or a “cute” personality, all of which is fine, until you step into a homogeneous society that is very open about giving you the look over and judging you by your appearance.

in the face of seoul’s trend-obsessed mainstream, it’s not surprising to come across very different lives in korean literature.  there’s a bleakness to korean novels that isn’t found in literature elsewhere, and many of the characters in the korean novels i read were people who had somehow been left behind or cast aside, who were struggling in these “outside” communities, who were Others because of their lack of prestige or education or financial stability.

korean-american literature, on the other hand, explores the korean as the very obvious Other, and i think the one korean-american author i’ve read who really straddles the korean/korean-american divide well is krys lee.  i read her debut collection, drifting house (viking, 2012), in 2013, and i’m still amazed when i think about it today because it’s like she has one foot firmly in korean-america and the other in korea.  that’s not an easy thing to do, but she does it beautifully and hauntingly, and i can’t wait for her novel, whenever that’s published.  i hope it’s soon.

iii.

reading in translation when you’re partially fluent in the original language is an interesting experience.

when i’m reading, say, a russian novel-in-translation, i admittedly don’t really think about it as a translation — as in, i’m not acutely aware of it, even though i know i’m reading in translation.  as in, because i lack any familiarity with or knowledge of russian, i’m able to take the translation with little resistance, almost at face value.

when reading korean novels-in-translation, though, i’m always aware that i’m reading in translation.  i frequently pause to wonder what the original korean says, how many liberties the translator has taken, how much nuance has been lost.  this awareness is more acute with certain books (i.e. han kang’s the vegetarian [hogarth, forthcoming 2016]), less noticeable with other books (i.e. jang eun-jin’s no one writes back [dalkey archive press, 2013]), and, sometimes, i’m so bothered that i have to stop reading the translation altogether (i.e. gong ji-young’s our happy time [atria books, 2014]).

this often has little to do with the translators.  the nature of translation is that it isn’t hard or rigid but porous with each translator bringing his/her own method and philosophy to each book, and translating from korean to english is hard.  english, as lovely as it is, is a limited language; it doesn’t have the width or breadth of words that korean has, words like 원망 or 정 or 아쉽다 — words that encompass so much more than their english counterparts can possibly convey.  korean is also structurally looser, more prone to poetic freedom and ambiguous pronouns, and there’s a rhythm to the way sentences usually end — 했다 한다 간다 — that creates a tone and cadence that simply cannot translate.

the inevitable by-product of translation is, therefore, loss.  we lose nuance; we lose points of cultural significance; we lose layers of voice and tone and mood.  one of my favorite books from 2015 was han kang’s human acts (portobello books, 2016), and, in the introduction, translator deborah smith writes:

born and raised in gwangju, han kang’s personal connection to the subject matter meant that putting this novel together was always going to be an extremely fraught and painful process.  she is a writer who takes things deeply to heart, and was anxious that the translation maintain the moral ambivalence of the original, and avoid sensationalising the sorrow and shame which her home town was made to bear.  her empathy comes through most strongly in ‘the boy’s mother’, written in a brick-thick gwangju dialect impossible to replicate in english, korean dialects being mainly marked by grammatical differences rather than individual words.  to me, ‘faithfulness’ in translation primarily concerns the effect on the reader rather than being an issue of syntax, and so i tried to aim for a non-specific colloquialism that would carry the warmth han intended.  though i did smuggle the tiniest bit of yorkshire in — call it translator’s license.

one of this translation’s working titles was ‘uprisings’.  as well as the obvious connection to the gwangju uprising itself, a thread of words runs through the novel — come out, come forward, emerge, surface, rise up — which suggests an uprising of another kind.  the past, like the bodies of the dead, hasn’t stayed buried.  repressed trauma irrupts in the form of memory, one of the main korean words for ‘to remember’ meaning literarily ‘to rise to the surface’ — an inadvertent, often hazy recollection which is the type of memory most common in han kang’s book.  here, chronology is a complex weave, with constant slippages between past and present, giving the sense of the former constantly intruding on or shadowing the latter.  paragraph breaks and subheadings have been inserted into the translation in order to maintain these shifts in tense without confusing the reader.  (human acts, 4-5)

i loved this.  i almost wish more translators would address such things in introductions or afterwords or something.  in some ways, i think smith’s introduction actually helped me read human acts when han’s other book-in-translation, the vegetarian, left me feeling a little frustrated and lost because i could feel the things that had been lost in translation.

that said, the idea of loss shouldn’t discourage us from reading in translation.  i think it’s absolutely crucial that we read in translation, if only because we lose so much (or fail to gain much, i suppose is the better way to put it) when we read only the offerings of english, and i find it discouraging whenever i hear how reluctant americans are to read books-in-translation and, in connection, how publishers are reluctant to acquire and publish books-in-translation, which is why i give major props to dalkey archive press for its “library of korean literature” published in collaboration with the literature translation institute of korea.  i read a number of titles from them in 2015 and am planning to read more in 2016, and it’s been a pleasure to read their translations, not only for the quality of their work but also the range of books they choose.

(also MUCH love to mcnally jackson for regularly carrying several titles on their shelves.)

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there was more i wanted to write here, but, as i plan to read even more from korean and korean-american authors this year, i’ll end this here.  in 2016, i also plan to make good on my 2015 goal to read a book in korean every month, so i anticipate that there will be a lot for me to think about as i read, so we shall continue this discussion over the year!

thanks for reading!

july + august + september reads!

apparently, three months is the charm.

thirty-eight.  margaret atwood, the handmaid's tale (HMH, 1986) (via oyster books).

she did not believe he was a monster.  he was not a monster, to her.  probably he had some endearing trait:  he whistled, offkey, in the shower, he had a yen for truffles, he called his dog liebchen and made it sit up for little pieces of raw steak.  how easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.  what an available temptation. (ch. 24)

creepy, creepy, creepy — margaret atwood’s dystopia made me think of something edan lepucki said at a recent event for the paperback of california, that, when she was coming up with the dystopia in california, she thought of all the things that were going wrong in our world today and simply imagined up how the world might look years from now if we continued on this same trajectory.  atwood’s dystopia creeps me out for the same reason — the world featured in the handmaid’s tale is not a wholly unimaginable or inconceivable one.

not only that, but offred also isn’t a character who was born into that society — she was there for the change, the transition, and she remembers life from before she lost her job, had her account frozen, was put in a red robe and tasked with sleeping with a married man for the sake of conception.  god, it makes me shudder just thinking about that, though the real terrifying part of this is that there are societies out there women are thusly repressed (women aren’t allowed to read in gilead) and valued solely/principally for their ability to spawn and meet the needs/demands of men.

that said, i must confess that i really was not keen on the ending, that last bit that’s meant to be an academic study.  i felt it was unnecessary and a little jarring, actually.

thirty-nine.  michael cunningham, the hours (FSG, 1998).

yes, clarissa thinks, it’s time for the day to be over.  we throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes.  we live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep — it’s as simple and ordinary as that.  a few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we’re very fortunate, by time itself.  there’s just this for consolation:  an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we’ve ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult.  still, we cherish the city, the morning:  we hope, more than anything, for more.  (225)

cunningham writes with so much heart and so much love.  there’s a lovely quiet to the hours, a steadiness that gets disturbed as you get deeper into the book, into the lives of these three women’s lives.  on the surface, they each want such simple things, but nothing is quite so simple — it makes me think of what cunningham said at his lecture at columbia earlier this year, that there’s no such thing as plot, just characters trying to get something they want with some kind of force preventing them from getting it.

it’s been a while since i read the hours, so i admit to being fuzzy on specifics — the hours left in its wake a lovely, hazy feeling, though, and i remember it fondly, something i find to be common amongst books i’ve loved but have only read once.  my book club is reading the hours for our october read, though, so i do plan on reading it again next month!

one distinct thing, though, that i remember disliking:  there were two of three parts i found jarring because we’re removed from the POV of the three main women.  i loved the narrow focus on the women, and i felt myself shaken from the novel in those moments we’re taken away from them — because it only happens a few times, it’s quite startling.

forty.  margaret atwood, the heart goes last (nan a. talese, 2015).

then he’s unconscious.  then he stops breathing.  the heart goes last.  (70)

again, one of the disadvantages of waiting three months to write reviews is that, well, it’s been three months.

after i finished the heart goes last, i instagrammed, “trust margaret atwood to deliver your regular dose of what-the-fucks with smart social commentary, dry humor, and a dystopia that could be right around the corner.”  i didn’t love it effusively, but i enjoyed it — devoured it in twenty-four hours, actually.  i love the title, though.  and can’t wait to hear her read/speak in a week!

forty-one.  jeffrey eugenides, the virgin suicides (picador, 1993).

we couldn’t imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.  (243)

two things:

(one)  this is a case where rereading produces an unfavorable change in opinion.  i loved this a whole lot when i first read it a few years ago (It was also one those rare instances of liking the movie as much, too), but i had a lot of problems with it this time around.  for one, i felt like i was floating over the narrative the whole time (a similar problem i had with middlesex), and, for another, it lacked introspection, but, most of all, i was creeped out by the lack of self-awareness that would have mitigated the stalking and voyeurism.

i’m not saying that literature shouldn’t creep us out.  literature should disturb us, take us into depths we wouldn’t normally descend, but we’re supposed to be getting the virigin suicides in the past.  the narrative we is grown-up now; they’re middle-aged, looking back on their youth; but they haven’t grown up — there’s frankly no depth, and the romanticizing of their creepy behavior did not sit nicely with me at all.

i also was never convinced of the narrative “we” and its “reportage” — for the former, the “we” would fade into an omniscient third-person from time-to-time, giving us stories that were either imagined or being recalled and narrated for the reader, neither of which i was convinced was the case.  (inconsistent narrative voice is, apparently, a thing that bothers me a lot.)  as for the latter, i simply wasn’t convinced that they could get the access they could.

(two)  only a man could have written this book.  i’m not saying that’s inherently good or bad, simply that it is.

forty-two.  helen macdonald, h is for hawk (grove/atlantic, 2015) (via oyster books).

gos was still out there in the forest, the dark forest to which all things lost must go.  i’d wanted to slip across the borders of this world into that wood and bring back the hawk white lost.  some part of me that was very small and old had known this, some part of me that didn’t work according to the everyday rules of the world but with the logic of myths and dreams.  and that part of me had hoped, too, that somewhere in that other world was my father.  his death had been so sudden.  there had been no time to prepare for it, no sense in it happening at all.  he could only be lost.  he was out there, still, somewhere out there in that tangled wood with all the rest of the lost and dead.  i know now what those dreams in spring had meant, the ones of a hawk slipping through a rent in the air into another world.  i’d wanted to fly with the hawk to find my father; find him and bring him home.  (ch. 23)

i LOVED this.

the premise of the book is simple:  after the sudden death of her father, macdonald learns to fly a goshawk.  it’s a beautiful book about grief, full of heart and mourning and love, whether for her father, for her hawk, mabel, or for the greater world around her and the history that came before.  macdonald’s writing is sparse and raw and honest, and i simply loved this book.  it’s one of those loves that leaves me coming up empty when trying to write about it, but i loved it and highly, highly recommend it.

(i did think there was a bit too much about t.h. white, but, overall, i liked how she wove his story into her own.)

here’s another passage just because:

of all the lessons i’ve learned in my months with mabel this is the greatest of all:  that there is a world of things out there — rocks and trees and stones and grass and all the things that crawl and run and fly.  they are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world.  in my time with mabel i’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not.  and i have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it.  goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities.  their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all.  (ch. 29)

forty-three.  richard lloyd parry, people who eat darkness (FSG, 2012) (via oyster books).

i thought a lot of things while devouring people who eat darkness, but i still have no idea how to articulate any of it.  i had a lot of rage, a lot of anger at this patriarchal world and its double standards of women, that much i can say.

here are three long-ish passages instead.

anne allison writes, “there is something dirty about [the hostess], the sexuality she evokes, and the world of the mizu shōbai she represents.  all of this sexual dirtiness, in turn, makes the woman who works in this world ineligible for respectable marriage, ineligible therefore to become a respectable mother with legitimate children … in a culture where motherhood is considered ‘natural’ for women, the mizu shōbai woman is constructed as a female who transgresses her nature.  for this she is degraded; for this, however, she is also enjoyed.”  (ch. 6)

and

surrounded by powerful and aggressive neighbors, korea had been a battlefield throughout its history.  as far back as the sixteenth century, samurai armies had plundered the peninsula, returning across the narrow strait of tsushima with treasures, slaves, and the severed ears of slaughtered korean warriors.  japan began to dominate korea once again at the end of the nineteenth century; in 1910, the country was formally annexed into the emerging japanese empire.  the colonizers built roads, ports, railways, mines, and factories, introduced modern agricultural methods, and sent the children of the korean elite to be educated in tokyo.  but whatever good japanese power brought in the form of economic development was eclipsed by the racism, coercion, and violence of the imperial occupation.

the policies of the japanese administration shifted over time.  but by the late 1930s, its goal was not merely to control koreans and exploit their resources but also to dissolve their culture and colonize their minds.  the japanese language was made compulsory in schools; students were required to worship at shinto shrines, and koreans were encouraged to take japanese names.  infrequent uprisings were quelled with arrests, torture, and killings.  and a vast and unequal human exchange took place, as japanese bureaucrats and settlers were shipped over to govern and farm the new lands, and poor koreans sailed in the opposite direction to find work in the industrial cities of tokyo, osaka, and fukuoka.

at first, this migration was voluntary, but as the pacific war turned against japan, its colonial subjects were forcibly conscripted, both by the imperial army and civilian industry.  by 1945, hundreds of thousands of koreans were scattered across asia with the japanese forces, as soldiers, orderlies, camp guards, and military sex slaves (the “comfort women” whose existence was officially denied for almost fifty years).  in japan itself there were two million zainichi, most of them concentrated in ghettos close to the the mines and factories where they were set to work.  as much as anything, it was the sudden presence of so many foreigners in the motherland that showed up the hypocrisy of japanese colonialism.  (ch. 14)

and

the most serious failure of the police was in not identifying and bringing obara to justice years before.  katie vickers, for one, had reported him in 1997; she was ignored.  how many others, who have never told their stories publicly, experienced similar treatment?  the greatest disgrace had been another five years before that, when the police dismissed the suspicions of carita ridgway’s family about “nishida,” the man who brought their dying daughter to hospital.  the failure was one of imagination, an institutional inability to think other than in clichés.  people were types, and types were to be relied upon.  the young hostess who went to a customer’s place and then claimed rape must be trying it on; the respectable chap who talked of a bad oyster and food poisoning was to be believed. (ch. 24)

forty-four.  lois lowry, the giver (HMH, 1993) (via oyster books).

“the worst part of holding the memories is not the pain.  it’s the loneliness of it.  memories need to be shared.”  (the giver, ch. 20)

the giver was one of my favorite childhood books, but i was much less enthralled by it this time.  i still love the premise of it, this dystopian world where everything is controlled and tightly managed, but i think i wanted more — more conflict, more tension, more ending.

also, i watched the trailer for the film adaptation after i finished rereading it, and what the fuck?  good job taking all the layers of the giver and reducing it to your generic dystopian YA flick, cold tones, stupid romance, and all?

forty-five.  stephen chbosky, the perks of being a wallflower (mtv books, 1999) (via oyster books).

i had an amazing feeling when i finally held the tape in my hand.  i just thought to myself that in the palm of my hand, there was this one tape that had all of these memories and feelings and great joy and sadness.  right there in the palm of my hand.  and i thought about how many people have loved those songs.  and how many people got through a lot of bad times because of those songs.  and how many people enjoyed good times with those songs.  and how much those songs really mean.  (december 7, 1991)

i couldn’t sleep one night, so i finally read this.  i liked it more than i thought i would, but the most surprising thing to me was how the film captured the exact tone and mood of the book.  i’ve seen the film several times (idk, i liked the film, awkward american accent by emma watson and all), and its’s one of those instances where the film didn’t ruin the reading experience — like, i actually didn’t mind have the actors’ faces in my head.  it kind of made the reading experience more enjoyable in a way.  (i felt the same about the virgin suicides.)  i guess it shouldn’t be much surprising given that chbosky wrote and directed the film adaptation, but, regardless, crossing mediums isn’t something that’s always done so seamlessly, so props!

forty-six.  laline paull, the bees (harpercollins, 2014) (via oyster books).

“then kindly remember that variation is not the same as deformity.” (sister sage, ch. 3)

i wondered about my tendency to read books about animals as allegories (not that i read many books about animals), so, when i started reading the bees, i deliberately, intentionally refused to read it as such, and what a delight it was!

(if the author meant it to be allegorical, i apologize.)

the bees was one of the weirder, more engrossing reading experiences i’ve had — like, i-missed-my-subway-stop level of engrossing.  we follow a worker bee through the ranks of bees — first as a nurse, as a forager, and so on — and it’s a fascinating world, the hive.  it’s hierarchical, with the bees divided into their different roles, and there’s also a cult-ish feel to it, the way the queen is so revered.

i feel like there could be a greater social commentary present, but i admit that i took the dumb reader route to this because i was resisting an allegorical reading and because it’s also that engrossing.  i randomly came across this on oyster, and i’m glad i read it!

forty-seven.  lauren groff, fates and furies (riverhead, 2015).

because it’s true:  more than the highlights, the bright events, it was in the small and the daily where she’d found life.  the hundreds of times she’d dug in the soil of her garden, each time the satisfying chew of spade through soil, so often that this action, the pressure and release and rich dirt smell, delineated the warmth she’d found in that house in the cherry orchard.  or this:  every day they woke in the same place, her husband waking her up with a cup of coffee, the cream still swirling into the black.  almost unremarked upon, this kindness.  he would kiss her on the crown of her head before leaving, and she’d feel something in her rising through her body to meet him.  these silent intimacies made their marriage, not the ceremonies or parties or opening nights or occasions or spectacular fucks.  (389)

groff’s prose is exquisite, and one of my favorite things about this book was its structure.  it’s broken into two parts, the first (“fates”) being strictly linear and the second (“furies”) jumping around in time and poking holes in everything we’d learned (or thought we’d learned) in “fates.”

“furies” was awesome.  i loved mathilde; nothing about her life was as expected; and i loved the ways she’s a survivor.  

i wasn’t as fond of “fates,” which is why i wasn’t as effusive about the novel as i thought i might be.  “fates” felt a little too long, trapped by the strict linearity, like we had to flip through these pages to get to the interesting part — in that way, it did feel like “fates” was clearly foundation-building to give us the necessary backdrop for “furies” to start puncturing.  one example of this is the section in “fates” that follows lotte and mathilde in their first new york city apartment.  it’s built of short segments of gatherings that are meant to show us the passage of time, and it’s written beautifully, yes, but, after a while, it started to feel a little too convenient, a little tedious.

also, frankly, lotte wasn’t that interesting, and i had no sympathy for or connection with him.  he’s kind of pathetic, and not in any endearing way, and then he acted pathetically to mathilde near the end of “fates,” and i would’ve been fine if we got less of him and more of mathilde.

because “furies.”  “furies” makes “fates” worth it.

forty-eight.  cristina henriquez, the book of unknown americans (knopf, 2014).

when i walk down the street, i don’t want people to look at me and see a criminal or someone that they can spit on or beat up.  i want them to see a guy who has just as much right to be here as they do, or a guy who works hard, or a guy who loves his family, or a guy who’s just trying to do the right things.  i wish just one of those people, just one, would actually talk to me, talk to my friends, man.  and yes, you can talk to us in english.  i know english better than you, i bet.  but none of them even want to try.  we’re the unknown americans, the ones no one even wants to know, because they’ve been told they’re supposed to be scared of us and because maybe if they did take the time to get to know us, they might realize that we’re not that bad, maybe even that we’re a lot like them.  and who would they hate then?

it’s fucked up.  the whole thing is very, very complicated.  i mean, does anyone ever talk about why people are crossing?  i can promise you it’s not with some grand ambition to come here and ruin everything for the gringo chingaos.  people are desperate, man.  we’re talking about people who can’t even get a toilet that works, and the government is so corrupt that when they have money, instead of sharing it, instead of using of using it in ways that would help their own citizens, they hold on to it and encourage people to go north instead.  what choice do people have in the face of that?  like they really want to be tied to the underside of a car or stuff dingo a trunk like a rug or walking in nothing but some sorry-ass sandals through the burning sand for days, a bottle of hot water in their hands?  half of them ending up dead, or burned up so bad that when someone finds them, their skin is black and their lips are cracked open?  another half of them drowning in rivers.  and half after that picked up by la migra and sent back to where they came from, or beaten, or arrested.  the women raped in the ass.  and for what?  to come here and make beds in a hotel along the highway?  to be separated from their families?  (237-8)

this might be the expected reaction, but my main thought as i was reading the book of unknown americans was, god, see, this is why we need diverse books.

this is a beautifully written book.  it’s in multiple POVs, though, narratively, we principally follow a family that’s come from mexico to delaware so the daughter can attend a school for kids with special needs, and there’s a whole lot of heart in these pages.  one of my favorite things about it is that henriquez doesn’t try to soften the reality but, more importantly, doesn’t lose the novel to it.  she talks openly about immigrants and the discrimination they face, but the story isn’t lost to a political agenda or a social “purpose” — and i greatly appreciated that, given how easy it would have been to go the other way.

i highly recommend this.

forty-nine.  jonathan franzen, purity (FSG, 2015).

around scotts valley, the dear fog appeared, and suddenly the season was different, the hour less determinate.  most weekends in june, a great paw of pacific fog reached into santa cruz, over the wooden roller coaster, along the stagnant san lorenzo, up through the wide streets where surfers lived, and into the redwoods on the hills.  by morning the ocean’s outward breath condensed in dew so heavy that it ran in gutters.  and this was one santa cruz, this ghostly gray late-rising place.  when the ocean inhaled again, midmorning, it left behind the other santa cruz, the optimistic one, the sunny one; but the great paw lurked offshore all day.  toward sunset, like a depression following euphoria, it rolled back in and muted human sound, closed down vistas, made everything very local, and seemed to amplify the barking of the sea lions on the underpinnings of the pier.  you could hear them from miles away, their arp, arp, arp a homing call to family members still out diving in the fog.  (66-7)

(god, franzen’s passages about california made my face go all :SLKJ:LSJDFSDF.)

truth be told, there are few authors who deliver books of sheer enjoyment and joy like franzen does.  it’s not news that i’m a huge fan of franzen or that i was looking forward to purity since it was announced last november, and i had to stamp down a lot of my anticipation, so i could go into purity without that baggage.  i also actively avoided any and all reviews and most interviews (which is usually the case with most books), and i still haven’t read many of them (reviews) because i admit to being fatigued by the same old noise around franzen.  everyone knows what opinion to have of him, so little of interest or depth is said anymore, which is unfortunate but unsurprising.

it’s also a little funny because purity made me think that here is a man who loves and cares for people and the world.  he thinks deeply about it, and he writes affectionately and thoughtfully of it.  sure, he puts his characters in unsavory and/or extreme situations, and he doesn’t write kindly of mothers, and his women aren’t always “likable” or “nice,” but, you know, i tend to like his women most of his characters, and that was no different in purity.

it took me a bit to get fully into purity because it really is tonally different from the corrections and freedom.  (i lean more towards the side that reads a book within the context of the author’s backlist.)  there was a sort of dissonance in my head, especially during the first two parts of purity, and it wasn’t until i got to “too much information” that i found myself relaxing into the book because there was franzen as i knew and recognized him, which is neither good nor bad and maybe sounds a little bizarre, but one reason i think we love the authors we do is that there is some core that resonates with us, some thing that makes their work knowable and familiar.

although i must also add that the second part, “the republic of bad taste,” was an odd initial read because it had been excerpted in the new yorker (i am vehemently not a fan or supporter of novel excerpts being published in the new yorker) — i actually resented that it had been excerpted because the excerpt was obviously chopped up and cobbled together of parts, and it reads differently (and better) in its whole.

so there was that.

altogether, i loved it.  i got annoyed with all the references to beauty (especially in regards to annagret), and there was a very questionable word choice that took me out of the narrative because i had to be five years old and laugh (if you’ve read it, you know what i’m talking about), but, overall, purity is a more relaxed, happy franzen, one i can get behind, even if it means the anger is gone.  purity is fun — i had a hell of a time reading it, and i liked that it was plot-heavy, while retaining the idealogical and thematic explorations franzen loves, so here’s a big thumbs up from me!

(franzen said in an interview with esquire uk that, “[after] this last novel [purity], i’d been planning not to write a novel again for at least a decade,” to which i say, NO, PLEASE DON’T, i can’t wait another ten years.  T_T)

fifty.  jonathan franzen, the corrections (picador, 2001).

it was the same problem enid had with chip and even gary:  her children didn’t match.  they didn’t want the things that she and all her friends and all her friends’ children wanted.  her children wanted radically, shamefully other things.  (121)

the corrections is still my favorite of franzen’s novels, and i was sad after i finished purity because i had no more franzen to read, so i decided to reread the corrections.

at this point, it’s more interesting, to me, to think about what was different in this most recent read.  this was my third time reading the corrections, and i was filled with guilt when i finished reading it this time because, at the moment, i was in a complicated place with my own parents and their wants for me.  as i’ve gotten older, i’ve been thinking more about how parents and children conflict, specifically as we get older and start to become cognizant of our parents as being full human beings, independent of us, while we also try to assert ourselves as full human beings, independent of them.

and i think that’s one reason i love the corrections so.  you can argue that nothing really happens, that there isn’t much of a plot (ha, remember what cunningham said, though?), but i love how it explores the complicated dynamics of family, of parents and children.  parents undoubtedly have expectations for their children; they try to raise them well, provide them with everything they need, open up as many opportunities as they can; but, at one point, sometimes, it all falls apart.  children have minds and wants and desires of their own, and i enjoy how the corrections explores what happens as children grow up and try to be their own people and make shitty decisions and get themselves into absurd situations and fall away from their parents and from each other — but how, in the end, they’re able to come together because they’re family.

i think the korean in me loves this.

i try to be concise when talking about franzen, but that never works.  i don’t know what it is about his books (minus the twenty-seventh city) that i love so — part of it truthfully might be that i will never write the kinds of books he does, and i say this as a good thing (i quite like the kinds of books i write/will write, thank you very much).  there’s something kind of awe-inducing about how full his world is; one review recently talked about how franzen probably knows every little tiny detail about his characters; and i agree and find that impressive in its own way.

and i like that he makes it a priority to give his readers a good time.  i’m not a fan of art for art’s sake, and i disdain that kind of pretension in literature — i want [extremely] well-written, thoughtful, nuanced books, and i’m not here for authors getting lost in their own language or their own selves.

going back to the corrections, though:  i still hate caroline.  and gary.  but i love everyone else, especially denise and alfred, even enid.  and i’m still bummed the HBO adaptation didn’t happen because, god, if there were ever a perfect cast, that was it.

wow, i could talk about franzen for ages.  don’t ever get me started.

fifty-one.  nell zink, mislaid (ecco, 2015) (via oyster books).

because people never grow accustomed to lies.  they either believe them or they don’t.  and a big lie is never forgiven.  the person who told the lie stops existing, and in his place stands a paradox:  the truthful liar.  the person you know for sure would lie to you, because he’s done it before and confessed.  you never, ever believe that person again.  (ch. 4)

halfway into mislaid, i stopped to write myself a note on my iPhone:  i think the thing that puts me off mislaid is that it’s lacking audacity.  it’s too glib, too smooth, that it reads dangerously toes the line of superficiality and flippancy, never mind that zink really is making astute observations about race (and privilege) in america without being weighed down by the fact that she’s white.

and then i finished it, and … i don’t know.  i’m so torn about it, but i don’t know how i’m torn about it.  i didn’t love it, but i didn’t hate it, but neither am i totally indifferent to it?  and i don’t think i liked it, but i also didn’t dislike it — we can do this forever.  i could see the merits in it, but, even when i’d finished the book, i still think that it’s lacking in audacity and risk.  i also further think that it just didn’t go anywhere.  no one learns anything.  no one really changes.  nothing really changes.  nothing really happens.

and yet …?

idk i like nell zink.  i mean, she writes a line like:

she would be the brontë of warm, malarial moors, the dramatist of the great dismal swamp.  (ch. 3)

and she generally seems not to give a fuck (in all the good ways), so there’s that.

fifty-two.  jang eun-jin, no one writes back (dalkey archive press, 2013, published in korea in 2009)

i do, however, like to write when i travel.  written words are less extravagant than photographs and souvenirs, and they are serious and contemplative.  words penned while traveling do not lie; they’re not for showing off, but for making you reflect on, and take care of, yourself.  i dare say that in life, it is when we travel that our minds and hearts are the most open.  it’s a time when we think more than at any other time in our lives.  we may even think of something that we would never have thought of in all our lives.  and so, it would be the loss or the mistake of a lifetime not to write down in words those thoughts which may never have occurred to us.  you can always go back and take pictures, and buy as many souvenirs as you want.  but the thoughts that come to you while you travel will not come back.  when you go back, the feelings and sensations you have will no longer be the ones you had before.  (8)

what a great book to end september on.

it’s been a very heavily white reading year, and i find myself growing exhausted with it.  i’ve been saying for years now that i want to read more from contemporary korean literature, but i’ve admittedly been so lazy about it, falling back on the excuse that a lot of it isn’t translated, which also doesn’t actually work as an excuse because i can read korean.  and, as i learned last year when i read 3/4 of kim young-ha’s most recent novel, i can read fiction in korea better than i thought i could.

when i saw no one writes back at mcnally jackson (one reason i love mcnally jackson is that they actually have a section labelled “korean literature;” it’s not very big; but it’s there!), i had to buy it.  i’d read about it earlier, and i intrigued — the narrator is a 30-something who’s on a journey with his dog, staying in motels and writing letters to people he meets while in transit.  he tells himself he’ll go home when someone writes him back, and, every morning, he calls an old friend to see if he’s received any mail.

it’s a lovely, thoughtful book, and i can’t help but wonder how much better it would read in korean, given how lyrically and hauntingly the korean language captures melancholy.  (the korean language is fucking beautiful.)  i just finished this an hour or so ago, so i’m still processing it, still kind of stunned by it.