international women's day!

March 8, 2016

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.

banana yoshimoto, lizard (washington square press, 1995)
marilynne robinson, lila (FSG, 2014)
krys lee, drifting house (viking, 2012)
ruth ozeki, a tale for the time being (penguin, 2013)
mary shelly, frankenstein (penguin clothbound classics, 2013)
han kang, human acts (portobello, 2016)
helen macdonald, h is for hawk (grove press, 2015)
charlotte brontë, jane eyre (penguin clothbound classics, 2009)
jang eun-jin, no one writes back (dalkey archive press, 2013)
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!

2015 reading: here are some numbers.

December 30, 2015

this is why i like the end of the year. >:3

in 2015, i read 68 books*, and here are my top 7 from those 68 (in no particular order) (or, rather, in the order i posted them on instagram, which was in no particular order).

helen macdonald, h is for hawk (jonathan cape, 2014)
alex mar, witches of america (FSG, 2015)
patricia park, re jane (viking, 2015)
rebecca solnit, the faraway nearby (penguin, 2014, paperback)
jonathan franzen, purity (FSG, 2015)
han kang, human acts (portobello, 2016)
robert s. boynton, the invitation-only zone (FSG, forthcoming 2016)

(you can find quotes and reasons why i chose these 7 on my instagram.)

* as of this posting time. i still have two days to read more!

in 2015, i went to 38 book events and readings, and here are 10 i particularly enjoyed.

marie mutsuki mockett and emily st. john mandel with ken chen at AAWW
michael cunningham at columbia
meghan daum with glenn kurtz at mcnally jackson
kazuo ishiguro and caryl phillips at the 92Y
aleksandar hemon with sean macdonald at mcnally jackson
alexandra kleeman and patricia park with anelise chen at AAWW
lauren groff at bookcourt
jonathan franzen with wyatt mason at st. joseph's college
patti smith with david remnick at the new yorker festival
alex mar with leslie jamison at housingworks bookstore

(both franzen events had no-photo policies.)

in 2015, i took 34 photos of books with pie. mind you, this is not the number of times i ate pie. this is simply the number of times i went to eat pie and decided to photograph it with the book i was reading at the time. and by pie, i mean pie from four and twenty blackbirds because their pie is delicious and not too sweet and totally worth going to gowanus for (so, if you're in nyc, go get some!).

here are 5 photos of books with pie because it would be unnecessarily mean of me to torture you with all 34 slices of amazing pie, wouldn't it?

in 2015, i took 38 photos of books with stitch.

i suppose, to provide some context: i love stitch. lilo and stitch is one of my favorite movies (we're talking top 3 here). i've had this stitch for 13 years. i still shamelessly take him with me everywhere (he's in california with me right now). obviously, he popped up every now and then with a book.

here are 5 photos of books with stitch. i'm totally choosing how many photos to post arbitrarily (in multiples of 5, though, so maybe not so arbitrarily?).

in 2015, my book club started, and we read 10 books. we've now eased into a routine of meeting at my friend's apartment and having a potluck, but we were absent this routine the first two times we met, hence the three out-of-place photos. i know; it's making me a little twitchy, too; but we'll have 12 consistent flat-lays from 2016!

marilynne robinson, lila (FSG, 2014)
alice munro, the beggar maid (vintage, 1991) (first published 1977)
kazuo ishiguro, an artist of the floating world (vintage,1989) (first published 1986)
margaret atwood, the stone mattress (nan a. talese, 2014)
jeffrey eugenides, the virgin suicides (picador, 2009) (first published 1993)
ta-nehisi coates, between the world and me (random house, 2015)
virginia woolf, mrs. dalloway (vintage, 1992) (first published 1925)
michael cunningham, the hours (FSG, 1998)
nikolai gogol, the complete tales (vintage, 1999)
nathaniel hawthorne, short stories (vintage, 1955)

(we combined two months, so i didn't have 10 photos, so i included the nachos i ate when we met to discuss munro's the beggar maid.)

in 2015, i became much more brutal with dropping books because life is too short for books that simply don't hold your interest. i intentionally dropped 13 books.

claire messud, the woman upstairs (knopf, 2013): so. boring. nothing. happens.
cheryl strayed, tiny beautiful things (vintage, 2012): i started reading this in earnest, but then i skimmed it with a friend, and then i never went back to it. strayed’s columns are generally hit or miss for me.
atul gawande, being mortal (metropolitan books, 2014): this wasn’t what i was expecting it to be ... though i’m also not entirely sure what i was expecting it to be. i think i was expecting more profundity, and i wasn’t taken by the writing.
renee ahdieh, the wrath and the dawn (putnam, 2015): omg, the sheer amount of adverbs in this made me want to throttle the book. i always read with a pencil to mark passages i like or to jot down thoughts, but i read this with a pencil to cross out all the adverbs and circle all the different variations of “said” -- i want to ban her from using a thesaurus ever again. and limit how many adverbs she's allowed to use.
rebecca mead, my life in middlemarch (crown, 2014): i really liked what i read of this, but i finished middlemarch and didn’t like that that much, so i never did finish the mead.
rabih alameddine, an unnecessary woman (grove, 2014): i just stopped reading this -- like, i put it down for the day and kind of forgot i’d ever started reading it, which was weird because i started reading it on oyster books and liked it enough that i bought the paperback … and then i never went back to it and probably never will.
ta-nehisi coates, between the world and me (random house, 2015): i know; i’m horrible for dropping this; but i did. i never finished reading it for book club, and i didn’t finish it after book club and have no inclination to pick it up again.
jesse ball, a cure for suicide (pantheon, 2015): this tried too hard to be … whatever the hell it is.
virginia woolf, mrs. dalloway (vintage, 1992): ugh. i'm sorry, michael cunningham, but UGH.
emile zola, thêrèse raquin (penguin, 2010): given the plot, this is going to sound bizarre, but i was bored to death with this. it was so predictable.
philip weinstein, jonathan franzen (bloomsbury, 2015): given my unabashed, vocal love for franzen, you’d think i’d be all over this, but, as it turns out -- and i say this in the most non-creepy way possible -- i know way too much about franzen’s bio already. also, my brain kept going off in all sorts of directions because it’s already full with my own critical analyses of franzen, and weinstein’s writing is very flat. one day, i'll write about franzen.
shirley jackson, we have always lived in the castle (penguin, 2006): so. boring. nothing. happens.
nathaniel hawthorne, short stories (vintage classics, 2011): (no comment.)

in 2015, i took a lot of photos of books with food, and i am not going to count them all. here are 5 i randomly chose so that i'd have 7 "in 2015"s instead of 6.

and that's all, folks! stay tuned for my year-end recap coming ... at some point in the next two weeks. >:3 happy new year!

hello monday! (150427)

April 27, 2015

in his art of fiction interview with the paris review, kenzaburo oe says:

i've cultivated the first-person style as opposed to the third person. it's a problem. a really good novelist is able to write in the third person, but i have never been able to write well in the third person. in that sense, i am an amateur novelist. though i have written in the third person in the past, the character has always somehow resembled himself. the reason is that only through the first person have i been able to pinpoint the reality of my inferiority.

in an interview [also] with the paris review, rachel kushner says:

i deliberated in a tortured and endless way over what the voice was going to be, whether it was going to be first or third person. the first year I was writing this book I hadn’t decided. i would go to friends’ readings and raise my hand at the end and ask, why did you choose to tell the story in third person? and people would look at me like, why would you ask such a basic question? but to me these basic questions must be asked and answered for every single book.
at this point in my life, i’m not that interested in third person. there’s a certain falsity when a character is given a full name and a set of characteristics and can be seen from outside. to me it speaks of a kind of realism whose artifice I have a hard time shaking, as a writer, in order to get inside what i am doing and imagine it fully.

one of jonathan franzen's 10 rules for writing as posted in the guardian is:

write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.

ishiguro, in talking about his recent novel, the buried giant (knopf, 2015), told the huffington post:

i did something i've been wanting to do for at least 15 years, which was to write a novel about that same question -- when is it better to remember, when is it better to forget -- but applied on a larger scale, to society, to a nation, to a community. i couldn't keep it as a first-personal narrative. this book wouldn't be appropriate as something that stays within the confines of just one mind. i had to somehow have a way of portraying a kind of a community as a crucial point of its development.

i'm curious about writers and voice, why they choose to write in the voices they do, and it's even more curious to me when i read books and find myself in opposition to the authors' intention/thoughts re: voice. like, for instance, i've never been that keen on kushner's first-person, whether in telex from cuba (scribner, 2008) or the flamethrowers (scribner, 2013) -- i loved her third-person in telex (which uses both first- and third-person) because i found it so much richer and vibrant, whereas i found the first-person in the flamethrowers to be rather flat, distancing, and impersonal, which made for an apathetic reading experience. while i didn't necessarily disagree with what she was saying about the kind of falsity of the third-person, i found that interview a little surprising, particularly because i couldn't ever quite get a grasp of who reno (the narrator of the flamethrowers) really was, in the frustrating way of a character (and, in connection, a first-person voice) who has not been fully inhabited.

the quote from ishiguro about the buried giant makes me wonder if the book would have fared better if written in the plural "we." now that i'm thinking about it, i really wish ishiguro had gone for the plural first-person because his singular first-person is extraordinary -- how much more (or how much differently) could he do with the plural? i thought the lack of first-person actually did the buried giant a disservice because the third-person lost all the nuanced, complicated richness of ishiguro's first-person, and the third-person felt so scattered and superficial, the questions of memory given a very literal, very flat study.

also, speaking about authors trying out different voices, i am massively curious about franzen's purity (FSG, 2015, forthcoming) because apparently part of it is written in first-person, which [i'm pretty sure] franzen has never done before. or, well, at least, the part he read at colgate university last autumn was in the first-person, though i suppose we'll see if it were edited out -- which i hope it wasn't because i really liked what he read -- given how natural franzen's dialogue reads, i wasn't surprised that his first-person would read with such ease as well.

that said, though -- i've said for a while that i think there are many authors who are good at first-person but very few who are great at it (ishiguro being one of the first authors who pop immediately to mind as one who is great), so i tend to be wary of them. i also wonder if i'm more critical with first-person voices? because i find that a weak first-person voice can seriously affect my engagement with the book -- and, maybe given my appreciation for great first-person, i'm not quite sure i agree with oe that a good novelist has to be good in third-person. give me the novelists who only write in first-person and do so brilliantly! but also give me the novelists who only write in third-person and do so brilliantly! and the novelists who do all the voices brilliantly! just give me all the brilliant writing!

a friend of mine has been developing a site-specific art called "graft art," in which art is created for an apartment and grafted into the space, so the apartment itself informs the piece. it's obvious to see how visual or performance art might be used in such ways, but, as a writer, it made me think how writing and places work, how you might create a piece of writing that is built upon and grafted into a specific space.

in some ways, writing and place integrate seamlessly because setting is a big part of writing. stories are situated somewhere, take place somewhere, and, sometimes, place largely informs a story, becomes a character almost, like how 1970s new york city and italy are integral parts of kushner's the flamethrowers or how the natural wildness of florida becomes area x in jeff vandermeer's area x (FSG, 2014). it also isn't uncommon for writers to inhabit a specific space over their bodies of work, like paul auster's new york or marilynne robinson's [fictional] gilead, so i wonder if writing isn't naturally an act of creating art in places, of weaving art into the metaphorical fabric of spaces, because we are the places we come from or, even, the places we long for. we write about the places that capture us; we revisit and recreate the homes we've lived in, the streets we've walked, the offices we've worked in; and we reinvent them in some ways, try to be faithful to life in others -- and it isn't that other art forms can't or don't do similarly, but, like i said, stories are situated somewhere, take place somewhere, and it's hard to separate that from writing.

but, then, i wonder how this would work physically -- how would you take a story and physically integrate it into a space? other than the obvious ways of prints or wallpaper or curated shelves and tables. it makes me think even of the title of my blog (and the story i wrote with the same title) because "the toilet papers" comes from the idea of reading on the toilet, which is a specific place in the home that serves a specific purpose. i know i'm not the only one who reads on the toilet; people keep magazines, papers, books in bathrooms to be read during toilet time; but we don't read for long periods of time on the toilet, hence the format of the story (a series of notes written from one lover to the other) and the title of this site (maybe a blog post is the perfect length for toilet time!).

today is the last monday of april, which makes this the last poem. today's part of a poem comes again from ted hughes' birthday letters (FSG, 1998), this time from "the lodger" (125).

efforts to make my whole
body a conduit of beethoven,
to reconduct that music through my aorta
so he could run me clean and unconstrained
and release me. i could not reach the music.
all the music told me
was that i was a reject, belonged no longer
in the intact, creating, resounding realm
where music poured. i was already a discard,
my momentum merely the inertias
of what i had been, while i disintegrated.
i was already posthumous.

hello friday! (150424)

April 24, 2015

i was up and awake at 2 a.m., thinking, hm, what shall i talk about this friday?, when i looked to my right (not very far to my right) to the pile of books stacked rather perilously on the corner of my desk -- or, rather, the pile of things stacked rather perilously -- and, because the books in this pile are usually what i've been reading (or intending to read) currently, i think maybe we'll dive right in.

meg wolitzer, the interestings (riverhead, 2013): it's been an extraordinarily shitty few weeks, and i know it's been extraordinarily shitty because i've been having a difficult time reading. when i'm having a difficult time reading, i tend to reread because the familiar is assuring and comforting, none of that nervousness or anxiety that comes with starting something new, so i picked up the interestings again because i loved the interestings for the friendships, the banalities, the exploration of talent and potential, although the last maybe stings a little, given my current crisis in my own writing. (i stepped away from writing fiction last week.)

a mango: because i love mangoes. this needs to ripen a little more, but i cannot wait to eat it. i hope it's good, but, to be honest, fruit isn't as good in new york as it is in california. maybe all that goddamn sunshine's good for something.

jonathan franzen, farther away (FSG, 2012): i pulled this out because i went to see the documentary, emptying the skies, this week. it's based on the essay franzen wrote for the new yorker (published in farther away under the title, "the ugly mediterranean"), so i wanted to give the essay another read after seeing the documentary (on earth day, when it was released). it's a great essay -- one of my favorites of franzen's non-fiction -- and the book is just so pretty and well-designed all the way through.

betty halbreich, i'll drink to that (penguin press, 2014): this was my response to "i need some light, frothy reading," and what a riveting look into privilege this was. i'm fascinated by money, not gonna lie, mostly because i'm rather amused by the indulgence and entitlement and sheer ego that accompany it, all while the privilege and, again, entitlement are off-putting and repellent. halbreich has a measure of self-awareness, though, and acknowledges the unnecessary luxuries of her clients and of clothes, and, in the end, i'll drink to that was exactly what i wanted and needed during the week -- light, frothy reading.

ted hughes, birthday letters (FSG, 1998): i pulled this out to find a poem for my hello monday post and kept it out because this may be my favorite poetry collection. heh, i say that like i read a whole lot of poetry, but does that matter? this collection still means a lot to me and warms my cold, cold heart, and i love having it nearby.

rebecca solnit, a field guide to getting lost (penguin, 2005): like i said, extraordinarily shitty week means i'm stalled on this book, not because it's bad but because i'm stalled. i'd love for my heart to heal so i can read without feeling twinges again.

marilynne robinson, housekeeping (FSG, 1980): i started reading this last friday on my way out to coney island, but, wow, i'm already depressed as fuck, so i set it aside for lighter reading.

timothy keller, prayer (dutton, 2014): sometimes, i read theological books, too.

papers, notepad, etcetera: i'm not undoing my tower of books and crap to see what these papers are. i think there's a printed receipt in there, maybe a story draft, drafts of résumés and cover letters -- not very interesting, eh? moving on!

jonathan franzen, strong motion (FSG, 1992): damn, i have two franzens in the same pile? i started reading this a few weeks ago because i miss having fiction by franzen to read, but, see, i have this habit of reading, like, seven books at any given time, and it's always a gamble to see which book sticks and which one is temporarily set aside for a later day. this one, too, was put aside for something lighter.

flannery o'connor, the complete stories (FSG, 1971): recently, i went on this buying spree of o'connor books -- got the complete stories then the habit of being then mystery and manners -- but o'connor is someone i seem to be able to take only in morsels because she has this intensity that requires digesting. maybe it's just me, but, sometimes, i wonder if i'm "getting" her stories because i'm oftentimes left a little unsure at the end, wondering if i "got it" or if i missed something along the way. this isn't necessarily bad, though, because it makes me slow down -- actually, over the last two years, i've been trying to be a more careful reader instead of simply flying through books. i've always been a fast reader, so it's been a good exercise to slow down a little and rest on the page, in the story, with the characters and absorb more of everything. also, i'm not allowing myself to buy any more books until i find a job ... but i am horribly weak when it comes to books, and the CLMP lit mag fair at housing works is this sunday, in which case, shit, well, lit mags aren't books, right?

and that is the pile! as it goes, though, tonight, i'll be finishing a book that isn't in this stack, kazuo ishiguro's an artist of the floating world (penguin, 2013) (drop caps edition), for book club tomorrow, which also means i get to bake strawberry cream scones because it's book club + brunch because what's a book club meeting without food?

have a great weekend, all! enjoy this battle between winter and spring if you're in nyc!

hello friday! (150417)

April 18, 2015

truth? there is something so soothing about sitting and staring out at the ocean. whenever i'm having a really hard time or going through a bout of really bad depression, i hie myself out to the ocean and just sit and sit until i start feeling like i can breathe a little easier. i couldn't live anywhere that doesn't have easy access to an ocean.

but books! in bullet points this time just because.

finished rebecca solnit's the faraway nearby (penguin, 2014, paperback) then immediately picked up a field guide to getting lost (penguin, 2006, paperback). conclusion: solnit is wonderful. i'm going to pick up wanderlust: a history of walking (penguin, 2001) next.
started writing a post about the faraway nearby and losing my grandmother to alzheimer's, but then the post became an essay that also wove in my travels in japan (i went to japan a few weeks after my grandmother passed away) and the books i read there and about solitude and place and dislocation and memory. as of now, i'm unsure what it'll be, but i think that's one of the cool things about writing (or about creating in general), that you have no clue where you'll end up. you could have a destination point or an end goal in mind, but that doesn't mean you'll actually get there, but it's all right because you end up somewhere better, if only because the journey there is revealing and eye-opening.
the 2015 pulitzers are announced on april 20, and i'm all ready to side-eye the hell out of it again. (i've been side-eyeing the pulitzer since 2011.)
- who do i want to win the pulitzer? marilynne robinson's lila (FSG, 2014)!
speaking of whom -- i started reading housekeeping (FSG, 1980) on the subway (in an empty car, no less) today, and i'm enthralled with her descriptions. like this passage:
- "it is true that one is always aware of the lake in fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below. when the ground is plowed in the spring, cut and laid open, what exhales from the furrows but that same, sharp, watery smell." (9)
- there's something so rich and visceral in that -- you can just imagine the earth exhaling, the smell it gives off.
- i don't know if other readers are like this, but i find myself reading debut novels (in this case, of long-established authors) with a slightly different eye. i'm not sure how to describe how my reading eye is different, but maybe it's a little more probing, a little more examining, not in a critical way but in a way that seeks to see the places authors came from, where they originated, how their work has progressed through their body of work. i love seeing growth, how authors have matured, and i think it's fun because it's usually a very organic progression because change is natural -- we're constantly growing, reshaping, metamorphosing as people, so, of course, that ought to be reflected in the writing.
- and, of course, this is relevant here because i've read robinson's later novels and housekeeping was her debut.

have a good weekend, all! happy reading!