korean/korean-american literature i recommend!

July 26, 2016

when i say “korean/korean-american literature,” i don’t mean literature written by koreans/korean-americans strictly about koreans/korean-americans or about the korean/korean-american experience. one of the things about life (and art) is that we aren’t restricted to “what we know,” that we are more than our ethnic or lingual identities, and this has been the really cool part of reading more from korean/korean-americans (“kor-/kor-am” from hereon out), that we write across a wide variety of topics in a wide variety of styles and voices and perspectives.

that might sound like an obvious thing, but [mainstream] publishing is not one that has been friendly to diversity — and, taking it further, to diversity within diversity. it’s still the case that certain narratives are desired, that certain expectations and burdens are placed upon the shoulders of writers of color, that we’re expected to play within these lines and deliver stories that fit within the narratives shoved onto us, oftentimes immigrant narratives, narratives of hardship and racism and prejudice.

* also, if you haven’t read this fabulous essay by jenny zhang, you should.

it’s fun to see what writers of color are doing, the stories they’re telling, their obsessions and interests, the weird things that make them tick. it’s also a relief to find a general understanding of intersectionality amongst writers of color, that we are not one thing but many things, that we are not only people of color but that we are also, i.e., queer people of color, that we are the sum of our parts. it’s also fun to see how we don’t restrict ourselves only to narratives that involve “our experience;” like, i love that alexander chee wrote a massive novel about a french opera singer in the nineteenth-century. all these things might sound like nothing but aren’t.

it’s also fun to see what’s making it into english translation from korea. i’m thrilled that the korean government is finally investing in its literature and actively trying to get more korean literature into translation and to make it more visible throughout the world. i was also so, so happy that the vegetarian recently won the man booker international prize, not only because it was written by a korean woman but also because it’s this weird, dark, korean novel that i’m also impressed and thrilled has picked up a lot of attention, even before the man booker win, in the book community.

and, so, here’s some book talk.

mise en place is french for “everything in its place,” and i fully blame top chef for my current obsession with it. (and for my current obsession with baking asian sponge cakes, no electric mixer involved.)

a big part of it is my love and appreciation for the aesthetics of order; there’s something so visually satisfying about having “everything in its place.” another part is that it makes cooking a lot easier once everything has been chopped, measured, separated because all the mechanical labor is out of the way. what any of this has to do with kor/kor-am literature is anyone’s guess.

i do sometimes question my strong interest in kor/kor-am literature (i think it’s worth examining our obsessions and gravitations from time-to-time). i acknowledge that a significant part of it is informed by the fact that i am korean-american, that i am bilingual and bicultural, that i am consequently very interested in the gap and disconnect that often occurs between my korean and american sides. naturally, i turn to literature to see how we, as this tangle of thinly-related groups, wrestle with and negotiate identity, and i’m interested in exploring that tension, seeing how others struggle with it, the various results of that struggle.

that, partly, is why i started making more deliberate attempts to read from kor/kor-am authors, though, to be honest, another incentive was guilt. i’d always followed korean pop and cinema and television (and still do), but, a few years ago, i knew almost nothing about korean literature, which would give me twinges of shame because i have always loved books and yet had nothing to say when it came to korean literature because of my own ignorance. once i started reading, though, from both korean and korean-american authors, i fell in love, enchanted by how richly and differently these authors saw the world and expressed themselves, and it’s what’s brought me here and keeps me diving deeper and wanting more and wanting to put these incredible books out there into the world as much as i can.

i might live and breathe books, but i also think a lot about food.

it’s a mystery to my family where my love for food comes from, and they find it simultaneously amusing and distressing that i love it so and think about it constantly, what i want to eat for my next meal, what i want to cook, what i want to try baking. (right now, i’m playing with the idea of breaking down a whole chicken, brining and searing the breasts, freezing the wings, frying the legs, and roasting the carcass to make broth. i’ve roasted whole chickens before, but i haven’t broken one down yet, and i find the prospect so exciting, especially when the result is homemade broth.)

food is the thing i loved most about han kang’s the vegetarian — that all that unravelling begins to exhibit in yeong-hye’s sudden refusal to eat animals. while meat isn’t a huge part of korean cuisine, korean food is not one i’ve necessarily thought of as vegetarian-friendly, despite people (usually not korean) trying to herald it as such; we use anchovy broth for our stews, beef broth for our soups, shrimp paste in our kimchi; and i don’t mean this to say that korean food can’t be made vegetarian, simply that, in its current form best known to me, it is not one that is inherently accessible to vegetarians, at least not in the ways people seem to assume.

which is a total tangent because the vegetarian is not a novel about vegetarianism — or even, food. instead, han uses korean food culture to get to issues in korean culture overall, whether it be the patriarchy, conformity, the unit over the individual, and this is what i love so much about food culture in general, how much it absorbs so much of culture and reflects it back or subverts it and makes it into something else.

in this case, though, it’s the former, and han delivers a wallop of a criticism against patriarchal korean society. (i should probably say i’m focusing mostly on the first part of the novel.) not only is it narrated by yeong-hye’s husband (except for dream segments), thus placing her in position to someone else, but the fall-out from yeong-hye’s refusal to eat meat is defined entirely in how it affects the men in her life, specifically her husband and her father.

her husband is angry because his wife is no longer performing her wifely duties by preparing him meals with meat and declining to have sex, and he’s shamed because her vegetarianism (really, veganism) sets her apart from everyone else. when he takes her to dinner with his boss and coworkers and their wives, yeong-hye refuses to eat meat and sits there, silent and not eating, marking herself as willfully different and outside social norms as she refuses to bend even to social etiquette and social niceties. that isolates her husband as well because his wife isn’t like other wives, which means that he’s also no longer welcome, because social norms and etiquette and niceties are the glue that holds korean society together. it’s a conformist world, one driven by trends and sameness, the group over the individual, and yeong-hye’s refusal to participate in food culture places her outside that world.

her father is enraged, too, because he’s the patriarchal head of the family and should be obeyed. if he tells his daughter to eat meat, she should eat meat, and he shouldn’t be shamed by the actions of a contrary daughter. her failures to perform her wifely duties shame him as well; the best thing a daughter can be is a good wife; so yeong-hye is an embarrassment, ungrateful and rude — yeong-hye’s rejection of the oysters and food and black goat her family offers her is gravely rude and offensive; in korea, when someone senior to you offers you something, you take it, no questions asked.

it’s funny because what i love so much about korean food culture is everything that maybe runs against korean culture. i love how the 밥상 can often represent a safe space for strangers and outsiders, for people to find refuge and forge and solidify new connections, to create family where blood does not flow. i love the emotional significance of being invited to someone’s 밥상, of being given a place of your own, a rice bowl of your own, an invitation to share a meal (and very literally share a meal — korean food is communal, doesn’t come neatly plated) — and maybe this sounds romanticized and idealized, but, as someone who has taken part of this very culture, who has shared 밥상s with people and created them for people, it’s a very real, very precious thing to me.

that’s likely why the first part of the vegetarian had the strongest impact on me (and why it’s the only part i’m really discussing here). like i said, han uses korean food culture to point at ugly aspects of korean culture overall, namely the intense patriarchy, the casual acceptance of violence, the extent to which any kind of individualism or any kind of deviation from the norm is shunned. korea is still a xenophobic, homophobic country, obsessed with academic excellence, a single standard of beauty, and, sometimes, i wonder at the kind of fear that keeps koreans so compliant to this social conformity, that keeps them working themselves to death since childhood to get into SKY, get that job at samsung, get that face, that apartment, that family, that lifestyle.

and so, underneath it all, underneath the extreme reactions to yeong-hye’s vegetarianism lies that fear. it’s a fear of the unknown, of the different, of someone’s rejection of the norm and the accepted and expected. it still boggles my mind that people fear (and hate) difference so much, to the point that they will ruthlessly, deliberately murder people because of it, because they so fear any disruption of the so-called norm, of the status quo — i will simply never understand this insane fear. like, what makes you, the [hetero]normative majority so great that you feel everyone must fit into your single goddamn mold?

here are 13 recommendations for books by korean/korean-american authors in alphabetical order by last name (korean names are formatted the korean way, family name first):

choe yun, there a petal silently falls (columbia university press, 2008) [link]
susan choi, my education (viking, 2014) [link]
catherine chung, forgotten country (riverhead, 2012) [link] [2]
han kang, human acts (portobello, 2015) [link] [2]
jung eun-jin, no one writes back (dalkey archive press, 2013) [link] [2]
lady hyegyong, the memoirs of lady hyegyong (university of california press, 2013)
chang-rae lee, a gesture life (riverhead, 2000) [link]
krys lee, how i became a north korean (viking, 2016) [link]
park min-gyu, pavane for a dead princess (dalkey archive press, 2014) [link]
patricia park, re jane (pamela dorman books, 2015) [link]
shin kyung-sook, i’ll be right there (unnamed press, 2014) [link]
unknown, the story of hong gildong (penguin classics, 2016) [link]
jung yun, shelter (picador, 2015) [link]

why these thirteen? what were the criteria? how did i select them? is it terrible if i admit that i chose them a little arbitrarily? and that there’s also kind of a cheat in there because i haven’t actually finished reading the memoirs of lady hyegyong yet?

reading is an intellectual act, but it’s also a visceral and emotional act. (it’s also, partly, a visual experience.) we respond to different things, connect with different characters, identify with different conflicts and struggles, and these are simply books that have resonated with me for one reason or another. some of them also have what i call staying power, books that have stayed with me since i read them, even if i might not have felt super strongly or positively about them after i’d initially read them.

the one rule i did follow is that i only allowed one title per author*, and i did try to provide titles by an equal number of korean authors and korean-american authors. if i reviewed or wrote about a title, whether via instagram or on this site, i linked them as well because i’m not going to go into in-depth reviews here.

this is not a comprehensive list by any means, and it is entirely 100% subjective. however, i can assure you that they are all well-written, smart, thoughtful books, and i think they each add to the general dialogue of literature, of korean/korean-american literature, of translated literature. some of them (there a petal silently falls, human acts, a gesture life, i’ll be right there) consider human brutality within history; others (forgotten country, re jane, shelter) consider korean-americanism, what that means and how that fits into and impacts people’s lives in different ways; and even others (no one writes back, pavane for a dead princess) look at contemporary korean society and its ailments. and then there’s how i became a north korean, which is currently by far my book of the year, a brilliant, heart-breaking story of north korean refugees, as well as a searing indictment of everyone (and i mean everyone) in the exploitation, abuse, and mistreatment of north korean refugees.

* if i hadn’t given myself that rule, i would have also included krys lee’s drifting house (viking, 2012), han kang’s the vegetarian (hogarth, 2016), susan choi’s the foreign student (harper perennial, 2004), and shin kyung-sook’s please look after mom (vintage, 2012).

so there we have it! thanks for reading, and please do feel free to share any thoughts, especially if you do pick up or have read any of the books mentioned/listed!

my year reading korean and korean-american literature.

January 7, 2016

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.)

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!

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!

38 in 2015!

December 16, 2015

i went to 38 book events this year and did a lot of hearing authors twice. i heard kazuo ishiguro twice, jenny zhang twice, jonathan galassi twice, patricia park twice, marie mutsuki mockett twice, meghan daum twice, jonathan franzen twice (and i’m still kind of kicking myself about that because i should’ve just gone to the b&n event, too), and the anomaly to that is that i heard lauren groff three times because she was on two of the panels i attended at the brooklyn book festival* before i went to hear her at bookcourt.

(* i counted the brooklyn book festival as one event for my tally of events attended. i did count the two talks [toni morrison and patti smith] i attended at the new yorker festival as two events, though.)

mcnally jackson and bookcourt are tied with 7 events attended at each, followed by greenlight and housing works with 4, then the 92Y with 3 and AAWW with 2. 11 events were attended at other locations.

not too shabby, i say. in 2016, i shall endeavor to attend more! :3

patricia park and alexandra kleeman + lauren groff!

September 23, 2015

2015.09.16: patricia park and alexandra kleeman with anelise chen at aaww!

last wednesday, i went to a reading at the asian american writers' workshop with patricia park (re jane, viking books) and alexandra kleeman (you too can have a body like mine, harper books), and can i just say? it's awesome to be able to sit and listen to someone say things about what it's like to be korean-american and just think, oh my god, that's exactly what it is!

PP: with re jane, i kind of wanted to speak for queens. queens suffers from a PR problem.
jane is a minority within a minority, which doesn't make sense to white americans who expect hyphenated americans to fit in within their minority groups.
AK: it was very important for me to have a female protagonist.
- wanted to create someone who was very sensitive and porous to the world around her
PP: wanted to explore being mixed-race because, until very recently, korean society was very homogenous
- PP: jane eyre was such a refreshing departure from the disney characters i'd been weaned on.
Q: were you thinking about the womanly traits usually attributed to female characters?
- AK: reading beckett, realized that you didn't need much to create empathetic characters
- PP: whether characters are likable or not, do they garner your sympathy?
- AK: we have a narrow scope for who we befriend or talk to in bars, but fiction allows usu to get to know someone we normally wouldn't.
Q: this whole thing about how female characters should be likable also comes out in how both A and jane deal with how they should be likable.
- PP: yeah, i guess it's tough being a woman, isn't it?
- for jane, the korean community is driven by nun-chi, which casts her as meek and subservient as an au pair -- the ways these cultural cues translate (or don't) cross-culturally.
AK: the feedback cycle through which women constantly assess themselves -- it makes them very malleable.
PP: i think cities shape people, as much as people shape cities.
PP: it's funny how koreans have all these words for different categories of koreans. (i.e. she isn't just a korean. she's a korean-american who lives abroad, etcetera etcetera etcetera.) (my note: seriously, the labels go on.)
AK: my book is stripped down and generic, which comes from being biracial and asian-american and having moved a lot
- moved 11 times before she was 13
- they (these cities) had their differences but were also very much the same
- this stuff that was supposed to be generic and normal was so strange to me (re: being biracial and growing up with different food/snacks).
PP: was more concerned with getting the cultural context right than with modernization
re: the MFA experience: did you workshop the book? how was the journey?
- AK: i'd recommend getting an MFA with conditions.
  - you can't really teach writing, but you can expand your mind.
  - feels like the classmates she was closest with/respected the most sit on her shoulders
  - with this book, got some really good feedback
  - felt like dickens, writing it a chapter at a time
- PP: chose BU because ha jin was there and it was only a year long
  - thought it'd be really efficient, but writing the book took a decade
  - ha jin was very refreshingly prescriptive.
  - "this is writing, right? you go down all these dark alleys, only to realize you don't want to write about it after you've written about it."
- AK: the most helpful thing i got was from ben marcus -- he would take a story and say that i know where you're trying to go with this piece, so how great would it be if you put this first?
  - it's an incredibly difficult thing to do, and she still doesn't know how to do it.
AK: the most upsetting thing about the best american poetry [scandal] is that anyone who just skims the story will land on the conclusion that it is easier if you're asian.
PP: had one crotchety professor who commented that her characters sounded so assimilated
PP: "going back to korea" / "going back to the motherland" -- we say this jokingly, but then we go to korea and realize we're foreigners

here's a slice of matcha custard pie from my favorite pie bakery, four and twenty blackbirds.

2015.09.23: lauren groff at bookcourt!

tonight! lauren groff (fates and furies, riverhead) is an absolute delight. she's ebullient and bubbly and enthusiastic, and she read a bit then fielded Qs from the audience.

(there was also this awesome cake, inspired by the novel.)

"you're hitting me at the happiest time. the birth of my children was great ... but it was painful and there was recovery."
(starts reading from the very beginning, then sees a child run up to her parent) "i'm gonna read from a different part ... i don't want to contribute to the dissolution of any minors."
re: the play excerpts
- it was so much fun [to write].
- found out in the writing of them that she'll never write plays ... okay, maybe one. but it'll never be put on.
- tries to imagine everything fully, but playwrights have to take everything away (because plays are all dialogue).
Q: what inspires you to write?
- "anxiety? the deep dark pit inside of me?"
- wasn't good at anything else -- bartending, telemarketing ("i have a phobia of phones"), etcetera
- "the thing that inspires me to write ... is that i have no other skills."
- feels the urgency of story
"there's knausgaard who does it ... and doesn't stop!" (re: about writing an entire life in 16 pages or so)
"you teach yourself how to write whatever you're writing as you're writing it."
re: the structure of fates and furies as a two-part book
- with lotto's part, wanted to write a fairly straightforward bildungsroman
- with mathilde's part, tried to puncture that -- it's told in short sections, jumping around in time
basically what i'm doing when i'm writing is gleefully amusing myself.
there's a secret structure in the second part that she's waiting for someone to discover.
"i love structure!"
re: the lack of technology in the book: i learned emoji yesterday. people would send them to me, and i'd wonder where they were hiding them.
if you haven't read the iliad recently, it. is. the. most. perfect. book. that. ever. exists.
- it has magic realism in ti!
basically everything i read in the long period of time i was working on this is reflected in this book.
i would watch a lot of youtube videos -- lots of youtube videos -- of operas and plays.
on not having a life: "you guys have nyc! i have alligators and heat. and sand."
- (she lives in central florida.)
publishing period for arcadia was two-and-a-half years
"i write things at the same time."
- started fates and furies a little after she started arcadia
- usually one fails.