Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong Review

Title: Minor Feelings

Author: Cathy Park Hong

Genre: Nonfiction

Blurb: Poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong blends memoir, cultural criticism, and history to expose the truth of racialized consciousness in America. Binding these essays together is Hong's theory of "minor feelings." As the daughter of Korean immigrants, Cathy Park Hong grew up steeped in shame, suspicion, and melancholy. She would later understand that these "minor feelings" occur when American optimism contradicts your own reality—when you believe the lies you're told about your own racial identity.

Hong uses her own story as a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness in America today. This book traces her relationship to the English language, to shame and depression, to poetry and artmaking, and to family and female friendship in a search to both uncover and speak the truth.

Me: The greatest reading surprise of this summer has been just the incredible Asian American literature I have read. These books are, quite literally, the books I've been waiting for my entire life. Throughout my reading experience, there have been many books that have put into words feelings that I couldn't fully understand before. But none of them have made me feel as real and as seen as this one. 

Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino Review

Title: Trick Mirror
Author: Jia Tolentino
Genre: Essays, Nonfiction
Blurb: Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly in a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Tolentino writes about a cultural prism: the rise of the nightmare social Internet; the American scammer as millennial hero; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the mandate that everything, including our bodies, should always be getting more efficient and beautiful until we die. Gleaming with Tolentino’s sense of humor and capacity to elucidate the impossibly complex in an instant, and marked by her desire to treat the reader with profound honesty, Trick Mirror is an instant classic of the worst decade yet.

Me: I got to see Jia Tolentino in a passing second before I read her work. Having shown up late to one of her readings at college (which was so fully packed that I ended up leaving after a few minutes), I saw her walk in in a animal print coat with such a charismatic aura about her. I remember thinking that I absolutely had to read her book. And on finishing it, it didn't disappoint.