Read and Dream: My Book Life

April & May Books

Hi everyone! It's been quite a while but I've moved over to Youtube for monthly books reviews, so just wanted to link this here :)

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart Review

Title: Shuggie Bain

Author: Douglas Stuart

Genre: Historical Fiction

Blurb: Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. Under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink. Agnes's older children find their own ways to get a safe distance from their mother, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety. Shuggie is meanwhile struggling to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be, but everyone has realized that he is "no right," a boy with a secret that all but him can see. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her--even her beloved Shuggie. A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen in fiction.

Me: This debut novel about a young boy and his mother in 1980s Scotland has taken the literary world by storm. It just won the Man Booker, and I was excited to finally pick it up and get to read it myself. The praise is so well-deserved; the book was unapologetically beautiful and real.

Title: Another Country
Author: James Baldwin

Genre: Fiction

Blurb: Set in Greenwich Village, Harlem, and France, among other locales, Another Country is a novel of passions--sexual, racial, political, artistic--that is stunning for its emotional intensity and haunting sensuality, depicting men and women, blacks and whites, stripped of their masks of gender and race by love and hatred at the most elemental and sublime. In a small set of friends, Baldwin imbues the best and worst intentions of liberal America in the early 1970s.

Me: Continuing my Baldwin kick with one of his later novels, Another Country. He just not only never fails to disappoint, but always manages to amaze me and pull out something new. And the way he writes about love is unparalleled.

Title: The Magical Language of Others

Author: E. J. Koh

Genre: Nonfiction

Blurb: The Magical Language of Others is a powerful and aching love story in letters, from mother to daughter. After living in America for over a decade, Eun Ji Koh’s parents return to South Korea for work, leaving fifteen-year-old Eun Ji and her brother behind in California. Overnight, Eun Ji finds herself abandoned and adrift in a world made strange by her mother’s absence. Her mother writes letters, in Korean, over the years seeking forgiveness and love—letters Eun Ji cannot fully understand until she finds them years later hidden in a box.

As Eun Ji translates the letters, she looks to history—her grandmother Jun’s years as a lovesick wife in Daejeon, the horrors her grandmother Kumiko witnessed during the Jeju Island Massacre—and to poetry, as well as her own lived experience to answer questions inside all of us. Where do the stories of our mothers and grandmothers end and ours begin? How do we find words—in Korean, Japanese, English, or any language—to articulate the profound ways that distance can shape love?

Me: This book was a truly beautiful memoir, interlacing mother-daughter relationships with our experiences with mother tongues. I felt Koh's story to be deeply personal and vulnerable, and the added letters & translations added a fascinating layer to the whole book.

2020 has been a wild ride of a year. Before anything, whether this year has grounded and lifted you or really deeply challenged you, I just want to say I'm so proud of all of us for making it through. For me, it's been a year filled with ups and downs, but one single constant has been reading. I read around 70 books total this year. The last time I read even close to that number was in 2016, 4 years ago. I'm always grateful to literature for being an escape and a comfort, but especially this year.

That being said, what were the incredible, mind-blowing, will read-again and treasure forever reads of this year? It was hard to narrow down, but here are (in the order that I read them) the BEST books I read in 2020:

What a year it's been, and it's not even over yet. I honestly can't believe we've made it to November, especially when all the days have blurred together since March. Funnily enough, I've realized that my activity on this blog largely reflects my quarantine state: a huge push in the beginning when I was all motivated to "make the most" of this time, and then little sporadic pushes before I lose any motivation again. I'm trying to be more forgiving of myself.

However, though I haven't been blogging or really doing anything "productive" that much, I've been reading like crazy. It's weird for me, tearing through books at a pace I haven't had since middle school, and not even trying to read the most "intellectual" or "important" books, but just books that pique my interest. Books have saved me time & time again, and they've really made this whole year bearable.

I have a whole list of books that I've read but haven't blogged about, and I wasn't sure how to deal with them. I decided that overall, they might reveal some cool patterns/habits of mine over the past few months; reading habits that I hope to take with me even after this period of the world is over.

Title: Lincoln in the Bardo

Author: George Saunders

Genre: Historical Fiction, Contemporary

Blurb: February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returned to the crypt several times alone to hold his boy’s body.

From that seed of historical truth, George Saunders spins an unforgettable story of familial love and loss that breaks free of its realistic, historical framework into a thrilling, supernatural realm both hilarious and terrifying. Willie Lincoln finds himself in a strange purgatory, where ghosts mingle, gripe, commiserate, quarrel, and enact bizarre acts of penance. Within this transitional state—called, in the Tibetan tradition, the bardo—a monumental struggle erupts over young Willie’s soul.

Me: After reading Saunders' short story collection Tenth of December, I didn't think I would feel inclined to read any of his other works. He was known primarily as a short story writer before this novel, and while his writing is undeniably fascinating and fresh, it didn't seem like my thing. This book changed my mind, and got me so excited that I get to experience a writer like this in real time.

Title: Human Acts
Author: Han Kang

Genre: Historical fiction

Blurb: In the midst of a violent student uprising in South Korea, a young boy named Dong-ho is shockingly killed.

The story of this tragic episode unfolds in a sequence of interconnected chapters as the victims and the bereaved encounter suppression, denial, and the echoing agony of the massacre. From Dong-ho's best friend who meets his own fateful end; to an editor struggling against censorship; to a prisoner and a factory worker, each suffering from traumatic memories; and to Dong-ho's own grief-stricken mother; and through their collective heartbreak and acts of hope is the tale of a brutalized people in search of a voice.

An award-winning, controversial bestseller, Human Acts is a timeless, pointillist portrait of an historic event with reverberations still being felt today, by turns tracing the harsh reality of oppression and the resounding, extraordinary poetry of humanity.

Me: Han Kang is probably the most well-known contemporary Korean author, and it had bothered me for a while that I hadn't read any of her works, especially The Vegetarian (which won the Man Booker and is definitely on my next-to-read list!). I decided to read this first because it was directly related to a period of South Korean history, and I'm so glad I did. It was one of the most beautiful books I've read about any uprising or protest.

Title: My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Author: Ottessa Moshfegh

Genre: Contemporary

Blurb: Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.

Me: I've seen this incredible cover everywhere, and finally decided to see what the hype was about. Definitely nothing like I expected, but not too groundbreaking or even really that interesting.

Title: The Girls

Author: Emma Cline

Genre: Historical Fiction

Blurb: Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park, and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon, Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their sprawling ranch is eerie and run down, but to Evie, it is exotic, thrilling, charged—a place where she feels desperate to be accepted. As she spends more time away from her mother and the rhythms of her daily life, and as her obsession with Suzanne intensifies, Evie does not realize she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence, and to that moment in a girl’s life when everything can go horribly wrong.

Me: One distinctive change from this summer has been that I've started to actively read more adult contemporary fiction, a genre that I mostly avoided unless books were critically acclaimed. It's been really nice, keeping me reading not just for education but for fun, and has also shown me some general flaws of popular "literary" or adult fiction. The Girls was one of those, where I found myself extremely interested in the story yet not entirely compelled by the writing, not intoxicated by the world of the book.

Title: Giovanni's Room
Author: James Baldwin

Genre: Fiction

Blurb: Baldwin's haunting and controversial second novel is his most sustained treatment of sexuality, and a classic of gay literature. In a 1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by dangerous liaisons and hidden violence, an American finds himself unable to repress his impulses, despite his determination to live the conventional life he envisions for himself. After meeting and proposing to a young woman, he falls into a lengthy affair with an Italian bartender and is confounded and tortured by his sexual identity as he oscillates between the two.

Examining the mystery of love and passion in an intensely imagined narrative, Baldwin creates a moving and complex story of death and desire that is revelatory in its insight.

Me: I haven't read such beautiful fiction in a while. Baldwin's command of language is just absolutely mind-blowing, and creates the most stunning atmosphere of Paris, all the while capturing some of the most complex facets of love and desire with such clarity.

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.

Title: Severance
Author: Ling Ma
Blurb: Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. So she barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies halt operations. The subways squeak to a halt. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale and satire.

Me: Eerily relevant and beautifully poignant, Severance was one I absolutely tore through. Such an incredible exploration of what we value in our contemporary world and what we need to be aware of going forward.

Title: The Hours
Author: Michael Cunningham
Genre: Contemporary, Fiction
Blurb: In 1920s London, Virginia Woolf is fighting against her rebellious spirit as she attempts to make a start on her new novel. A young wife and mother, broiling in a suburb of 1940s Los Angeles, yearns to escape and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway. And Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich village apartment in 1990s New York to buy flowers for a party she is hosting for a dying friend.

The Hours recasts the classic story of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway in a startling new light. Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, this exquisite novel intertwines the worlds of three unforgettable women.

Me: After reading Mrs. Dalloway for the second time and being even more blown away, I decided to pick up The Hours and see how Cunningham's interpretation/inspiration from the book would be. For what initially seemed like a glorified fanfiction, it was the closest to a real homage to Woolf I think anyone could have written. But nothing comes close to the real thing.

This past week, I've been thinking a lot of what I can do to contribute to not only this current moment, but also to combat racism and anti-Black violence in my daily life. It's such a crucial and significant topic that I want to make sure I'm doing the most I can, while not overstepping any boundaries when it comes to performative activism/insufficient allyship.

One thing I've seen circulating a lot is lists of books to read to educate ourselves on racism and its pervasive effects in our country and our world. I still truly believe that literature and stories can be one of the greatest catalysts for change, where we take a moment to really understand someone else. For me personally, literature was fundamental in my understanding of racism/police brutality/inequity in our society, and I want to do what I can so others can learn from these incredible books too.

So without further ado, books for an anti-racist bookshelf.

Title: The Underground Railroad
Author: Colson Whitehead
Genre: Historical Fiction
Blurb: From prize-winning, bestselling author Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South.

In Whitehead's ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor- engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil.Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre–Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroad is at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.

Me: Winning both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, this book has become a part of every list of essential books to read from the past few years. I was really excited and intrigued by the premise and had very high expectations going in - perhaps too high, because it felt mostly underwhelming and not entirely memorable.

Title: Normal People
Author: Sally Rooney
Genre: Fiction, Contemporary
Blurb: At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school soccer team while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her housekeeping job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers - one they are determined to conceal.

A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years in college, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. Then, as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship.

Me: She finally did it, gals. After having seen Sally Rooney's name in every bookshop for the past two years, I watched the trailer for the new Hulu series and decided I needed to bite the bullet and try the books. And AHHHHH (coming from the excitement of binging the show right now)- I'm so glad I did.