Read and Dream: My Book Life

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.

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.

Title: Girl, Woman, Other
Author: Bernadine Evaristo
Genre: Fiction, Contemporary
Blurb: Joint Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2019

Teeming with life and crackling with energy — a love song to modern Britain and black womanhood

Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.

Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.

Me: I'd casually heard the name of this book everywhere for the past few months, but it took me a while to realize it was a recent book (one that won the Man Booker Prize in 2019!). I'm so glad I decided to finally read it - probably one of the best reads of 2020 so far.