April 2023 Reads
Late again, womp; let's just say I'll get these out within the first several days (hopefully sooner than this tho) of the new month, shall we?
Well, hello there!
Sorry for the delayed newsletter this month. No big reason, just a bunch of small reasons piling up: a heady admixture of finals week/grading, news cycle doldrums, out-of-town-edness, and tiredness. But, hey, grades are in, so let’s talk books!
Last month, I claimed this month would probably be a bumper crop, including boat-loads of poetry. Well, Past-Me: you are bad at predictions, turns out. But Present-Me has learned nary a lesson, and so I’ll go ahead and forecast a bumper crop *next* month, because summer and teaching fewer classes and I may even have caught up on some distracting podcasts I’d been bingeing.
Hope is a thing with eternal springs, or something.
So, below are the 7 titles I finished in April, a microview of each, and longer reviews of the 4 standouts (yet another month where I should just review all 7, because they were all great, but alas, it’s already almost halfway into the next month, so we’ll just have to make do).
*Note: starred entries below are reviewed in more detail later
The Books, in the order I read them:
*Scattered All Over the Earth (2018) by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani - Novel (Literary Fiction)
Incredible near-future novel in which rising sea levels have swallowed Japan entirely, revolving around language and a Japanese refugee who is trying to find a fellow refugee to have a conversation in her own language again.
*Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (2020) by Angela Chen - Nonfiction
Excellent exploration of what asexuality means, why subcategories within asexuality are useful distinctions to make, and what everyone, including non-asexual identifying (allosexual) folks, can learn about relationships and consent and relating to one another better.
Please Report Your Bug Here (2023) by Josh Riedel - Novel (Literary Fiction)
Part thriller, part portrait of tech startup culture, with near-future technology, some multiverse-ishness, great characters, and deep questions.
Bliss Montage: Stories (2022) by Ling Ma - Short Story Collection (Literary Fiction)
I read Ling Ma’s novel Severance (2018)—unrelated to the Apple TV+ show—several years ago and loved it, and this is an excellent follow up: often surrealistic stories, including one where all a woman’s exes live with her and her husband in a mansion, one where a woman finds out the guy she’s planning to have a one-night-stand with is actually a yeti, one where a complex friendship between a student and professor includes a secret portal to another world, etc.
*If I Survive You (2022) by Jonathan Escoffery - Short Story Collection (Literary Fiction)
Linked short stories surrounding a complexly lineaged family of immigrants from Jamaica, dealing with identity, familial bonds, how immigration affects those bonds, etc.
Confessions of a Modern-Day Kumiho (2022) by Alissa Tu - Nonfiction (Memoir)
Fascinating surrealist take on a memoir, in which the author explores her (mostly negative) experiences with modern dating using the East Asian/Korean folktale of the kumiho, a nine-tailed fox that can transform into a woman to seduce men and then eat their liver or heart: not for everyone probably, due to some pretty vivid descriptions of sex and metaphorical eating of hearts and livers, but I loved it.
*The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (2022) by Franny Choi - Poetry
Excellent collection of rage and sorrow in poem form, as the world seems to grow ever worse and we keep surviving our way through it as best we can; Choi transmutes that rage/sorrow into beauty and wonder through these poems.
My Top 4 (in no particular order):
Scattered All Over the Earth (2018) by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani - Novel (Literary Fiction)
I first heard of this novel while watching a virtual event with StoneWright Reads favorite Alexandra Kleeman, in which she recommended it. So, being me, I immediately found that the audiobook was available through my local library and put it on hold, got it quickly, and blew through it. This is a slim but heady novel, and I think the thing that sets it apart from other novels where there is a pretty major near-future, climate-change-related plot point is just how understated it is within the novel itself. In fact, the very background nature of the disaster part is one of the more chilling parts. An entire nation has disappeared, leaving relative handfuls of survivors and refugees, and most folks are just going about their lives. Beyond climate change, the real focal point of the novel is language. It’s a gorgeous meditation on what language means, how it is linked so centrally to identity and culture and history and future. The novel shifts between several characters' perspectives as a motely crew end up joining together to try to help a Japanese refugee (who has crafted a brilliant form of pan-Scandinavian language that excites a linguist who sees her on a TV program) find a fellow countryman so that she can hear and use her own language again. There are a ton of other complexities here that I can’t even figure out how to adequately explain, so let’s just say: read this book. It’s great.
Good quote: “Breathing in several grammars, she was melding them together inside her body, and then exhaling them as sweet breath. Listening to those strange sentences, I stopped worrying about whether or not they were grammatically correct, and felt I was gliding through water.”
Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (2020) by Angela Chen - Nonfiction
One of the things I was interested in trying to explore in my dissertation novel from my Ph.D. program (on the back-burner now, but I want to eventually come back to it) is asexuality. I don’t think it worked, due in large part because I had not yet read this incredible book about asexuality. So anyway being interested in the subject already, when I heard of this book (I forget where now), I was like, YES PLEASE. That instinct paid off for sure. Chen does a fantastic job of meeting the reader at whatever familiarity- and comfort-level they’re at, explaining terms and distinctions in a way that expands our understanding of what sexuality and relationships are. One of the ways she does this is by revealing her own journey through first coming across the term asexual outside of a biology context and coming to grips with her own sexuality in these wonderful memoir-esque passages. There are a ton of terms explained in here that have expanded my vocabulary in beautiful ways. Ace (Asexual), Allo (Allosexual, or not asexual), Aro (Aromantic), etc. The complexity and comprehensive implications of the experiences and concepts Chen goes into chapter by chapter are pretty mind-blowing. Cards on the table, I do not personally identify as asexual or any of the attendant terms, but I found the discussions of various categories of how one defines what they are looking for in a relationship, what things they look for sexually, the relationship between attraction and sexuality, etc. etc. incredibly illuminating and essential for understanding myself and others better. I cannot recommend this book highly enough for everyone, no matter how you identify. I bet your mind will also be blown.
Good quote: “Normal is often treated as a moral judgment, when it is often simply a statistical matter. The question of what everyone else is doing is less important than the question of what works for the two people in the actual relationship. It matters that everyone’s needs are carefully considered and respected, not that everyone is doing the same thing.”
If I Survive You (2022) by Jonathan Escoffery - Short Story Collection (Literary Fiction)
The first story in this collection “In Flux” is probably my favorite, though the others are also excellent. It just grips you by the soul and pulls you through this perspective of an ethnically ambiguous second-person Jamaican-American character. The opening sentences—“It begins with What are you? hollered from the perimeter of your front yard when you’re nine—younger, probably. You’ll be asked again throughout junior high and high school, then out in the world, in strip clubs, in food courts, over the phone, and at various menial jobs. The askers are expectant.”—set the themes and stage beautifully, and then then story begins persistently cracking open society’s conception of race and identity, and reveals the conflicting narratives and expectations and contradictions within. It’s an incredible feat, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to teach this story whenever I get the chance. This story also sets up our main character: this 2nd person narrator, his brother and parents and friends and acquaintances, doing wonderfully what good linked short stories are capable of—forcing us to see the same events and people through different perspectives, making us rethink our assumptions and perceptions, switch allegiances, etc. It’s brilliant, and I’m yet again grateful for the many writers I follow who post about their reading lists and what they’re excited for, because this one was mentioned by many of them.
Good quote: “You’re a rather pale shade of brown, if skin color has anything to do with race. Your parents share your hue. As do their parents. Their parents, your great-grands, occupy your family’s photo albums in black-and-white and sepia tones that conceal the color of their skin. Some look like they might guest-appear on The Jeffersons, while others look like they’d sooner be cast on All in the Family. Your best school friends, José and Luis, are the two whose skin tones most match yours outside of your home. But when they flip back and forth between English and Spanish, you feel excluded. And when they flip their hair back and forth in mock head-banging motions when singing your favorite rock songs, it becomes painfully obvious that yours isn’t long or loose enough to bang along.
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (2022) by Franny Choi - Poetry
These poems are a brilliant, searing, beautiful articulation of the guttural and complicated cosmic background scream that anyone who is seeing the world as it is unfolding and has been unfolding around us probably has felt like unleashing into the void. That’s a clunky sentence, but then anything but an actual scream-into-pillow can’t really approximate it, I guess. As the title suggests, this is a pretty bleak book. It reminds us that, in reality, apocalypse is less of a single event and more of a slow-moving, multi-faceted ooze. I felt a lot of big feelings while reading this, and I took it in slowly because of that. I started this back in February, maybe? And it’s honestly a mark of the quality (well, probably also due to the fact that I got super overwhelmed with work stuff) that I wanted to savor rather than devour. I had to stop several times within most of the poems to just digest again and again the turns of phrase, the images Choi evokes, and process the way the lines shifted my perspective or altered my emotional state. These poems are often long, some are prose-y, others in a variety of forms, most are pretty long. All are works of genius, as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, I was also able to watch the January 26th virtual reading and excellent conversation between Choi and Danez Smith, whose collection Homie (2020) I reviewed in my first ever post here, through Lost City Books of Washington, D.C. It was a love fest between two excellent poets and friends who can’t get over how awesome the other one is, which was a delight to watch, as well as an insightful and fascinating conversation about the role that anger and sorrow play in the art we make and consume.
You, too, can watch the event here:
Also, just because I found this hilarious and true:
All hail Franny Choi.
Good quote: “Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse of boats: / boats of prisoners, boats of cracking under sky-iron, boats making corpses / bloom like algae on the shore. Before the apocalypse, there was the apocalypse / of the bombed mosque. There was the apocalypse of the taxi driver warped / by flame. There was the apocalypse of the leaving, and the having left…”
In Case You Missed It:
Welp, this month, there was nothing else you missed, but I do just want to take a second to say that the WGA writers’ strike is important, and our content and entertainment is not more important than these writers’ ability to get paid a reasonable amount for the incredible work they do. You can learn more about it here:
https://www.vulture.com/2023/05/wga-strike-2023.html
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