I started listening to the audio book for How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe after finishing the audiobook I was reading and started reading Sorry Please Thank You after finishing the physical book I was reading. I soon had to choose one to stop reading because they were blurring in my mind too much to discern what was coming from which book. This isn’t to say they are exactly the same, but Charles Yu’s writing style is so distinct and playful, I wanted to make sure I had it straight which world he was playing in before moving onto the next one…

The book is always flipping through a few perspectives, the two leads: Irene and George, Irene’s mother Bernice, and maybe two chapters of a very silly side character who briefly dates Irene named Belion, after his RPG persona in a game that he made and actively develops. All the characters are lovable and in some ways deeply flawed. While most get a satisfying resolution to what is obviously haunting them from the beginning, not all of them do. There is at least one thread that burns up in a beautifully depressing way, providing no satisfaction yet staying so true to the story that its ending feels punctuated rather than trailed off. For a story so focused in the characters it contains, Netzer succeeds in providing space for each of them to live full lives while juggling overwhelming scenarios….

In Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong writes a series of essays I’d describe memoir or historical, and others blur the lines between the two. All connected by theme and telling the life story of not just herself, but Asian Americans broadly. She paints in strokes that cover a demographic too large to be defined by her words alone, providing understanding of an experience rather than a people. She doesn’t claim to speak for everyone, yet in speaking she says things that anyone could identify with. I recommend reading this book alongside her poems, and vice versa. The presence of both in her life is clear whenever the other is referred to…

This post is my writing on poet Cathy Park Hong’s poetry collections Translating Mo’um, Dance Dance Revolution, and Engine Empire.

Opening on a theatrical opening at the National Theatre in London, the book begins centered on Amma. Her life is contextualized through the first section to the point I assumed the rest of the book would be about her. The next section about her daughter Yazz, and the third her best friend Dominique, both of whom are introduced in Amma’s section. Then chapter two begins with Carole, who has never been mentioned and the only brief references to that first chapter of women is of Amma’s play opening and a teacher Carole had that Amma was childhood best-friends with. The book continues like that, telling the life stories of eleven women and one non-gendered character, all connected to each other in some way that is revealed immediately or not until hundreds of pages later while reading about someone else entirely. If this framing device is jarring at first, I encourage you to read past it, because through the five chapters and final epilogue, a truly spectacular feat of storytelling takes place…

I’m always curious when reading a book that sprang from a podcast if those who didn’t listen will get the same enjoyment out of the book. I can’t imagine there would be any hurdles reading You Feel It Just Below the Ribs. For me it only brought more questions for the podcast, Within the Wires, and very little prior knowledge helped my understanding of the world until the end. The New Society, the name for the world government within this fictional universe, is necessarily vague in its intentions, in the information it chooses to share. Throughout the novel there is editorializing by a mysterious publisher of the memoir, in her interjections you get a better idea of what is and isn’t allowed to be known. It reads like a dystopian novel edited from the perspective of a propagandist, or someone publishing with propaganda and censorship in mind…

Stop what you’re doing and put on Psychopomp by Japanese Breakfast. When you try to picture Michelle Zauner’s mother, look back at the album cover and add a few decades to the person reaching out at you. That’s her and a sister, who you will also meet over the course of the memoir. From the first pages of Crying in H Mart, you know that Zauner’s mother is dead. Odds are you know Michelle is also the lead singer/songwriter of the band Japanese Breakfast. If you didn’t, now you do, and the voice you hear singing is only a few months removed from the person who buried her mom…

She Who Became the Sun was always going to be one of the best I read this year. It starts like any other fantasy adventure series, orphaned in the first chapter, surrounded by famine and poverty with the expectations any female protagonist can expect in a male dominated society. From there Shelley Parker-Chan shows her skill in setting up expectations and subverting them every time you let your guard down. Whether it was through prophecy or the steady build of a soldier’s rise to power before their sudden death. Sometimes I would be surprised by the immediacy of Parker-Chan’s actions, wasting no time in drawing out a plot point she’s telegraphing for later, she’ll wrap it up by the end of the chapter when a different writer might take another hundred pages to do so…

I will abstain from mentioning anything about the plot other than: for reasons, letters are removed from the vocabulary of all characters. Since the entire novel is epistolary, told through letters and notices posted around the fictional island Nollop, the effect of missing letters is immediately reflected in the writing. Without mentioning anything of it, I really enjoyed the story. I thought it was clever and silly, the way they approached the major conflicts and resolutions was a great way to carry the story forward. One of the rules of the world required a mounting tension as characters progressed through the conflict, and the personal stress that caused affected everyone differently. The characters were charming, and though the epistolary nature was limiting in some ways, everyone had plenty of space for character development and their own personal arcs…

Tracks is a novel of relationships more than individual characters or dramatic tension. Though there is the looming presence of timber companies closing in around the community, different families splitting from tension new and old, Tracks isn’t concerned with a traditional Western, colonizer narrative. It makes sense as the first novel in a series that might travel to different families and uncover stories hinted at between conversations and retellings by characters who heard about something second, third, or fourth hand. It’s easy to call many of the events that take place magical realism, but then the story is being told by a character, not by some third person omniscient narrator. The stories are fiction because they’re being told by fictional characters, within the world of Tracks, the Lake Spirit is as real as Father Damian’s Catholic Lord…

I have always been a natural runner. I fall apart when the concept of stretching or routine comes into play, but have always found that when I haven’t intentionally run in years, the act of putting on athletic shoes for even a light jog feels refreshing. I always thought to be a runner you need to have all this insight about form, tension, and other sorts of things so that your body doesn’t damage itself over time. According to celebrated author Haruki Murakami, none of that is true and all you need to do is hit the pavement with the intention of running to make yourself a runner. Like everything in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, what I just wrote could have been true about writing…

Setting this book’s problematic nature aside, there was a lot of it I enjoyed. If you could suspend your disbelief about why Jumper knew stories from his absent father’s perspective, the unraveling of that character became one of the more interesting plot lines of the novel. From the moment you first figure out that his dead dad was in the towers when they fell, to finding out he jumped rather than suffer within the collapse. He becomes more and more sympathetic until you finally see him hit Nix during a bender the book would have you believe she pushed him to. Learning more about both parents could have made this novel much longer, maybe even fixed some of these shortcomings. Unfortunately, as the story of the inebriated teens comes to a close, so too must the parent’s story and all they represent within it…

One of the reasons I think generational trauma is so relatable, is the familiarity in how we process, even when there is nothing identical about your own experience. Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford begins with a phone call informing Ford that in two weeks her father would be released from prison. The memoir then jumps back in time and moves linearly until the end. Throughout, an image comes into focus, of how Ford came to the person she is today and what growing up was like in her unique situation…

I am rarely one to admit an adaptation managed to improve upon the source material while staying true to everything that came before it. The Adventure Zone: Crystal Kingdom does for this story what the podcast simply couldn’t for sake of being a table top RPG. Every beat from the original story remains, though some are condensed from an entire episode to a single frame, and others are given to entirely different characters in order to expedite plot. From the first few pages, Carey Pietsch and the McElroys manage to take a shopping episode and use it to carry them to plot. Combat that originally made up thirty to forty percent of the arc is squeezed into pages that care more about communicating lore or character development…

The fact is, you know Danny Trejo. What version of him comes to mind will be different for everyone. Personally I remember him from Spy Kids, seeing him as the bad guy that gets blown up or shot doesn’t resonate with the Danny Trejo making spy gadgets in a clean denim shirt. The man that begins this memoir doesn’t know anything beside crime, drugs, and prison….

I was listening to a reading T’ai Freedom Ford was giving at a poetry showcase that The New School and Cave Canem Foundation were doing through their Creative Writing Program. After her first reading she said, “My poems get jealous of each other if you clap more for one than the other y’know or one gets the big head and then I gotta go home and deal with this poem…” and while she was referring to a different poetry collection, the same feels true for & More Black. It’s hard for me to separate one poem from another because they all fit together, like a dysfunctional family trying to make sense of their personal history…

World building is like baking, which is like science, while cooking is an art. When you bake everything must be perfect, or whatever you’re baking will turn out just wrong enough that it won’t be right enough. People will still enjoy it, most people in fact, but there will be those that sour at the taste, texture, appearance, or some other aspect that could have been won over had your proportions and execution been closer to perfect. In this way I think N.K. Jemisin is a master baker of worlds. I love a good lore dump, but realize all too well how many people take that as a sign to stop reading a book…

A book of essays flips on the other side of the memoir coin. They both ask you to let go of your doubt and trust what you are told as the most important truth. Of course there will be lies, there will be opinions that force facts to look differently than another writers might present the same story. Someone who is good at either knows how to bring doubt back into that relationship, allowing the reader to shape their worldview around the new ideas they have just taken in. Hanif Abdurraqib presents ideas I’ve grappled with, and some I’ve never considered, with vast historical knowledge through his A Little Devil In America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance…

Sometimes a novel begins and you know about something that has to happen before the final page. Things We Lost to the Water begins with a hurricane alarm in New Orleans, August of 1979. With that opening chapter and title of the book, Hurricane Katrina is all but guaranteed. So little can create so much, and Eric Nguyen brought to mind every image I’ve seen overplayed on the news with a reference to one word and setting. While the image is strong, the novel’s not about the hurricane. It’s always just out of view to the characters, but the quality of water takes on so much more in-between the 27 years of the novel that it becomes eclipsed by the element it contains…

Part Two of this memoir begins with “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick”, which is a quote from Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor. At this point in the book, you already understand the title Between Two Kingdoms, but for some this may be the first time they understand, we are all always living within one of the two and only the very unlucky ever visit just one. Some people go much of their lives before they cross over, some experience it immediately. I’ve personally found myself in the kingdom of the sick for mild visits, but I accompanied my dad there when he was diagnosed with cancer and I witnessed it firsthand as it occurred to us that he would never leave…