Crying in H Mart (by Michelle Zauner)

This wraps up the 2021 Read Harder Challenge with the category "food memoir by an author of color."  Michelle Zauner explores her relationship with her Korean mother (and grief over her mother's illness and death) through food. You can read the New Yorker essay that turned into this book here.

This was a great way to wrap up the challenge. This memoir is excellent and heartfelt, and made me think about my own relationship with my parents (also immigrants) as well as my daughter. So much here resonated.  

I especially loved Zauner's willingness to show herself and others so truthfully. She doesn't shy away from her flaws or those of others (cough her father cough) and the honesty makes you feel like you're being confided in by a friend.  I absolutely loved it! One of my favorites of the Read Harder Challenge and the year.

Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds (edited by Billy Collins)

For the "book of nature poems" prompt in the Read Harder Challenge, I've been working my way through this illustrated anthology, edited by Billy Collins. This was a suggestion from Book Riot that seemed to be right up my alley, as a birder and bird lover.  I bought it on actual paper and everything, the better to enjoy the illustrations. (Also the library didn't have it.)

The poems themselves skewed a bit male and a bit old-timey for me. I did enjoy offerings from Wordsworth and Tennyson, but I didn't really need Thoreau attempting to rhyme about birds. I would have enjoyed more fresh, contemporary poems and less of the predictable, oft-anthologized authors. (We didn't need two Dickinson poems about robins, especially when one is far superior to the other.) But there are quite a few delightful poems. I particularly enjoyed "Pheasant" by Sylvia Plath and "Grackles" by Lisa Williams.

David Sibley's illustrations and facts about the various featured species added a lot too.  Overall I just wished the poetry were a bit fresher.

Planet Earth Is Blue (by Nicole Panteleakos)

Another Read Harder book, this one "a children’s book that centers a disabled character but not their disability." I don't know if I would qualify this one as not centering their disability because our main character, Nova, is nonverbal, and to what extent the adults around her are able to communicate with her is a key plot point. But arguably other plot points take precedence and it is on the official recommended list so I will count it. 

This book is really good. It takes place in the 10 days before the Challenger liftoff. Nova is a sixth grader who loves space. She is in her eleventh foster home; her older sister is missing but has promised to come back to watch the Challenger liftoff. We alternate between letters from Nova to her sister and the story of Nova adjusting to her newest foster home and classroom, and eagerly awaiting the launch of the shuttle.

The end, as you may predict, is heart-wrenching and I definitely did sob my way through it. But it's also as "poignant and lovely" as the recommendation promised.  Nicole Panteleakos is autistic herself and does a great job of portraying how autism (especially what we might call "severe" autism) was understood in the late 1980s.  Her afterword talks about some of her specific choices in this regard.  

For those of you out there who read children's literature, especially fellow 80s kids, I highly recommend this one.

The Woman Who Would Be King by (Kara Cooney)

This book about the pharaoh Hatshepsut was for the Read Harder Challenge category "a book by/about a non-Western world leader." It was my third attempt at a book for this category so even though I had some issues with it and in another timeline may have given up, I pushed on to the end.

Kara Cooney is a good writer and clearly knows her stuff; her feminist take on a woman in power is obviously something that spoke to me. The trouble is, we don't know a lot about Hatshepsut. Cooney could have written a more rigorous and frankly drier book, which I would have enjoyed more, or historical fiction ala Hillary Mantel, which I probably also would have enjoyed more. Instead, Cooney splits the difference, which makes for a frustrating read. 

For example at one point she speculates that Hatshepsut's daughter may have been standing by her deathbed after Hatshepsut's final illness, rending her garments. Except we don't know how Hatshepsut died, how her daughter felt about her, or even if her daughter was still alive at this time. So what's the point? It tells us nothing. The book is full of speculation like this, seemingly based on what captured Cooney's imagination. Some stuff she dismisses out of hand (like Hatshepsut and Senenmut being lovers) despite the fact that there's more evidence for it than half the other stuff she speculates was happening.

My favorite passages were the ones was where she brings in actual facts; discussions of statuary and monuments and what they might tell us, descriptions of how the mummification process worked, etc.  But this isn't a bad book; in fact I think Cooney's hybrid approach could really work for some readers who don't mind a mix of historical fiction and scholarship. I am not that reader, however.

New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color (ed. Nisi Shawl)

I love speculative fiction and was really excited about this collection. I wouldn't say it's all speculative fiction, there's a good dose of fantasy in here as well, which is not my favorite, but overall I enjoyed this and am excited to know there is a second volume in the works. This was for the RHC category "an SFF anthology edited by a person of color." I normally don't read short stories and I'm so glad the Read Harder Challenge nudged me towards this anthology.

My absolute favorite story here is "The Robots of Eden" by Anil Menon. Pure speculative fiction (what if you could have an artificial brain installed to help control your emotions) with an unreliable narrator in a near-future dystopia. Basically all my favorite things! Menon published a young adult novel and I look forward to giving it a try. 

I also enjoyed "Come Home to Atropos" by Steven Barnes, "The Fine Print" by Chinelo Onwualu, "unkind of mercy" by Alex Jennings, "Burn the Ships" by Alberto Yáñez, "Give Me Your Black Wings Oh Sister" Silvia Moreno-Garcia, "The Shadow We Cast Through Time" by Indrapramit Das, "Harvest" by Rebecca Roanhorse, and "Kelsey and the Burdened Breath" by Darcie Little Badger. Definitely more hits than misses for me in this collection.

Black Dahlia, Red Rose (by Piu Eatwell)

I read The Emperor of All Maladies thinking it would qualify as "investigative nonfiction by a POC" but it's really not investigative. So I decided to try again with this book about the Black Dahlia murder by Piu Eatwell.

I've read a few Black Dahlia books and they are always kind of terrible. (I read the Black Dahlia Avenger, although Google barely indexes my blog so I can't find it anymore.) This one is better than average and presents a theory of the case that I personally find persuasive.  Although the consulting psychiatrist does sound like a quack, it seems that Leslie Dillon knew facts of the case that only the killer would know, plus there is a ton of circumstantial evidence tying him to Elizabeth Short and to the murder. Case closed? 

Eligible (by Curtis Sittenfeld)

I thought this "modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice" would be a fun choice for the RHC category of books set in the Midwest (it's set in Cincinnati).  (As a side note, I consider the Midwest to be
Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. But actually now that I look at a map, none of those are in the western half of the country.  Maybe it should be called the Mideast?) 

Eligible is a breezy read, funny in parts, quite clever in parts, but also uncomfortable at times. Racism, fatphobia and bigotry are used as punchlines and the Black and trans characters are very tokenistic. I feel like Sittenfeld had good intentions but it's cringey in the execution.  The ending also feels very rushed (strange considering how long the book is; I think she maybe is adhering a bit too faithfully to the pacing of the original) and in 2013, I don't think two characters are going to decide to get married before they even have begun dating each other, so some of the modernization needed work.  

(Also one of the best characters is named Ham, short for Hamilton, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that it's because Wickham has been split into two characters here, and the other one is named Jasper Wick. Duh. )

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (by Ta-Nehisi Coates)

“I don’t ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the resistors, almost always fails.” - Ta-Nehisi Coates

This was my pick for "a book you’ve been intimidated to read."  For a long time, I couldn't bear to look back at the tragedy of Obama giving way to Donald Trump. I still can't read about the 2016 election.  The pain is still too raw; even with Joe Biden now being in the White House, the spectre of Trump still lingers. But I got this book, a paperback copy no less, and decided this would be the one.

This is a collection of Coates's Atlantic essays, one each for the eight years of the Obama presidency, with an introduction contextualizing the essay, ruminating on what Coates wishes he might have done differently and the impact each essay had on his career . The Wikipedia page links to the essays themselves. My favorite was "Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?" and I also thought "The First White President" (presented as an epilogue) was illuminating. It punctures the myth of the "white working class" that we (white people) like to "blame" for Trump.  

Coates published this in 2017, a dark time for the country, and it ends in a place of semi-despair. (Even before we knew how very bad Trump would be, how close we came to outright fascism, how many people would die in a pandemic.) I would like to believe that Coates despairs a little less now. He criticizes Joe Biden's prison policies a lot, for example, but Biden has put racial justice at the center of his agenda in a way that I am not sure Coates would have predicted in 2017.

Nonetheless, this was a confronting and frankly depressing read, and it took me a while to get through it.  I'm going to read What White People Can Do Next and try to focus on the continued resistance that, as Coates says, must be in some respects its own reward.

Waikiki Reads

I read four books while on vacation, definitely a nice cross-section of my reading tastes (just missing the YA). And here now are those four books.

Golden Girls Forever (by Jim Colucci) 

I found out this book existed right before the trip, and serendipitous the library had it available.  A nonfiction book about The Golden Girls: what better book to read on my first airplane ride since 2019? It's full of great information and tidbits about the show, and I accompanied the book with many YouTube searches for particular scenes and moments. The closest this gets to drama is that Bea Arthur wasn't super friendly or warm to a lot of people. I still love the hell out of her though. 

Project Hail Mary (by Andy Weir)

I adore The Martian and after Artemis I thought it was the one and only truly magical book Andy Weir would ever write. But this goes back to the "lone dude in outer space doing hard science" well and thus scratches the identical itch as The Martian. Again the lead is basically Mark Watney (except he doesn't curse) but Weir adds in a first contact storyline that is both inventive and plausible. Absolutely loved this!

One Last Stop (by Casey McQuiston)

Oh, my heart. A romcom from the author of Red, White, and Royal Blue and it's perfection. The lead character is curvy and bisexual. (Some of the best bisexual representation I've ever read.)  The love interest is a hot butch woman. There's a sci fi twist. There's a ragtag group of friends. I cried at the end. And McQuiston is non-binary so this qualifies as "a romance by a trans or nonbinary author." A delightful book!

No One Is Talking About This (by Patricia Lockwood) 

Read for Camp ToB. This is a book in two parts: the first is an exploration of the internet (called "the portal") and full of true moments about what it's like to be "extremely online" in the era of Trump (called "the dictator"). The book then takes a turn in the second half and grapples with the intrusion of real life (and the heartbreaking impact of draconian "pro-life" politics) in an incredibly moving way.  This isn't an easy read, in the end, but it is an astonishing and remarkably subtle work. 

All four of these books were terrific, several being among my favorite reads of the year.

Their Troublesome Crush (by Xan West)

I'm so sorry to read that Xan West has passed away. This is #ownvoices rep like never before! The main characters are metamours (meaning they are both polyamorous, in a relationship with the same third person) and I have to pull all the representation from the description or I'll miss something: Ernest is a Jewish autistic demiromantic queer fat trans man submissive, and Nora is a Jewish disabled queer fat femme cis woman switch.  

Mostly this is like a geeky queer kink scene come to life, complete with Ernest singing showtunes. Xan West was an autistic queer fat Jewish genderqueer writer, so represented themselves in lots of dimensions. I would have loved to continue reading the series if it had continued.  Sorry to those of you who knew Xan; may their memory (and their writings) be a blessing.

Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me (by Anna Mehler Paperny)

This was my RHC pick for a book that "demystifies a common mental illness"; in this case, depression.  I thought the first half, Paperny's own story of her suicidal depression, definitely did help me gain more understanding of what the experience of depression is like and was extremely powerful.  (A note that as you might expect, this would likely be extremely triggering for anyone with suicidal ideation.) 

The second half of the book is more in the reporter vein (Paperny works as a Reuters reporter) and covers mental health stigma, the extremely inadequate research around depression, various treatment modalities, healthcare in Canada, and personal stories of other people experiencing depression. I found a lot of interesting info here but also it was less compelling for me that the more personal material.

Two More YA Books

Chaos on CatNet (by Naomi Kritzer) 

So excited to learn there was a sequel to Catfishing on CatNet! The original book in the series is an absolute gem. This has the same sparkling characters and fun speculative fiction elements, handling all its queer teenagers (and its poly adults) in an affectionate way.  The plot isn't quite as gripping to me as the plot of Catfishing on CatNet but that book is near-perfect so I can't really complain.  I hope the fact that this is "CatNet #2" means there will be a CatNet #3! (Disclaimer: I tagged this "I know this person" because although we've never met, Naomi and I are friends on Facebook.)

Here the Whole Time (by Vitor Martins) 

This is translated from the Portuguese and set in Brazil, so qualifies as "a realistic YA book not set in the U.S., UK, or Canada."  I tagged it novella because it's very short. I looked down thinking I was maybe halfway in and I was almost done! This is about a fat, gay teen in Brazil whose handsome neighbor comes to stay with him for two weeks. Although he is dealing with profound own body image issues and they are handled sensitively and movingly, the book really lacks conflict.  I definitely was hoping for more out of this one.

Two Very Different YA Books

Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley

Firekeeper's Daughter is an #ownvoices book and as a young adult mystery/thriller, it also qualifies as  "a genre novel by an Indigenous, First Nations, or Native American author" in the Read Harder Challenge. This book does a great job of immersing the reader in Ojibwe culture and community, and I loved our protagonist Daunis, who is biracial and straddles both her father's Ojibwe culture and her mother's white family.  I loved her choices and the ending especially is powerful. I highly recommend this one as a deep dive into present-day (well as of 2004, when it's set) Native culture.

A couple of caveats with spoilers, so skip this paragraph if you don't want to know. Firstly, the romance element is pretty squicky because of how utterly unethical her romantic interest is.  I liked him as a character in many ways but it's reallllly hard to get past that.  And secondly, although the sexual assault storyline is ultimately handled well, it really seems put in there just to make a point about the lack of justice for Native women. I loved the scene with the pansies though so ultimately I was on board with it. 

I guess the other thing is that consider it's a thriller, it's a bit slow going. The ultimate bad guy is telegraphed very obviously very early, although there is a lot more to the twists that I did not see coming. And the pacing is pretty slow.  Still, it's worth it for the exploration of culture and for Daunis as a character.  

Kate in Waiting by Becky Albertalli 

Of course I'm always going to read a Becky Albertalli novel! This one also has some problems, although maybe I'm feeling picky this weeekend. This is about a girl and her gay BFF, theater kids who tend to have "communal crushes" on the same guy.  I mean, any of us former nerdy teenagers with gay BFFs (and we are legion) can relate to this unhealthy level of enmeshment, I'm sure.

Some issues: the side characters are not explored well at all. I got no sense of Matt as a character, Raina and Brandie are just kind of there, Harold might as well not exist. I appreciate the efforts at representation a lot, but it did seem a bit like Glee: throwing in the token trans character or token girl in a wheelchair, just kind of ticking off boxes rather than writing them as fully three-dimensional characters. (Some characters are great though, including Anderson, Noah, Ryan, and Kate herself.) 

Another issue: the Anderson and Kate relationship. It turns incredibly toxic and is really repetitive. I especially had issues with Anderson and how he kept having these "I love you more than anything!" talks and then giving Kate the silent treatment over nothing in the next scene.  I think the idea is good (and I like the reveal of his motivations) but the balance here is off.  I was not really rooting for their friendship as much as I think I was supposed to.

Still, did I stay up late finishing this one? Did I love the musical theater setting? Did I love Kate unreservedly? I sure did.

Smash It! (by Francina Simone)

 A cute contemporary YA about a Black girl who decides she needs to come out of her shell. She makes a "Fuck It" list (I guess they couldn't name the book that) and starts crossing things off. Needless to say, she makes mistakes, her relationships change, and she learns valuable lessons about herself.

I almost gave up at the first page - one of the plotlines is that the school is doing a Hamilton-esque rap musical version of Othello, and the "songs" they put in are embarrassingly hokey.  This ends up being very brief though so I moved on. I loved Liv finding female friends and learning about sex positivity and female empowerment.  I loved the body positivity as well; she has a larger frame that her mother disapproves of, and she learns to own it by the end of the novel.

Goodreads is really mad about a few throwaway jokes; for example, Liv's friend Janice makes a tasteless joke about a Palestinian-Israeli character. I think they're really not making enough of a distinction between the author and the character: the character is written to be inappropriate and it seems pretty clear the joke is not okay! Some people refused to read or gave up reading at that point, which, I mean, seems extreme? There's also pearl clutching about the stereotypical depiction of a Hawaiian character (one of my favorite characters, honestly) and making Othello African instead of a Moor? I mean Alexander Hamilton wasn't Puerto Rican, either.  Anyway, don't bother with the Goodreads crowd this time around. They are really conflating the author with the narrator and the characters and that road never leads anywhere good.

Moving on, my favorite thing about the book is that the tertiary characters are really well drawn. They have strong motivations within themselves, complex lives and character arcs. It's really noteworthy considering how rare this is in YA. I actually didn't think the love story was that strong - I found some of the love interest's actions rather unforgiveable, but the messiness seemed earned. I dunno, I guess just overall, I liked it!

The Case of the Left-Handed Lady (by Nancy Springer)

This is kind of scary for a supposedly "middle grade" book! But checking off the "middle grade mystery" category anyway in the Read Harder Challenge. This is the second book in the Enola Holmes series, aka Sherlock Holmes fanfiction in which both he and Mycroft are wildly out of character, but whatever, it's just an excuse to write about the clever and independent Enola. I enjoyed it.

As I update my list I see I didn't finish a lot of books this month. I read parts of several Tournament books, including Deacon King Kong and Shuggy Bain, without finishing them. I made it through about three quarters of We Ride on Sticks before I got so irritated I gave up. (I wanted to like it as I love first person plural narration and my own beloved Gen X; it's just a bit too long and a bit too cutesy for me.) 

I did end up finishing all four of the Tournament of Books semifinalists, although I go back and forth on my favorite. (The Vanishing Half was my fourth-ranked, though I still enjoyed it; the others are simply more inventive.) My brain says Interior Chinatown and my heart says Piranesi.  But Breasts and Eggs is also my favorite! Augh! Anyway, great tournament, with some outstanding judgments, particularly this one.

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Fall of WeWork (by Reeves Wiedeman)

This book scratches a bit of the same itch as Bad Blood, about Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes. Adam Neumann, megalomaniacal CEO (who is besties with Jared Kushner, so that tells you something) somehow convinces people to give him billions of dollars for a company that doesn't make much money, and then spends it on ridiculous shit. He and his equally insufferable wife talk a lot about being spiritual and "changing the world," apparently by getting as rich as possible and then buying stuff for themselves.

When WeWork faces public scrutiny, it falls apart and Neumann is forced out. Of course, the people who really suffer are the employees he exploits; he and his awful wife are still rich and I'm sure he'll find plenty of assholes to shower money on him in the future. You read this and end up thinking I knew capitalism was broken, but damn, it's really broken.

Definitely read some of the articles (or watch the inevitable documentary) about this douchebag, because the details are fun. (He flies to one of his five mansions in Hawaii to surf, which involves being pulled out into the waves on multiple jetskis, films himself with a drone as he surfs, and then hangs up a giant print of himself surfing in his office.) Oh and do I even need to mention the company is a cesspit of sexism?

Even from the beginning, looking at the cover, I was like "there's something about this guy's face I don't like." By the end I knew it qualified for the Read Harder challenge in the category of "book with a cover you don’t like." I hope this guy ends up in jail somehow, but I'm not counting on it.

My Beloved World (by Sonia Sotomayor)

For the RHC category "memoir by a Latinx author," I selected Sonia Sotomayor's memoir. It covers her childhood and ends with her achieving her lifelong dream of becoming a judge; she deliberately does not cover her time on the Supreme Court or talk about her jurisprudence.

I enjoyed spending time with Sotomayor and learning more about her and Puerto Rican culture, although like most political memoirs, hers not as candid as it could be. I also wished we could spend more time with the adult judge Sotomayor; instead, this really is mostly about her childhood and upbringing with a view towards inspiring young people who grow up facing similar hardships to follow in her footsteps. 

This quote is in the introduction, and it ultimately sums up the lesson of this book for me: "Experience has taught me that you cannot value dreams according to the odds of their coming true. Their real value is in stirring within us the will to aspire. That will, wherever it finally leads, does at least move you forward. And after a time you may recognize that the proper measure of success is not how much you've closed the distance to some far-off goal but the quality of what you've done today."

Breasts and Eggs (Mieko Kawakami)

This is "a non-European novel in translation" for the Read Harder Challenge and also a selection from this year's Tournament of Books. On top of all that, I loved it! It's like the litfic trifecta.

This book is described as a "psychological novel" concerned with the bodies of women. It focuses on everything from breast augmentation to fertility, from asexuality to the creative process. I loved the style, the characters, and the Tokyo setting, which reminded me of what it felt like to visit there. 

I really like the description of "psychological novel" and I think that's a style I really enjoy. There's something reminiscent of The Wings of the Dove or My Year of Rest and Relaxation or The Remains of the Day. This very interior, meditative approach that is still so compelling. Luster was like that too, except less successful overall. But the interiority is something I enjoyed there too.

This is one of those finds that would have passed me by without the Tournament of Books, and one reason I love participating every year.  Not perfect, but my favorite read of the year so far!

Get a Life, Chloe Brown (by Talia Hibbert)

This qualifies as a "fat-positive romance" for the Read Harder Challenge, but since I've already fulfilled that category, it also fits in "Read a book featuring a beloved pet where the pet doesn’t die." (The main character also has fibromyalgia, which is represented really well, which is where I thought this would slot in, but apparently I misremembered one of the categories.) 

This book is funny and charming and sexy; actually, maybe a little too sexy. There is a lot of very explicit sex and it somehow felt like a bit too much, too soon. But I loved the alternating points of view, the authentic emotional journeys each character was on, and the matter-of-fact and very positive handling of both body size and disability. 

You'd have to be really okay with a whole lot of non-euphemistic sex scenes, but if that's you, it's very worth reading. Also, the pet doesn't die!

The Vanishing Half (by Brit Bennett)

This book is highly acclaimed (including by Barack Obama) and my friends at work also raved about how great it was. Also, it's on the Tournament of Books list so I was hoping I would finally finish one ToB book this year.

It was a bit slow going for me in the beginning, which made me nervous, but it picked up the pace when we jumped into the next generation and I ended up loving it. There are a number of Chekhov's guns that never actually get fired, which I found refreshing in a weird way. It felt more naturalistic, even if I had some questions and curiosities at the end that were never answered.

Some of the Goodreads crew didn't find the characters fully realized, but this was not an issue for me; I thought the characters were amazingly drawn. Excellent novel and I hope it goes far in the ToB!