2022 books
Jan. 2nd, 2023 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lackingdazebooks completed
picture us in the light by kelly loy gilbert
★★★she who became the sun by shelley parker-chan
★★★★ 💗a tale for the time being by ruth ozeki
★★★★.25 💗winter in sokcho by elisa shua dusapin
★.5the memory police by yoko ogawa
★★★bunny by mona awad
★★★.75afterparties by anthony veasna so
★★★★.5 💗the friend by sigrid nunez
★★★★time is a mother by ocean vuong
★★★★the idiot by elif batuman
★★★my body by emily ratajkowski
★★★★disorientation by elaine hsieh chou
★★★★ 💗america is in the heart by carlos bulosan
★★no-no boy by john okada
★★★★spinning by tillie walden
★★★★.5 💗the magic fish by trung le nguyen
★★★★ 💗on earth we're briefly gorgeous by ocean vuong
★★★★ (reread)bliss montage by ling ma
★★★★.75 💗snapdragon by kat leyh
★★★★ 💗you have a friend in 10a by maggie shipstead
★★★did not finish
book lovers by emily henry
babel by r.f. kuang
portrait of a thief by grace d. li
our missing hearts by celeste ng
- goal: 30 books / reality: read 19 (+1 reread) books — the way this absolutely did not happen. to be fair i thought i would read more in the gap between fall quarter and start of study abroad but umm instead i just watched more shitty kdramas and i totally did not read at all the entire time i was abroad bc 1) i didn't bring any physical books with me and 2) seoul is so loud. like as much as i want to be one of those people who can read at aesthetic cafes i actually cannot bc if i can't hear the words in my head while i read i get really frustrated. truly having stats of like 2.5 books a month, half of which are assigned readings but ummmm. anyways.
- goal: reading more nonfiction, commercial fiction, mg/ya, graphic novels / reality: yes on the first and last, no on the rest — i think i read like 1.75 nonfiction books this year which is actually a lot for me... my thing with nonfiction is umm it reminds me of reading new yorker articles for market research + it's not very engaging in terms of style/sound bc the writing is usually pretty idea-forward. i've realized i enjoy nonfiction more in podcast/audio form tho (courtesy of miss tolentino's trick mirror). then i actually read a handful of graphic novels this year, mainly thanks to dw and twt recs!! they're literally so perfect for when i'm not paying attention in class and i like how quickly i can go through them. in terms of commercial fiction, i tried to read some emily henry but i think i've grown past the age where i can tolerate romance in mediums outside of kdramas and fanfiction. then for ya/mg, sorry but again on sound why do so many of these recent releases SOUND terrible.....(is just traumatized by the 5 pages i read from my friend's copy of cemetery boys in korea)
📁 faves
i don't think i have a boty for this year tbh because i didn't read a single one where i was like wow this is life changing (tho maybe it's just bc i'm more of a hater now)....but still some notable contenders
💗 bliss montage by ling ma — i think i'm just seriously ling ma fan!! her writing is so pleasing to me bc i love her use of rhythm. she's very economical but precise, which works well with the way she structures her stories. this is not a perfect short story collection (if such a thing even exists). i'm not big on her more experimental short stories like los angeles or yeti love but i did really like "oranges" and "office hours" to an extent. my favorite of the bunch was definitely "g," which details the relationship between two chinese american girls as they do a drug of the same name. i promise the story sounds better than the premise!! sorry for being a basic bitch but literally why does ling ma's genre of "life is so hard for teen girls who are in their 20s" resonate so much with me 😭 favorite lines:
- "What if I dissected my feelings, pulled them apart and brutalized them so that he would know they were true?"
- "It doesn't take much to come into your own; all it takes is someone's gaze. It's not totally accurate to say that I felt seen. It was more that: Beheld by her, I learned how to become myself. Her interest actualized me."
- "If being exactly yourself meant you had to suffer the loneliness of being unlike anyone else, he seemed not to mind. The insularity of his lifestyle cradled him."
💗 afterparties by anthony veasna so — this is the year of me reading short story collections... no but truly avs is so talented and i'm pretty sure his writing is going to enter the asam lit "canon" in the years to come (it has already showed up on my syllabus). i didn't like all the stories in this collection (the one about gays in the silicon valley was just...lol....) but i remember reading "maly maly maly" in a copy of the paris review and being like woah wtf this is amazing. it's one of those stories that i aspire to write because it captures coming of age in such a cutting and brutal way. "three women of chuck's donut" is also an absolute banger and i liked "superking son scores again."
💗 spinning by tillie walden — i rated it 5 stars on storygraph but now i don't remember much about it so i will reread it this week but as always i think i'm eternal tillie walden fan and out of all the stories so far, i found this one to be the most intimate/easy to connect to (?) probably bc it's a memoir
📁 other thoughts
- the friend by sigrid nunez — kind of remember nothing about this other than how much it made me realize i hate the publishing industry and writing!! maybe i should reread in 2023 around graduation time so i stop applying to jobs at problematic publishers lmao
- disorientation by elaine hsieh chou — i want every asamst/lit bitch ever to read this. this is what interior chinatown thought it was doing btw
- the friend by elif batuman — yes i read this like everyone else on the tl <3 personally i'm a hater of this book bc um i do not like elif batuman's voice. it's too dry for my tastes and some of her jokes are funny but mainly i do not get them b/c i am 1) cali bitch living in a bubble 2) just not knowledgeable about the various references she makes. i get that this book was just a Bildungsroman About a Gurl Who Goes to Harvard but like this is how i imagine people reading my fics about asian american srats with no prior exposure of such feel. also do not get the appeal of ivan/selin's attachment to him just made no sense to me, but also maybe that's the point. definitely i am not the target demographic of this book....
- time is a mother by ocean vuong — objectively ocean vuong is a talented poet but subjectively my proximity to on earth we're briefly gorgeous this year makes me super pessimistic about his writing lol. this was a nice quick read, it feels like the final in a trilogy of his previous works. but that fish sauce poem permanently traumatized me!!!!!!
📁 goals for 2023
- read 20 books. i think 30 was definitely too ambitious and i prefer setting a realistic goal...though who knows what my era of unemployment will hold
- listen to more nonfiction audio books
- read more graphic novels
- stop reading so much asamlit bc i can feel the brainrot in real time and writing this up was kind of harrowing. like why am i just my major
no subject
Date: 2023-01-05 02:32 am (UTC)- trick mirror truly life changing book for me when i read it as a high schooler… genuinely love jia tolentino + think she’s one of the writers of our generation or whatever
- also ya/mg is kind of terribad especially if u look at the ones with asam tilt. then again i love trashy asam ya so idk but also literally the # of times i’ve had to read the same trite hs romance with angst over like playing the violin or whatever
- also ngl it is 100% on brand for u to not like the friend like within 10-15 pages of reading i was like There’s No Way Van Liked This… it’s just so newenglandcore ivy league pretentious bitch monologuing yk? which i love personally
- im dead at ur goal being read more graphic novels whereas mine is READ LESS… but i love u for this