meitachi | books read: 2022 october

I got three poor hours of sleep last night and probably need to go to the grocery store but I also don't know if I want to leave the house after working Night Market yesterday.

I'll probably just read my gaming cnovel.

Anyway, books from October!

Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong by Louisa Lim - A tough book that was part history record and part-memoir. The history bits were interesting but also dragged a bit for me. The last third of the book about the 2019 HK protests onward really hit me harder. I do feel like there was a bit of a forced theme with the King of Kowloon, but maybe we are (or the author at least is) in search of a Narrative about Hong Kong. I also have Impossible City by Karen Chen on my TBR list, as another book about HK for comparison.

The Hidden Moon by Jeannie Lin - (Pingkang Li Mysteries #3) The sheltered, noble-born daughter, and the slightly rough bad boy with a sketchy past! With an imperial murder mystery to solve with greather political implications. Yet it didn't feel particularly high stakes compared to the previous stories. Nevertheless, enjoyable. Very much feeling the period's constraints on what women can do and accomplish.

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers - More enjoyable to me than the first book, perhaps because I knew already what to expect of the world. Or perhaps I just like partner journeys/road trips, rather than solo ones. A dreamy, surreal world but with very human (and non-human) existential questions of what gives life meaning. I like to picture the villages/towns in their different scenic backdrops, but it does all feel very much like an optimist's escapist fantasy.

They Found Him Dead by Georgette Heyer - A murder mystery involving family drama -- a staple of the genre! It was okay but not especially satisfying or memorable.

Unraveller by Frances Hardinge - I love, love Hardinge's world-building and flawed-and-often-prickly-but-allowed-to-grow characters. Her staples, imo. I love her prose too. I just. Love that she writes middle grade but allows for complexity and nuance and trusts her readers to not have One Right Answer spelled out, and even the happy endings are as-best-as-we-can Good triumphing over Evil.

The Mother of All Questions by Rebecca Solnit - A wonderful set of essays on feminism and particularly motherhood (or expectations around such). I deeply appreciate how her views also evolve with more learning and time as well, because we are allowed to and should grow. Reflecting on some of her essays written in 2014 around #MeToo are a bit painful though, given where she thought we would be now.

A Venom Dark and Sweet by Judy I. Lin - The first book was a blur that I slowly remembered as I read this book. One of the rarer times where I preferred the first book to the second. The pacing was better? I also hated the POV switching between first person limited (present tense) and third person omniscient (present tense). Find a less clunky way to deliver all the bits of story you need to! Also everything the reader needed to know was kind of hand-fed through these alternating POV changes; reading this right after Hardinge, who also utilized POV switches but in a way that didn't tip the entire plot for the reader, was especially challenging.

The Final Gambit by Jennifer Lynn Barnes - (The Hawthorne Legacy #3) Final book of the trilogy and as fun and ridiculous as the rest, with a little less love triangle but still a little too much. I did like the emphasis on choice over fate. Kind of a ridiculous conclusion, but good on Avery for her end choices.

Diary of a Void by Emi Yagi - A translation from Japanese and reminded me a bit of Convenience Store Woman, but a little less surreal/sensual. A woman pretends to be pregnant at work once she realizes it gets her out of a lot of the unfair treatment and expectations that come with being a woman in a male-dominated field. A touch of magical realism, but mostly a meditation on human relationships and loneliness.

The Decagon House Murders by Yukito Ayatsuji - A twisty murder mystery translated from Japanese. Contemporary but draws on the past. It was okay but not my favorite! A bit gimmicky in the setup, but I guess it is a pretty interesting resolution. Satisfying? Not exactly.

Bliss Montage by Ling Ma - A collection of weird as fuck short stories often with interesting intersections of Asian American identity and experience but too frequently with abrupt endings/lack of endings. I get not wanting to provide a tidy resolution to every story, but so many of these really don't feel like they have a third act at all. But I still largely enjoyed the collection! Her writing is pretty good.

Making a Scene by Constance Wu - Actually one of my favorite Asian American memoirs I've read in recent years, probably because it's a series of essays in no particular order, highlighting memorable bits of her life, and because I really didn't know much about her before the book so it genuinely was interesting to learn more. I had no idea she was from Richmond, VA! And I do think the white suburbanness of her childhood was relatable to my own experience in ways the experiences of AAPI stars who grew up in big Asian enclaves in Jersey or California were not. Extroverts are still baffling to me, and the love of acting in public, on stage (??), but I loved her love of reading, of learning to bake bread, of grappling with her complicated relationships with her younger sister and her mother.

Less Is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer - A sequel to Less, which surprised me with how much I enjoyed it (more so after than the fact than in the moment of reading). This book felt far less prickly and lost, and not as pointed in its gentle mockery of Less as a character. It was a quick, fun read but I think makes far less of a lasting impression than the first book; it certainly doesn't provoke the emotional engagement (both for good and ill), in my experience.